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astxlphe · 5 years

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Day 2 // Kuniatsu

Kunikida and Atsushi’s relationship, a year after getting together.

love languages / enduring “Love itself is what is left over, when being in love has burned away.” -Louis de Bernieres, Captain Corelli’s Mandolin

( @bsd-rarepair-valentines-week)

(Not sure it fits the prompts that well, but well.)

“Atsushi?”

Atsushi looked up from his paperwork. “Is there something wrong?”

“I’m closing the office.” Kunikida approached to stand next to him, glancing at the files on his desk. “Are you finished?”

“Not yet — I’m checking a few details for tomorrow…” he trailed off as Kunikida scowled.

“You need to wake up early tomorrow. I’ve calculated, you will to be waking up at 5:15.”

“It’s way too early!”

Him and Dazai started the day in surveillance — tailing a suspect in the latest murder case the agency had been asked to help with in the hope of catching their accomplice. And Atsushi did not want to mess this up.

“Unless you go home now.” He checked the time. “To be at full capacity for your case tomorrow morning, you need to start sleeping in exactly 12 minutes.”

“But—”

“You’ll do fine,” Kunikida interrupts, leaning over his shoulder to close the file. “If you get some sleep.”

“…All right.” He smiled sheepishly. “I’ll go to bed.”

Kunikida nodded sharply, and waited for Atsushi to put his things away. They walked back to their shared dorm together, Atsushi’s hand resting at the crook of his elbow.

Precisely 12 minutes later, they were in bed. Atsushi curled himself up against Kunikida, head on his laps, and closed his eyes, willing to let himself drift to sleep.

The older man turned on his lamp and open his book, his fingers running through Atsushi’s hair, scratching his scalp just enough to make him more comfortable.

A soft scratch at the right spot dragged a low, rumble like sound out of him. “I like that,” he mumbled.

“Why aren’t you asleep?” Kunikida asked.

“You made me purr.”

“Tigers don’t purr, they chuff. You chuffed. It was adorable.” He put off his reading light and closed his book. Then, he lied down into bed, pulling himself closer to Atsushi, who immediately grabbed him like a hug pillow.

“You usually read for longer than that.”

“As your senior,” Kunikida said, propping himself up on his elbow, “I need to be a good example for you, to make sure you actually sleep. I don’t want to keep you awake; it wouldn’t be professional.”

Unprofessional, as if said senior wasn’t currently sharing a bed with him.

“You’ve kept me awake plenty of times. Are you…” Atsushi chuckled. “Are you worried?”

“No, I’m not.” Seeing the way Atsushi’s eyebrow almost went over his hairline in disbelief, he elaborated: “I have no reason to.”

Atsushi pushed himself up and kissed Kunikida on the lips. He spluttered a little.

“Not even a little bit?” Atsushi asked playfully.

Face flushing, Kunikida huffed. “You don’t trust yourself enough, so I have to do it in your place. I know you, and even if your recklessness is the bane of my existence—"

“Wasn’t that Dazai?”

“Yes, it is, actually, Dazai,” he conceded. “But it comes close second!”

“You wouldn’t like me half as much if I wasn’t prone to recklessness?” Atsushi tried.

Kunikida wrinkled his nose. “Maybe.”

It made Atsushi smile. “Thank you,” he whispered. “For trusting me. Now just let me—” He snuggled some more against him, sighed in contentment, and promptly fell asleep.

After wondering how Atsushi could fall asleep so soon after closing his eyes, Kunikida marveled at how calm he felt.

Loving Atsushi was the most unexpected, yet the easiest thing Kunikida ever did. He had spent a long time denying the strange twist in his stomach every time he thought of him ever existed — because Atsushi didn’t meet 29 of his 58 requirements.

And now there was the calm settling inside him as he listened to Atsushi’s soft breathing, his arms thrown around him, making Kunikida feel warm enough to fall asleep content.

Perfect, he thought. Requirements met or not, this was perfect.

“So—”

Atsushi almost ignored him. “What is it?”

“I saw you and Kunikida leave together yesterday night.”

“How did you— you had already left for an hour!” Atsushi shook his head. “And of course, we left together, we live together.”

“But you never leave work together! He’s having a terrible influence on you. Now you work overtime.”

“I was only doing overtime because I was worried about today,” Atsushi admitted. ”Kunikida convinced me to stop working.” He shook his head when Dazai gasped loudly, and leaned against the wall. “He made me feel better.”

Dazai wiggled a suggestive eyebrow. “Did he?”

Atsushi rolled his eyes. “Aren’t you a 24 years old man?”

“You’ve changed so much, Atsushi! I can’t tease you anymore — you used to get all red whenever someone brought up you and Kunikida!”

“I’m not blushing anymore because I’m not exactly shy about it anymore. It’s —” he frowned, looking for the right word. “It’s different now.”

And he still wondered, over a year later, why this man had decided he was worth his time — he wasn’t the smartest, most well read, most punctual, most…whatever Kunikida had expected from partner. He was just the brat.

“Different,” Dazai repeated plainly. “Really?”

“Yeah! It’s…comfortable?” He tapped his chin, thinking. “Remember at the beginning? I was always nervous around him because I was so in love with him, and our relationship was really new, and I was thinking about what should I wear, what’s should I say, I was—”

“You were scared,” Dazai completed for him, “of not doing enough.”

Nodding, Atsushi twisted the collar of his coat. “I guess so? And once I wasn’t scared about it anymore, I was scared that my feelings were fading.”

“Couples starting out all over each other and it fades after some time.” He nodded as if he’d come up with the concept himself.

“That’s it. We were just…settling in some kind of normalcy. and I was worried over nothing.” He laughed awkwardly. “I’m still a bit of a scaredy cat.”

“I don’t think you are,” Dazai said pensively. “You were worried because you care.” He gave him a complicit smile. “Here is a secret: Kunikida was always worried about everything at the beginning too. But Dazai, he’s not going to like that. Dazai, do you think Atsushi would mind? Dazai, tell me if Atsushi likes this kind of flowers! Dazai, Dazai, Dazai—”

Atsushi hid his face behind his hand. “I don’t believe you.”

“I was his resident Atsushi expert. At least, until he figured the formula to make you happy.”

“Dazai—”

“But it’s true! Kunikida is a worrywart.”

“No, Dazai, look! That’s them!”

Dazai peaked from the corner of the street, following his gaze. “You’re right!”

Under Kunikida’s paperweight was a little note. Since Atsushi had left before he was awake, he had put it on their table in the morning, and it was covered with his scratchy, barely legible for the average human being handwriting.

“Have a nice day! I’ll see you tonight” it read. He slipped it out from under the paperweight and into his notebook to serve as a page marker.

The office door opened. “We’re back!” Dazai bellowed, and flounced across the room to end up at Kunikida’s desk. “The police almost didn’t let us go.”

Kunikida’s eyebrow twitched. “What did you do?”

“They just wanted our statements,” Atsushi told him as he walked in behind Dazai. Kunikida kissed him hello, and he noticed the rip in the sleeve of his shirt, just under the shoulder. “He tried to stab me,” Atsushi explained sheepishly.

“He means the criminal,” Dazai clarified when Kunikida’s sharp eyes focused on him.

“We managed to catch them and gather enough evidence to prove their guilt, and they’re now in police custody. We will give you the report tonight.” Atsushi went on, getting on his tiptoes to straighten Kunikida’s glasses. “They were askew.”

“Did I hear about paperwork? Aaaand that’s where I take my leave,” Dazai announced as he disappeared from their field of vision. “It’s been a long day!”

“Maybe you should wait for tomorrow for the report.” Kunikida looked miffed. “Dazai is bouncing on the walls, he’ll just distract everyone.”

“Are you telling me not to finish my paperwork early?” He smiled cheekily. “Who are you and what have you done with my boyfriend?”

“See if I’m this lax with you again,” he scoffed. “It was supposed to be a reward for a job well done, but it seems like you don’t need it. I want that report in an hour.”

“Wait no! Please let me do it tomorrow! I was almost stabbed!”

“Fine! Tomorrow night. But don’t tell the others, they will think I’m going soft.”

“They already think that.”

“Tomorrow, lunchtime.”

“UUgh!”

“You don’t have to help me sew my clothes every time something happens.”

“We would have to buy a new one once a week. Besides, I want to help.”

“Thanks but, we wouldn’t —” Atsushi winced at the thought. “I would bribe Akutagawa into fixing it for me.”

They sat at their table; Atsushi’s ripped shirt spread in front of them. Kunikida held the sleeve as Atsushi did the needlework, closing the hole in the cloth.

“One day Akutagawa will stop taking your bribes.”

Atsushi snorted. “He won’t. He likes me too much for that.” Not that he would ever admit it. “Dazai was pretty happy when Akutagawa started dragging me to his team dinners.” He made a face. “It still feels weird saying it. You should come, sometimes.”

“I don’t think they would want me here.“

“They wouldn’t mind that much; they think you’re okay.” They had no reason to dislike Kunikida. “Oh, also, Dazai told me something about you today and…” He almost dropped his needle. “I’m not sure I really believe him—”

“What did he say, now?”

“He said you would always ask him for advice? About me? When we started dating last year.”

“That man—” Kunikida muttered. “He promised.”

“You mean it’s true?”

“Be careful with your finger.” With a short movement, Kunikida adjusted the sleeve’s position so Atsushi had easier access. “It’s true,” he ended up confessing. “I’m not sure how to express this.”

“If you throw random words out, I’ll probably be able to take a wild guess?”

“It’s just that I had such a clear idea of who I was going to fall in love with, I already knew who they were, what they were going to like and then—”

“And then it was me.”

“Don’t say it like that,” he scolded, and cut the thread once Atsushi was finished sewing. “But yes, it was you, and you threw a large, occasionally tiger-shaped wrench in my carefully crafted plans.”

The wording made Atsushi laughed. “So you asked Dazai for help?”

“You two are very close! It was a logical decision, if not a little risky. And I made a list in my notebook.”

“Alright now I’m curious about that. Is it about me?”

He tugged on the shirt’s sleeve, testing the strength of Atsushi’s sewing, and acquiesced.

“What does it say?”

“Wouldn’t you like to know?”

“You can’t just tell me you wrote in your notebook, about me, and not expect me to ask about it!”

It was a list of things Atsushi liked.

A long, bullet point list of everything that he could use to make Atsushi smile. Back then, he’d thought it necessary, but he knew all the information he’d gathered by heart now. Like the exact spot to scratch in Atsushi’s hair.

He’d started it without realizing it, and by the time he had over dozen entries, he’d wondered how he ever doubted loving Atsushi.

“Your shirt is fixed,” he simply said. “Do you want to try it on to make sure it’s fine?”

It took a second for Atsushi to answer, during which he stared for what seemed like a long time. “You’re really sweet, you know?” he declared, as if he’d guessed what Kunikida was thinking. Then, he pulled the shirt off the table and put it back on, flexing his arm a bit. “It’s perfect, thank you!”

“Just be thankful it wasn’t beyond repair.”

“I’ll try to keep the number of people trying to kill me to a minimum, I promise.”

#bsd #bsdrarepairvday #kuniatsu #nakajima atsushi #kunikida doppo #this is unedited word vomit i'm sorry #just wanted an excuse to write them being casually affectionate

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dearosamu · 4 years

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DESPERADO - INFERNO

SYPNOSIS: she, a dancer with personified problems all the while more that intrigues osamu dazai who came into her life amidst the chaos that is [name] [last name].

four - five

dazai was deseprate to find [name] (and possibly yumeno) again in the mall, but with no such luck, he didn't. he went back to the ice cream parlor that he previously had a run in with the two - more or less- siblings to get himself an ice cream. dazai observed people that walked by to see if he can spot any familiar faces. fortunately for him, he had. he spotted a former colleague of chuuya and akutagawa -- atsushi.

"ah, dazai!" atsushi chirps as he spotted dazai waving over to him. he walked over to dazai, smiling.

dazai formed somewhat a genuine smile as the white haired male came into view. "atsushi."

"how's the business going?" he smiles, taking a seat in front of the older male.

"it's alright. chuuya and akutagawa are still content."

"what about you?"

"i'm good."

"ah, that's good." atsushi replies smoothly with a tinge bit of sarcasm. it wasn't that he was glad of the contented situation of his former colleagues were, but it was something at least.

"i need to ask you a question, atsushi," dazai pulled his lips to a thin line before turning to atsushi completely. "how did you exit the business?"

"it's simple. i got my degree and quit the business," he hums, playing with the longer end of his hair with his fingers. "why? is it for a friend?"

"something like that," dazai mutters.

"is it that simple?"

"for me it was. i never had any weird history whatsoever, so it kind of is." he shrugs.

dazai closed his eyes, thinking about it over. weird history? could he mean ..?

"and by weird history, you mean ..?"

"sex working, owed money to bad people and some creeps following you around. the kind of clićhe bad past kinds."

"how do you break free from something like that?"

"unless you plan to change it all, of course. but such a thing ain't easy," atsushi crossed his arms. "is that newbie alright?"

"sort of."

atsushi hums before frowning. "it's surprising to hear how you're strangely worried about them. i suggest taking it slow and only accept the services."

"you think?"

"positive." he nods.

though with that said, dazai would never do such a thing.

about half a week had dazai completely avoided [name] and bit by bit, he slowly got fed up the longer he wasn't anywhere near her. he could not deny akutagawa was excellent at what he does, but his personal preference would always go to the [h.c] haired female. so he asked for her again, in which chuuya only pointed -- rather angrily, to where he could find her.

he opened the curtain to walk in on her taking her black crop top off. the woman turned to him once he cleared his throat.

"dazai?" she sighs and rolls her eyes. "i thought you'd be done with me."

"how can i though? you're too irresistible."

[name] made a face that looked like she wanted to vomit. "please, save your puny excuses for someone else. also, don't you know how to knock?"

dazai dismissed the first thing she said, shrugging. "i can knock on curtains? wow, i never knew that!" he mocks.

"shut up," [name] huffs. "as oh-so flattering that was, i need to get back to him." dazai noticed how she stiffened a bit upon the mention of her younger brother. "my neighbour watches over him, but he always runs off in other places and usually just goes back to our home. he never listens."

"my friend's chauffeur can drive you."

"he has a fucking chauffeur?" [name] asks bewildered for the slightest moment before her eyes turned cold. she was clearly pissed off but dazai didn't care.

"why though? is that your supposed reward for me for putting on a good show?" [name] spat, revealing a sweater from her bag and putting it on aggressively. her shorts were a bit loose to reveal her lace underwear that dazai couldn't help but to look. nor could he, really. he watches her all the time -- there was no difference.

"no, it's for your younger brother who needs his big sister." he replies solemnly. "growing up alone with someone you don't trust is .. difficult."

"so that's why you're an emotionless piece of shit," she mutters. "never had that mothers love, did you?"

"neither did he."

"i can act as his mother perfectly fine." [name] replies coldly. "i put my pride above my care for my younger brother. something i wouldn't even think that the likes of you would do."

dazai frowns. who was she to speak?

".. well you are perfectly capable of acting as his mother. actually, you don't even need to act," the brunette scowls.

"what's that supposed to mean?" the woman narrows her eyes at the male.

"it's not like you're his big sister right? i see no resemblance between you two."

"so what? it doesn't mean we need to look alike to be identified as siblings." her voice wavers as she spoke. "is there something you know about him?" she asked through gritted teeth.

"i'm saying that you aren't his biological sister, am i wrong?"

"what the hell do you know?!" she glared at dazai. his smart mouth would get him places ..

"i tried to find records under yumeno's name and apparently, i see no relation of you to him," dazai raises a sharp brow. "now tell me, why would you lie about this?"

"why the hell do you care?! what, you want me to tell you that he's not my biological brother? that he's just a kid i found on the side of the street?!!" [name] screeched in anger. her eyes widened as she processed the things she said. covering her mouth, she backed away from dazai who only stepped closer.

"[name]-"

"fuck off, dazai!" dazai felt a stinging pain on his right cheek as the woman before him slapped him with tears of frustration pricking her eyes. she furiously wiped them away.

dazai turned his head back to her before clenching his fist tightly, biting the inside of his cheek. no, he was not going to get mad at her. especially at this time.

"[name] listen to me, it's fine. it's something you shouldn't even worry about." dazai stepped closer to her.

"why shouldn't i? he's not just a kid i would throw away because his fa-" she cut herself off before she could continue her sentence. taking a big gulp of air, she continued. ".. because i couldn't let him suffer alone.."

"then why fake him as your brother, when you're his real mother?"

"that is none of your business!" [name] snapped. "why the fuck do you even care so much?! you sure like prying into someone else's business don't you?"

"then why do you keep up with that senseless pride of yours?"

"senseless?" [name] scoffs. "it's this senseless pride that keeps me going and keeping me from getting groped or raped by scum like you who come here to look for nothing but a hole to stuff their dick in. you think it's senseless? it's the only thing that keeps me sane and to return to yumeno for when he needs me."

"that pride of yours is keeping him away for a free ticket for a better and qualified education he'd be able to fathom."

"why are you such a persistent brat?!" [name] stomps over to dazai, grabbing the collar of his shirt. "listen up, dazai," she hisses, eyes filled with nothing but fury. "i don't need your help. i don't need you. i fucking hate you."

dazai looks down on the woman with a calm breath, watching her as she only radiated anger and nothing else. she was so close.

"there's that senseless pride of yours again." he spoke lowly. "it's what keeping you from giving yumeno the freedom to do whatever he wants for his future."

"shut the fuck up," [name] hisses once more before pressing her lips against dazai's.

the brunette wasn't surprised. [name] had the tendency to do strange things at the most inappropriate times. he noticed the roughness of the kiss they both shared. [name] moved her lips aggressively against his, biting his tongue and bruising his lips.

she pulls away with red, swollen lips and red tinted cheeks. "you're going to call the chauffeur and i'm going home. i don't want to see your face here asking for me ever again, got that?" [name] hisses.

"no."

"say it."

"i'll call the chauffeur. you'll be going home, but i will be back."

"stop sounding like you're in love," the woman mumbles, picking up her bag. "we are nothing more but friends with benefits. except we don't even actually fuck."

she passes by dazai who in turn, only faced her again. "besides, i don't do love."

"is it because you loved him?"

[name] froze in her spot.

"who?"

"yumeno's father."

"no. i fucking hate him." [name] spat, putting on her jacket. "call the chauffeur and tell him i'll be waiting outside. and he'd better get me home on time."

dazai heaves a sigh, running his fingers through his brown locks.

"certainly .."

#dazai scenario #dazai x reader #dazai osamu #bungou stray dogs x reader #bungou stray dogs #desperado #reader insert

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inactivebsdblog · 5 years

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Bungoutober, day four

Prompts: Rock band AU/ China Town AU

Type of media: One Shot, maybe making something out of it later

◇

"Thank you, Yokohama! Good night!"

While the crowd was still cheering, the lights went out for a moment, allowing Chuuya to go backstage without being the focus for once. Immediately, he was handed a bottle of water, which he, still panting and not able to stop grinning, took a huge sip from.

"Chuuya-san! That was incredible!", he heard Higuchi, a woman from the management staff, call out to him. He turned in the direction he thought her to be and gave her a grin. "Thanks, Higuchi," he tried to reply with a hoarse voice.

"Chuuya!" Tachihara's voice, on the other hand, wasn't hoarse yet, which honestly impressed the other redhead, since both of them had been singing for three whole hours now. "Do you have time now? We need to talk about the next song and-"

"Not now," Chuuya coughed, pointing at his throat.

"Oh, I see," the younger male nodded. "So, tomorrow? At the usual place, around twelve?"

The redhead nodded, then went to the direction of his cabin. He couldn't get back to his apartment tonight- he couldn't most nights after live concerts because of too many fans swarming around, so he had a cabin right here which he had prepared in advance. The people here knew him, so they always let him stay the night.

On his way, he passed the Akutagawa siblings- Ryuunosuke, the older sibling, who was generally referred to by his last name, and Gin, the only female member of the group. They both weren't really talkative, so they just gave him a nod. He did the same.

As soon as he reached his room, he let himself fall onto the couch. He was exhausted, this had been a rather long day. The longest in a while. He didn't even want to drink some of his beloved wine anymore. Only sleep... he felt like he hadn't slept for ages.

He couldn't even change his clothes before he fell into a deep slumber.

•••

Chuuya woke up when the sunlight already fell through the window. Groaning, he sat up, checking his phone. 10:38. He had two messages and five missed calls.

The messages were from Higuchi- "Chuuya-san, what to do about the meet and greet you all wanted to do" and Tachihara- "If you got too drunk yesterday to remember now, today at twelve at the usual place" . The calls were all from the same unknown number. Probably a fan. He shouldn't call back.

He lifted himself up. He felt like shit. Still in his stage outfit, still with the bit of make-up he had worn yesterday evening. And even though he hadn't even seen a single bottle of wine yesterday, he felt like he had drunken his whole bar empty.

The male sighed while walking towards his backpack. He had a few shirts he could wear stored in there and there was a little bath where he could shower right next to this room. He would even have a bit of time to get home.

As soon as he got out of the building, he put on the hood. His signature hat was in the backpack. The risk of being recognised through it was too big. Making his way downtown, he passed a shopping district.

I need to get some food later, he thought. His fridge was almost empty, if he remembered correctly.

Chuuya got to a small apartment complex, climbing the stairs and nodding at the passing people- an old lady, a young man with his son in his arms, Dazai, the landlord's daughter-

Wait a second.

He turned around with wide eyes, but the man was already gone.

Was that... Had that really been Dazai?

...No, it must've been his imagination. He had moved since four years ago, multiple times, to keep his location a secret.

With that thought in mind, he opened his apartment door, placing his backpack inside and stepping in.

He immediately noticed the white card on the floor, on it a handwriting he would recognise anywhere.

That man... it had really been Dazai.

It wasn't shock that filled his body. It wasn't sadness or happiness that he was back, that he actually contacted him.

It was pure, all-consuming rage.

Not even looking at the card, he ripped it to pieces.

•••

"Chuuya!", Tachihara greeted as soon as the older male walked into their usual café, Minato Coffee. "I got you coffee. Black, two sugar."

"Thanks," Chuuya muttered, sitting down.

The other ginger furrowed his brows. "Is... something wrong?"

"No," the male heard himself say. "I'm just a bit tired, that's all. Thanks for the coffee."

They sat down for a while, talking about the show the night before and discussing their next song. Tachihara also asked for a bit of advice from Chuuya- girl advice, as the boy said it (though the older redhead already knew who exactly Tachihara wanted to impress- it was pretty easy to see that he had a thing for a certain Akutagawa). The lead singer of the Black Lizard was, after all, notorious for being a womanizer.

After almost an hour, however, things took a different turn.

"So, Chuuya..." The redhead looked up. Tachihara suddenly looked even more uncomfortable than before when he had asked about girls.

"To be honest with you, we had a rock-paper-scissors match with the management team to determine who has to tell you and I lost... so..."

The young man turned his gaze away.

Chuuya leaned back. "Come on, tell me. It can't be that bad."

Tachihara didn't look any calmer.

"Our sales are declining-"

"And?", the redhead asked, lifting an eyebrow. "We just have to write better music, that's-"

"-so we want to collab with a more popular artist."

The male didn't get what was so horrible about that. There were tons of artists more popular than them. Why would Hirotsu's team do a rock-paper-scissors tournament just to determine who would-

Unless...

Tachihara still looked away, muttering "I'm sorry" to the other musician.

"I won't collab with Dazai," Chuuya said coldly.

"Chuuya, I get it, he hurt you before-"

"I. Won't. Collab. With. Dazai."

This time, his voice was even colder. More forceful. Almost deadly.

He leaned over the table, forcing Tachihara to look at him. The poor boy was trembling as Chuuya's murderous gaze struck him. "If I should hear that you are planning these things behind my back one more time," he whispered, "I will leave this band. You still need a lead singer, don't you?"

With these words, he slammed some money on the table and stormed out of the door.

◇

A/N: Man, this took longer than I expected. I started around 6 in the afternoon and I kinda failed the challenge in my timezone an hour ago, but don't tell anyone.

Anyways, an AU! I love AUs! Anyone know that Dazatsu Hogwarts AU by @looking-for-stray-dogs here on Tumblr? I love that one. It is really, really good.

I chose Rock band because I remembered that Chuuya's Japanese voice actor did the first and the third OP and is the lead singer of a band. That's also why he is the protag of this AU.

Little extra: the name I chose for the café, Minato Coffee, has a meaning: haven coffee, or, port coffee. I think everyone knows why I chose that meaning.

Anyways, I hope you enjoyed!

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straycatsacademia · 5 years

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Will You Tie the Knot With Me?

The Final Chapter!

Summary: Akutagawa Ryuunosuke is the top student at a prestigious boarding school. When Nakajima Atsushi transfers in and nearly beats Akutagawa for top spot, things start to get messy.

Chapters: 3/3

Ao3 Link

Chapter 3:

Akutagawa spent the next few days nursing Atsushi back to health before they both went back to their regular schedules. However, there was a shift between them neither could deny.

Akutagawa always enjoyed being around Atsushi, but now it was heightened, almost as if being without him made the world more… boring. Atsushi even seemed to be opening up to Akutagawa more.

Their lunch table had grown now, and Akutagawa could safely say that Atsushi’s friends were his friends too.

“So, Atsushi, are you going to ask anyone to prom?”

Akutagawa choked on his drink. Prom was something he forgot about, considering he never planned on going. He was annoyed with himself when he realized how much the thought of Atsushi going to prom with someone made him want to vomit.

“Me? Ask someone to prom? No way! Who would go with me?”

“Who wouldn’t go with you?” Akutagawa muttered into his sandwich.

Atsushi smiled at him softly. “You’re just saying that to be nice…”

Akutagawa rolled his eyes. “We both know I don’t just say things to be nice,” he remarked, and the entire table laughed.

“He’s right! You have an excellent shot at getting a date!” Tanizaki shifted his head from Atsushi to Akutagawa, and nodded at him.

Akutagawa’s face burned and he moved his eyes to his sandwich.

“Yeah, I know all the girls think you’re cute!” Naomi added.

Before Atsushi could respond, the bell rang, and they headed back to class.

“Have you ever thought about going to prom?” Atsushi asked Akutagawa.

Akutagawa snorted. “No, there’s too many people and I can’t dance. Have you?”

“Yeah,” Atsushi smiled, embarrassed, and Akutagawa’s stomach sank.

“Well, I guess you have several girls wanting you to ask them,” Akutagawa said bitterly.

Atsushi gave him a confused look before their teacher walked in and started taking attendance.

Akutagawa was relieved when they started teaching and the subject of prom was dropped. Atsushi had track practice after class so he would have the afternoon to himself before Atsushi would bring dinner to his room.

Atsushi always brought dinner after he had a shower, as he couldn’t stand being sweaty and gross. The thought of Atsushi sweaty made Akutagawa’s face heat so he tried not to think about it.

“Hey, they’re serving chazuke tonight!” Atsushi said excitedly as he sat down near Akutagawa’s bed.

Akutagawa smirked. “Will you ever love anyone more than chazuke?”

Atsushi choked on his food. “Wh-why would you ask me that?!”

Akutagawa blinked. “Because you love chazuke so much? It was a joke…” he trailed off, seeing Atsushi’s relieved face.

Atsushi laughed awkwardly. “Right… anyway, someone got asked to prom at our practice today…”

“Oh,” Akutagawa said. “That’s nice,” he added.

“Yeah.. Hey Akutagawa?”

“Yeah?”

“Do you… do you think it’s wrong of me to not want to ask a girl to prom?” he whispered, obviously emotional.

“What? No, of course not, why would you think that?”

“Well, everyone else seems excited to ask a girl to prom and I just… don’t,” he said softly.

“Atsushi, you don’t have to go to prom if you don’t want to,” Akutagawa said firmly. “I’m not going, remember?”

Atsushi sighed. “Yeah, I remember,” he said.

The rest of the night was spent in silence, and Akutagawa wished not for the first time that he could know what Atsushi was thinking.

The next few weeks were spent with everyone planning prom. While Akutagawa was glad Atsushi wasn’t going to prom, he was also feeling defeated that Atsushi looked so sad he wasn’t going.

Whenever the topic of prom was brought up at lunch, Atsushi would go silent. Akutagawa thought he was the only one who noticed, but apparently not.

When he got a knock on his door that afternoon, he was fully expecting it to be Atsushi. After all, no one else ever comes and knock on his door, so he was surprised that Tanizaki was staring at him when he opened the door.

“Hi. Can we talk?”

Akutagawa blinked, and then nodded, inviting Tanizaki in.

“It’s about Atsushi,” he said, sighing as he sat down on Akutagawa’s floor.

“I’ve noticed he’s been a little off,” Akutagawa mentioned.

“Yeah, he has been. He’s been acting weird ever since he turned that girl down for prom at track practice,” Tanizaki added.

Akutagawa’s eyes shot up. “Someone asked him to prom?!”

Tanizaki seemed equally as shocked. “Yeah, he didn’t tell you? He had to turn her down in front of the entire track team, he felt awful,” Tanizaki said sadly.

“He told me someone was asked to prom at track practice, he didn’t mention it was him,” Akutagawa whispered.

“That doesn’t surprise me, considering the one person he wants to ask him to prom hasn’t,” Tanizaki deadpanned.

Akutagawa’s eyes widened. “Who does he want to ask him to prom?!”

“You.”

Akutagawa’s jaw dropped. It was as if he could feel his brain imploding.

“That’s not true,” he whispered. “It is true. I should have known you would be too oblivious to notice it. But I’m not oblivious, and I know you like him too,” Tanizaki told him sternly.

Akutagawa looked down at his shoes, thinking. He could feel his heart soar, even though his brain was telling him not to get his hopes up. “He deserves better than me,” he whispered.

Tanizaki snorted. “It’s not about what he deserves, it’s about what he wants. He wants you, and you want him badly enough I know damn well you’ll treat him good!”

Akutagawa’s face burned, but he couldn’t deny it. “What- what if I’m a bad prom date? What if I ruin it and he never wants to go with him on a real date? What if-”

Tanizaki laughed. “Dude, he doesn’t just want to go to prom, he wants to go to prom with you. As long as you’re with him, it’ll be fine. I promise it’ll be worth it,” Tanizaki winked, and with that, he left.

Akutagawa sat there, dumbfounded. Now he knew Atsushi liked him back, but how the hell was he going to ask him to prom?!

Akutagawa spent the next few days pondering how to ask Atsushi to prom. He didn’t want to do anything too cheesy, or over-the-top, or god forbid, public. He wanted something that was meaningful, something that was special to them.

That’s when he got the perfect idea. He knew what he wanted to do, and he was going to do it… tomorrow.

The next day Akutagawa sat nervously in class, and whenever Atsushi asked him about it, he brushed it off as not feeling well. Atsushi was planning on coming to his room after class, but Akutagawa had a few things to do first, so he told Atsushi he was going to the nurse after class.

Once the classes for the day ended, Akutagawa ran to the library, found the book he needed, and headed back to his dorm, texting Atsushi he could come over.

The book Akutagawa had picked out was one they had bonded over back when they first started working on the project together. He was hoping Atsushi would remember it and started to get nervous when Atsushi knocked and entered his room.

“Hey! You feeling okay now?”

“Yeah,” Akutagawa coughed into his sleeve. “Here.”

Atsushi took the book from Akutagawa’s hands, confusion on his face until he read the title. “Oh! This is the book you recommended to me when we first started becoming friends!” “Open it to the first page,” Akutagawa rasped, his heart beating fast.

Atsushi blinked at him. “Okay…” he flipped the book to the first page.

Attached to the first page was a note that said: “Will you go to prom with me?”

Atsushi read the note, and his jaw dropped. He looked at Akutagawa in shock, his face red.

“You- wait- I thought- is this a joke?!”

“No. You wanted to go to prom right?”

“Yeah, but I thought you didn’t..”

“I don’t,” Akutagawa deadpanned, and Atsushi looked so heartbroken it made Akutagawa’s stomach twist.

“I don’t…” he added, “unless it’s with you,” he whispered.

Atsushi seemed to stare at him for an eternity, and Akutagawa started to sweat.

“You mean it? You want to go to prom… with me? As your date?”

Akutagawa nodded. “Yes. And if it goes well, I’d like to take you on a real date too,” he added.

That’s when Atsushi finally smiled, and he wrapped his arms around Akutagawa. “I’d like that too,” he whispered.

Prom was in one week, and Atsushi and Akutagawa were heading to lunch when Atsushi grabbed Akutagawa’s hand and entwined it with his own.

Akutagawa stiffened, and Atsushi went to pull away, but Akutagawa gripped his hand tighter and squeezed it. He saw Atsushi smile, and he felt himself start to smile too.

Finally the night of prom came, and Akutagawa was nervous. The boys were waiting at the bottom of the steps for the girls, but Atsushi was nowhere to be seen.

“Naomi told me that he was getting ready with the girls,” Tanizaki explained, and Akutagawa let out a sigh of relief.

After a few minutes the girls came out, and Akutagawa forgot how to breathe when he saw Atsushi.

There were flowers entwined with his silver hair, matching his light pink suit. The girls had put on some blush and eyeliner, and his eyes were shining. Akutagawa had never seen anything prettier in his life.

Atsushi met him at the bottom of the steps, twirling his hair nervously. “Do you like it?”

“You’re the most gorgeous person in this room,” Akutagawa whispered, and Atsushi beamed even brighter.

Akutagawa didn’t enjoy the actual prom as much, but seeing Atsushi look so radiant was worth every second. Atsushi didn’t even make him dance till a slow song came on, and Akutagawa held out his hand.

Neither of them were that good at dancing, but that was okay, because when Atsushi rested his head on Akutagawa’s chest he had never felt more at peace.

“Hey Akutagawa?”

“Yeah?”

Atsushi removed himself from Akutagawa’s chest to look at him. “What do you think we ditch prom and you can take me on that real date you promised?”

Akutagawa smiled, grabbing his hand and heading out as fast as possible while Atsushi laughed behind him.

They spent the rest of the night at a breakfast diner, talking about anything and everything.

Curfew was ending soon, and they held hands walking back to the school.

When they got to Atsushi’s room, Akutagawa realized he didn’t want to say goodbye. Before he could say anything though, Atsushi wrapped his arms around his neck and kissed him.

Atsushi pulled back before Akutagawa’s brain could catch up with what was happening.

“Goodnight, Akutagawa,” he whispered, before entering his room.

Akutagawa touched his lips, and smiled. He couldn’t wait to see Atsushi at class tomorrow.

#bungou stray dogs #bsd #akuatsu #shin soukoku #akutagawa ryunosuke #akutagawa ryuunosuke #nakajima atsushi #atsushi nakajima #will you tie the knot with me

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shinsoukokuvalentine · 6 years

Text

Glittering Crowd

(Decided on making them sing English songs because this is my AU and I can be illogical if I want to.

Songs used: Courtesy Call, Glittering Cloud, Glasshouse)

158/365: Glittering Crowd

Congratulations! Your band, _________, has been invited to the GUILD WARS!

During the GUILD WARS, bands from across the country will compete tournament-style for the chance to be recruited by the American Music Guild, who will not only publish the winning band’s albums overseas, they will also HOST that band ON TOUR in the UNITED STATES!

This is a ONCE IN A LIFETIME chance!

Call ***-***-**** to accept your invitation!

Further details on back…

Atsushi exhales slowly. His breath touches the mic, but the sound it makes is drowned out by the crowd surrounding the stage, screaming, chanting his band’s name.

Despite his exhaustion, he smiles. Here, on the stage, lights flashing around him, his band behind him, his heart still beating to the pulse a drum that has long since been silenced, here is where he feels alive…

Akutagawa’s fingers move like lighting across his guitar’s frets. In front of him, Chuuya sings into the microphone as if he’s singing to it, holding it gently, caressing it like a lover. Blacklights illuminate the negative patterns on his shirt, and the white tips of Akutagawa’s bangs appear to glow. The crowd cheers, but the music throbs in his head even louder, filling his veins like pure adrenaline.

He can’t take it anymore. The beat of the night calls him like a moth to a flame, and he’s off on his own, not only playing his guitar but using it, using it as a voice, an expression of his soul.

He catches side glares from his band mates. It doesn’t matter. He’s not ruining the song, he’s breathing life into it. Chuuya still sings unhindered, and it isn’t as if Akutagawa is distracting anyone else or throwing them off their part. He knows what he’s doing. He knows how to rewrite his part in a second, bringing the best out of his guitar, and he’s going to make sure the crowd knows that before the night’s over…

Know your enemy, Dazai says. Yokohama Mafia is that enemy.

“They’re the only real obstacle between us and that Guild sponsorship,” he says. “Both of us are soaking up votes left and right. I need you to watch them and see what weaknesses we can take advantage of.”

Atsushi shrinks back a little.

“You talk as if this like, warfare or something…” he says, trailing off. Dazai smirks.

“It is.”

So he watches them. He watches Chuuya, standing on the stage with his lips practically on the mic, singing love ballads to the stage itself. He watches Gin and Tachihara, the guitarist and the bassit respectively, who watch their leader with sparking eyes. But the last member, Akutagawa, he doesn’t watch.

Atsushi stares at Akutagawa. He knows he improvises, and from experience, he feels as if his band probably hates him for it. He’s a show off, through and through. So Atsushi wonders why he feels to drawn to the lead guitarist, the one with the red suspenders, the one with the unchanging expression, the one that closes his eyes and throws his head back when he plays, as if possessed by the music. It’s a kind of energy that Atsushi’s never seen.

He’s supposed to observe the band. He isn’t supposed to enjoy them. It’s Akutagawa’s fault that that music seeps into his skin, into his head, resonating with the sound of a guitar howling like a siren at the hands of an unlikely celebrity crush…

Whenever Akutagawa goes missing after a performance, Chuuya knows where to find him. Unfailingly, he’s in the audience, watching Dogs onstage.

“Scouting out the competition?” he teases him once when he gets back to the bandroom. Akutagawa doesn’t answer. Instead, he looks at the whiteboard on the wall, the one they’ve drawn a bracket on to track the winners of the Guild Wars.

“The lead singer of Dogs,” he says. He doesn’t say anything else, and it takes Chuuya a moment to realize that he’s asking for a name.

“Oh. It’s Nakajima Atsushi,” he says.

Akutagawa doesn’t turn around. He keeps his eyes on the whiteboard, tracing victories. Dogs’ victories.

“He’s not using his voice to his full potential,” he mutters. “He’s restraining himself.”

Chuuya tilts his head. “You’ve paid that much attention to him?”

Akutagawa nods. He closes his eyes, and for a moment, he’s back in that crowd, back in front of the stage, watching Atsushi sing passionately, watching him grip the microphone as if he’s willing his knuckles to turn white, hearing his voice fly through the stadium with the grace and power of a falcon diving for prey.

“Dogs is a worthy opponent,” he says, mostly to himself. “But if Nakajima finds his voice’s power, he’ll be unstoppable…”

“Don’t mess this up, Atsushi,” Dazai smiles, setting his hand on Atsushi’s shoulder, making him jump. With just one curtain between them, Yokohama Mafia prepares the stage for their final show, and the crowd outside is chanting their name.

“It’s all on you,” Dazai beams, slapping his shoulder again. “One wrong move and it’s all over.”

Atsushi’s stressed to the point of shaking. “W-why are you smiling about this?!” he stammers. Dazai pulls back and shrugs.

“Because I’m calm about it,” he says. The crowd’s screams escalate, and stagehands lift the outside curtain, revealing Yokohama Mafia to the crowd. Chuuya yells out a greeting. Dazai chews on the eraser of his pencil, his clipboard in his lap.

“Nothing surprises me,” he reaffirms.

Then Chuuya starts singing. Not two notes are out of his mouth, not two syllables into his first vocals, and Dazai drops the pencil. His expression doesn’t change, and he doesn’t move. But something’s so very obviously not right that discomfort almost seems to emanate from him in waves.

“They’re playing Courtesy Call,” he says slowly. He turns, facing away from Atsushi, drumming his fingers on his chin as the beat outside picks up. “They haven’t played anything like this the whole tournament… We need to change our game.”

Atsushi tilts his head, a frown tugging on his lips. “Uuuuh… Dazai?” he says slowly, but Dazai ignores him, standing. His smile’s gone.

“We’re not doing Glittering Cloud,” he says abruptly. Atsushi freezes.

“What?!” he exclaims, standing up from his seat. “But… It’s our best song! We’ve put so much practice into it!”

Dazai nods, but only as if he’s barely listening. He’s typing on his phone, and Atsushi sees that he’s messaging Kunikida, telling him to adjust the effects.

“It’s our most practiced song, yes,” Dazai says, not looking up, “but it’s not our best.”

Atsushi wraps his arms around himself. He can already feel sweat dripping down his hair, and he hasn’t even sung yet. “So what’s our best?” he asks, though he fears the answer.

Dazai picks his head up. Slowly, his smirk comes back, although it’s somehow terrifying this time.

“Glasshouse,” he says. Atsushi feels faint.

“You know I can’t sing that!” he protests. Dazai shakes his head.

“I know you can.”

Atsushi grips his hair. He feels ready to cry. “The last time we rehearsed that, my voice broke!” he shouts.

Dazai holds a finger to his lips, then nods his head towards the stage. Atsushi groans, rolling his eyes, stomping away until he can see through the gap to the side of the stage. Yokohama Mafia’s there, singing of battle cries and preparing for war, of oncoming storms and solidarity.

And suddenly, Akutagawa’s eyes meet Atsushi’s. He freezes. Akutagawa keeps playing. When Chuuya enters the chorus again, Akutagawa nods. It’s almost like he’s issuing a challenge to Atsushi, a call to arms.

“You won’t know if you’ve improved,” Dazai says, shocking Atsushi into turning around, “unless you try.”

Atsushi gulps. When he turns back to the stage, Akutagawa’s eyes are closed, and he’s playing the guitar like he’s worshipping it.

Taking in a deep breath, Atsushi turns around. “Do you really think I can sing Glasshouse?” he asks. Dazai smiles and nods, and Atsushi clenches his fists and sets his jaw.

“Then I’ll do it,” he says. Dazai smiles, and Yokohama Mafia’s song ends...

Akutagawa walks off the stage behind Chuuya, who spent too much time waving to the crowd and soaking in their praise.

“Relax, Akutagawa,” he says as they shuffle backstage. He turns around and grins. “It’s my last night in front of this crowd. Can’t I bask in it a little?”

But Akutagawa isn’t listening. He’s already shed his guitar, and he stands in the curtain’s shadows, watching the stage, waiting for Dogs.

“Looks like Yokohama Mafia just declared war! Can Dogs answer with an even stronger battle cry?” the announcer says, stirring up another cheer from the crowd.

Then he sees Atsushi. He steps onto the stage, waving, beaming like the sun. Akutagawa can’t pull his eyes from him. Behind him, the rest of the band assumes their positions. A nod from Atsushi to the lead guitarist, and the first chord begins. It’s low, unassuming, but then it ascends, until suddenly it bursts into the air like a thunderstorm.

“Is that Glasshouse?” Chuuya asks from behind Akutagawa. He can only nod.

The lyrics start, and Atsushi braces his legs on the stage. One hand grips the mic, the other moves through the air, and the emotion on his face accentuates every word, like they’re seared into his soul.

Then the tempo picks up. Other instruments join in. Atsushi’s voice rises, and Akutagawa’s eyes widen. He’s getting there, closer to that potential that Akutagawa knows he has.

And then the chorus hits, and Akutagawa’s blown away…

When the sound ends, Atsushi’s panting. His mouth feels dry, sweat drips down his nose to the floor, and he’s shaking onstage.

Yet he smiles. He feels it, feels that rush, that high from the stage, from the crowd. He couldn’t speak if he wanted to, but in that moment, his voice feels stronger than ever before.

He looks to the side of the stage. Standing there, hidden from the spotlights, Yokohama Mafia’s lead guitarist stands. He’s clapping.

Atsushi isn’t sure what comes over him, but after he leaves the stage, the first thing he does is kiss that guitarist.

Over the competition, they’ve bared their souls to each other. They’ve shown each other their passion, their song, their voice. Now, Atsushi realizes as he steps back, looking into eyes of gray, they’ve seen all there is to see of each other.

All that’s left is to experience it.

#shin soukoku #sskk #atsuaku #akuatsu #glittering cloud is my theme for atsushi #so i had to include it even if it didn't fit the tone i was going for very well #band au #also sorry if tumblr mobile kills the spacing #sometimes it does that

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izanyas · 7 years

Text

Nothing Noble (1)

First chapter of the roleswap Soukoku fic, feat. agency member Chuuya and mafia executive Dazai. Inspired by the Soukoku Christmas 2017 prompt “Nobility.”

Rating: M Words: 10,600 Warnings: character death, grief/mourning, violence, abuse.

Nothing Noble Chapter 1

Mori's voice was velvet through the silence, tempered, measured. Dazai knew how little of that sweetness was real, but where he usually found amusement in the fact that Mori lied about this as he lied about everything else—straight-faced and kind-looking—he found that he couldn't laugh tonight. Not even in the privacy of his own head.

His head was crowded. His ears rang with the sound of Chuuya's voice like they would after an earthquake. He wished he could allow himself to step out of the office, to step out of his own mind, as he had wanted to since the thunder of the shot had struck down his hearing.

His trigger finger ached. He couldn't uncurl it fully.

Mori was done recounting the events of the night to the other executives, now. Dazai pinpointed Oda's careful breathing at the back of the room, focused his attention on it rather than on Hirotsu's voice asking, "What do we do now, Boss?"

"Search for him, of course," Mori replied. "I have already sent men after him, and I have to ask you three to share your resources as well. Chuuya-kun is only one boy, but I think we all know better than to underestimate him now."

Ah, Dazai thought. That one was for me.

"With all due respect," Ace interjected, soft and honeyed. The glance he leveled with Dazai was positively gleeful. "None of this would have happened if Dazai had done his job, Boss. Do you think it wise to include him in the search party? He's the one who let Nakahara go."

"I think I would very much like to have Dazai-kun protecting my life, yes," Mori answered.

Ace sneered. "If you life even needs protecting."

"It does," Dazai said.

Oda's breathing pattern had shifted. His pace had been forcefully calm, deep and chest-wide; now it hurried at the sound of Dazai's voice, and the rhythm it took was one he only ever used for worry.

"I wasn't lying," he went on. His eyes found Mori's across the shadowed length of the room. "Chuuya will have your head. He was pretty adamant about me telling you this, actually, which I think was a bit stupid of him."

"And what would you do," Mori asked, "If it were you instead of Chuuya-kun?"

What would Dazai do, if it were him and not Chuuya?

Dazai couldn't imagine it. He couldn't see himself wrecked with the kind of grief Chuuya had shown, couldn't picture wearing such suffering over his open face. His mind was slow, still, with the aftermath of the affair. He stood still in the middle of the room, under Mori's scrutiny and Ace's thinly-veiled rancor, because it was better than to move, heavy-footed and sluggish.

His ears ached from the sound of the gunshot. On his hands, Chuuya's blood was no longer slick. It was no longer warm.

"I wouldn't tell you I'd be back for revenge for one," Dazai said, staring absently somewhere below Mori's chin. "Though, it wouldn't be hard to guess his intentions either way."

"Foolish," Ace said haughtily. "He was never very bright, was he."

Dazai was surprised by how irritated the words made him feel. "He won't go after you yet, Boss," he continued, pushing down the flash of bright anger. Mori had made no comment of Ace's insult. He stared at Dazai silently, waiting for him to conclude. "Chuuya doesn't like strategizing on the long term, but he knows you're too well-guarded now. He'll be patient. Wait for his chance to strike. There are other people he can take care of in the meantime, people who aren't so heavily protected."

"Even years from now?" Mori asked, mouth turned to a pout.

Oda wasn't breathing anymore. Dazai thought of Ango, whose name Chuuya had said in those last moments with soul-deep hatred; he thought of Chuuya in Corruption, standing deathly still in the ruins of the hilltop house, waiting for his power to consume him; he thought of the corpse he had found hours ago in the dim-lit mansion he had so often visited.

Its face had looked peaceful. It wasn't hard to guess who had taken the time to wipe away the blood, to change the clothes it wore, to lay it atop a bed as one lay a sick child. One of its hands had been out of the sheet. It had still possessed living warmth when Dazai had touched it, from being held by another.

He laughed.

Ace looked at him with outrage, Hirotsu with bored silence; Dazai rode out the nerves, rode out the emptiness, and he said, "You don't understand. Chuuya doesn't care about anything else, now." He smiled at his boss. "You took away the only thing he cherished," he said. "You cut down the one person tethering him to this organization. And now he wants equal payment. He wants what you care about the most—he wants your life, and he won't die until he has it. He won't rest until he has it. It doesn't matter if it takes him two months or two decades."

That was the sort of drive Chuuya possessed. The sort of loyalty that grief could inspire, the sort of love only one person had ever brought out of his heart.

"It seems we are in a bit of a predicament, then," Mori said.

"Dazai should be kept away from the investigation—"

"You need me to catch him," Dazai cut in. Ace glared at him, almost bare-toothed, a sharp contrast to the obsequious elegance he boasted. Dazai smiled at him thinly. "Unless you want to test your ability against his," he added. "Tell me—how much do you think Chuuya's life is worth in money, and how little do you think gravity manipulation cares?"

Ace looked about ready to try and strangle him. Dazai winked and looked away.

"We can kill him without you, Dazai-sama," Hirotsu said lowly.

Dazai didn't smile at him. He had never needed such niceties for the few members he respected. "I'm not sure about that," he replied. "Turns out, he can stop bullets."

"Even he has to sleep sometimes. And he's weakened right now. We just need to locate him and catch him unawares."

The rest of the conversation unfolded much the same. Dazai stood outside of it, vaguely trying to massage the ache out of his finger, blinking through the same images that he had for hours—Corruption, the destroyed house, Kouyou laid out on a bed, loved and grieved over.

Mori dismissed everyone but Dazai from the room, at one point. It didn't surprise Dazai, and it didn't surprise anyone else either. They trickled out of the office with heavy steps and resentful eyes, Oda without a word and Akutagawa without a care, Ace glaring, Hirotsu silent.

Dazai missed the sound of Oda's breathing the moment the door closed on it.

"I thought that this whole affair would go under much more smoothly," Mori complained, leaning back into his chair. "To think Chuuya-kun would betray us… I can't say that I predicted this. No, I really never thought such a thing could happen."

"Me neither," Dazai murmured distractedly.

He was looking at the black permit still resting over the mahogany desk, eyeing the gold letters printed on it, the gloss of its expensive paper. Mori said nothing when he approached and took it, not even when he opened it and smeared a brownish stain on the letter inside. Maybe the blood wasn't as dry yet as Dazai had thought.

"I wonder," he said out loud, "whether you thought Mimic would attack me instead."

Mori didn't answer.

Dazai's lips stretched joylessly. "Thought so," he muttered. "It's a shame Chuuya didn't like me nearly as much as he liked Kouyou."

"I don't believe for one second that Gide would've been able to kill you," Mori replied, nonchalant. "Not unless you wanted him to, and you've always so disliked the idea of death by bullet wound, haven't you."

"Odasaku's ability works on me, you know. Gide could've done it."

Mori gave him a very amused glance.

"I guess your loss is double this time," Dazai said, sighing. "If you'd cared more about me, Chuuya would have taken my life as a way to get back to you."

"He thinks of you as a partner."

Dazai huffed softly. "Not anymore," he replied.

Not even Chuuya would hang on to partnership after being shot in the face.

Dazai let the permit fall back onto the desk. The blood stain on it would be unwashable unless Mori risked blurring the text inside, and there was some satisfaction in that. There was some catharsis to be found in knowing that this prize was stained with blood, literally and metaphorically.

"Was it worth it?" he asked. It was the only thing he could think of saying. "You've lost a very influential executive, and now the port mafia's most destructive ability user is out to kill you. All for a piece of paper."

Mori was a hard person to read even to Dazai. But Dazai had an advantage, for a given value of the word, in that he had grown with Mori. He had an advantage in that learning to read what the man thought had always meant survival. He met the eyes of his mentor above the shining surface of the wooden desk, pressing his aching finger onto it, smearing viscous blood over its varnish; he searched the bleak depth of that familiar stare for even a hint of regret.

And in the smothered space of his own chest, where his heart beat only in name, Dazai thought that regret must feel how he felt. He thought regret must be the stickiness of drying blood on his hands; he thought regret must be cold metal against his finger, the click of a trigger and the sound of a gunshot, as a bond he had never had a name for snapped.

"Dazai-kun," Mori called a minute later, as Dazai was on his way out of the room.

Dazai looked back, blinking fast under the strain of the bandage keeping his right eye shut. He'd have to take it off soon. "What?" he asked.

"You think he can do it, don't you. You think Chuuya-kun will have my head one day."

"I think there's nothing to be done if he gets close enough to you to activate Corruption," Dazai replied. "He doesn't care anymore whether I'm here to stop it."

Chuuya hadn't cared at all that he would have died killing Mimic's members if Dazai hadn't caught him in time. He hadn't even known that Dazai would be there.

"Unless you're by my side," Mori pointed out calmly.

Dazai bent at the hip, smiling at him.

"I hope this will help you reconsider my usefulness, Boss," he said. Straightening out of the bow, he added, "I would so hate for you to die just because I wasn't there to help."

Dazai found Oda and Akutagawa on his doorstep. Oda was sitting on the floor, already looking at the doors of the elevator before they opened; Akutagawa was standing some distance away from him, despite the shaking in what Dazai guessed to be an injured thigh, and he was glaring at him. His face was still bruised from Dazai's punch.

The good thing with Akutagawa being in his vicinity was that Dazai always had the energy to be irritated with him, no matter the numbness.

"What are you doing here?" he asked curtly.

Akutagawa jumped, not having heard him approach. He seemed to hesitate before speaking, not knowing which of them Dazai was addressing—it only made Dazai want to curl his lips back with disgust. He would never talk to Oda that way, as Oda well knew.

"Send me after him," Akutagawa said. His voice, as always, sounded like a dying man's.

Dazai walked past him and slid his key into the lock of his door. He shoved his hand through the frame once it was ajar, disarming the trap there with deft fingers. "After who?" he asked, though the answer was obvious.

"Nakahara Chuuya."

"I thought you liked Chuuya."

It hadn't been an accusation, only an observation. Akutagawa did like Chuuya, admired him even, and it had nothing to do with what Dazai was aware of—Chuuya going behind his back occasionally and trying to lift the boy's spirits, with plethora of insults for Dazai's person as a perk. Anyone else would have welcomed the support eagerly, but not Akutagawa. No, Akutagawa admired Chuuya because Akutagawa only ever admired brute strength.

Of all the reasons to look up to his former partner, it was by far the least interesting; and Akutagawa, of course, took Dazai's words for insult.

"He's a traitor," he said slowly. He spoke with a very light lisp, because of the teeth he had spat out the day before.

Oda was getting to his feet now, looking between the two of them warily. He walked into the apartment behind Dazai. Akutagawa hovered in the entrance, doubting his right to do so as well. In the end, he followed with gauche steps, though he didn't go further in than the hallway. His eyes kept flickering to the walls around him and then to Dazai himself, quick and careful.

"I do not sympathize with traitors," he added for good measure.

Dazai hummed. He dropped his keys into the silver box sat atop his liquor cabinet. He shrugged off his coat, hung it on the back of a chair, and he said, "Sure. Go look for him."

There was a moment of silence.

"What?" Dazai questioned pleasantly. "You thought I wouldn't allow it?"

Akutagawa opened his mouth, stricken, and for a second Dazai half-hoped that he would dare oppose him. But—"No," he said. "Of course. I'll go at once."

"Dazai," Oda said quietly.

Dazai ignored him. "Chuuya might hesitate to strike you down, since he likes you too," he told Akutagawa. The boy had taken half a step back, thinking he was allowed to leave; he stilled at the sound of Dazai's voice. "Or he might not. He wasn't exactly in his right mind when I saw him last. Do you know how Chuuya gets when he's truly angry, Akutagawa?"

"Yes," Akutagawa replied hesitantly.

"The right answer was no."

Rashoumon shuddered around him, the sharp edges of the beast flickering to life on the curve of cloth on his shoulders. "I can take him," he whispered.

"Then go, by all means," Dazai replied. He extended an arm toward the door, almost touching Akutagawa himself on the way. "If your death can serve to tell us where he is, you'll finally be of some use to me."

Akutagawa didn't look like he had a single word left in him anymore. The look on his face was one Dazai knew well, one he would have revelled in at another time, under different circumstances; he looked almost waifish still under the heavy coat bestowed upon him, skinny and pale and utterly clueless. In the faint glow of the window, lit only by the night streets, the sight of him was ghostly.

"Then again," Dazai went on coldly, "you'll definitely get some experience in using that worthless ability of yours for defense. If you last longer than five minutes, maybe the lesson will even have time to stick."

"Dazai-san—"

"Maybe I should phrase it differently," Dazai mused, glancing toward Oda as if looking for input. Oda only stared back darkly. "How would you feel if I were to shoot Gin-chan in the head, Akutagawa?"

Akutagawa's whole body shuddered.

"I bet you wouldn't be very happy with me. I think you might even find it in yourself to attack me." Dazai stepped toward Akutagawa's still form, meeting his eyes again, finding them wide with fear. "Maybe Chuuya didn't value you enough to tell you that," he murmured, "but Kouyou raised him. She took him out of the streets, like I did with you, but she wasn't unkind to him, oh no. She loved him like a brother. And he loved her like a sister."

Dazai smiled. Akutagawa flinched. His shoulder was tense as a bow, the line of it like stone under Dazai's palm, once he raised a hand to touch it.

"I think you should stop thinking that you're anywhere near strong enough to take down Chuuya on your own," he said. "Or anyone, really. And I think you should go spend some time with your sister—she's going to be under investigation too, after all."

"Please," Akutagawa breathed. Dazai squeezed his shoulder, and his mouth snapped shut once more.

"I could put in a nice word for her, tell Boss that I know for sure Chuuya acted on impulse and didn't consort with anyone, including his favorite student." Dazai felt the weight of Akutagawa's plea almost physically, in the width of his pale eyes, in the choked workings of his throat. His neck was trembling visibly. "Or I could tell him to get rid of her," he said softly. "Just in case. We wouldn't want to risk another traitor in our ranks."

"Gin would never—"

"Shut up."

Akutagawa actually fought with himself for the barest second, the protest almost bursting out of him, pushed forth by his despair. Dazai waited patiently for it.

It didn't come.

Fatigue won over disgust and curiosity alike, in the end. Dazai gave a light shove to Akutagawa's shoulder and said, "You've never provided me with proof that I should trust you with this sort of responsibility. In fact, your stupidity in this whole affair considerably slowed down my investigation. You might yet claim responsibility for Kouyou's death." His lips curved cruelly. "Maybe Chuuya will figure that out in time, too," he continued. "He's probably finalizing his list of targets right now—I wonder if he'll add your name to it?"

"I," said Akutagawa.

"You must be proud of yourself. You and I, finally put down as equals."

"Dazai."

Dazai stilled. He didn't immediately understand that the weight on his back wasn't the heavy nothing he had felt since leaving the ruins of Corruption—it was Oda's hand, and that had been Oda's voice, sharp with disapproval. Once the realization crept in, he found himself wordless.

"You should go," Oda told Akutagawa. His tone was firm, lacking the usual drag of laziness and alcohol, but Akutagawa barely seemed to hear it. He was staring at Dazai, transfixed.

Dazai shrugged off Oda's hand. "Get out of my sight," he let out tiredly.

It wasn't until he turned around and walked into the living-room that Akutagawa obeyed. Dazai crouched by his liquor cabinet, pulled out the first bottle his unseeing eyes found, and didn't move from there until he heard the door slam closed.

Then, he exhaled.

"I'm guessing you're here about Ango," he made himself say, standing up once more.

"Not only," Oda replied.

Dazai turned around to face him. He blinked, after Oda turned on the light—he hadn't realized how dark his apartment had been until then. Oda took the offered bottle wordlessly. He walked to the kitchen and set it down there without opening it.

"You said Nakahara might put Ango on his hit list," he said.

"Not might. Will."

Ango had been one of three certain names. Dazai couldn't be sure about the rest.

"Ango's smarter than all of us combined," Dazai said. "I'm sure he already knows about Chuuya's defection, and since we're not allowed to harm him thanks to our Boss's deal with the special ability department, he only has that to worry about. Piece of cake, after playing three gifted organizations for fools. He'll be well-hidden until Chuuya makes it out of city."

Oda took the information in stride. If he was worried, he didn't show it, which was the smart thing to do.

Ango was a traitor as well.

"And you?" he asked lowly. "Are you gonna be okay?"

Dazai leaned against the back of his couch. "I said that to mess with Akutagawa," he answered. "I can't imagine Chuuya's very happy with me right now, but I'm not responsible for Kouyou's death."

"I wasn't talking about that."

Oda looked as unperturbed as ever. Dazai had never heard him utter judgment in either words or tone, and he wasn't judging now. If Dazai decided to do something as foolish as obey the weakness in his body and collapse, Oda would not think him the lesser for it.

"Are you okay?" Oda asked again.

"Why wouldn't I be?" Dazai replied.

Oda blinked slowly; he put a hand in the pocket of his rumpled jeans. "You were close to Ozaki, weren't you."

The picture burned itself into his mind again, of Kouyou's peaceful corpse tended to with a care Dazai himself would have never had the strength to muster up. He couldn't understand how Chuuya had even looked at her for so long, let alone cleaned her up and held her hand and grieved by her deathbed.

Dazai's throat closed up. "I'm fine," he let out, forcefully calm.

He took his right index finger in his left hand and tried to squeeze the tension out of it once more.

"You grew up with—"

"I don't really care about Chuuya leaving, Odasaku," Dazai cut in. "If I'm lucky I'll never have to see his ugly mug in person again."

Oda hesitated. "All right," he conceded, unconvinced. "We can just drink if you want."

And suddenly Dazai couldn't do it at all. He couldn't keep up the pretense, not even long enough to get drunk. Not with Oda looking at him with such compassion on his face. Space itself felt like too much; the sound of Oda's voice, the feeling of crusted blood on his hands, the ringing in his ears that hadn't stopped since he had fired the shot, everything collapsed together into a mass of overwhelming stimuli, of white noise and prickling goosebumps. He wanted to scream it away. He wanted to lock himself into a cramped room and fold his own body down to nothing. In two, in four, in eight, until he was reduced to dust.

"I'm sorry," he said, turning away. His own ribs felt like a cage, trapping the air inside of his own chest. He was having trouble breathing, he realized. "I think I'll just head to bed for now. You know," he waved a hand awkwardly, "gotta get a search team together in the morning. Else Ace will try to come up with another clever plan to get me out of the executive position."

"I don't much like this guy," Oda declared thoughtfully.

"I don't think anyone does."

Dazai stared at the unlit screen of his TV rather than look in the direction Oda was moving. A small red light kept blinking at the bottom of it. It was somewhat soothing.

"There's something I want to say," came Oda's voice. "If you'll hear me out."

Dazai closed his eyes. "Sure," he replied tightly.

Oda must be standing in the hallway already, maybe with one hand on the door, maybe with both in his pockets, his slouch hiding the swell of cloth over the twin guns he carried.

"I wasn't sure about it before today," Oda said. "And now is probably not the right time to say it, but I don't know if I'm going to get a better chance. I know we don't really… well. We meet for drinks, and I like that, but more than that, I consider you a friend. You and Ango."

Time slowed like a sticky substance; it stretched and pulled without ever snapping, tugging Dazai's skin along with it, expanding through his body like steam.

"So whatever happens next," Oda continued. "Whatever you decide to do, I'll be on your side of it."

"You don't know what you're saying," Dazai replied.

"I know exactly what I'm saying."

Dazai breathed in. He looked over his shoulder.

Oda wasn't slouching at all.

"Your side, Dazai," he said, meeting his eyes evenly. "Not Mori's. Not the port mafia's. You're the only person here that I want to follow."

Katai often came out of sleep with progressive consciousness. His dreams were a tangled mess of screen-bright images, mostly soundless, mostly impossible to describe. He crawled to awareness the way he crawled out of it; surrounded by the dark, windows closed and curtains drawn, so that no natural light filtered through the single room where he lived.

So he didn't notice anything different at first. His limbs were always heavy to him, weak from lack of use, his tongue dry and his heart slow. He awoke in his bed with the faint scent of burned plastic clogging his nose, with fresher air than he was used to running over the bare skin of his arms, and that was when wrongness settled in.

Someone was in his house.

He tried to move his head as slowly as possible and couldn't. He tried to lift an arm and couldn't. He felt suddenly impossibly heavy, pushed down by inexorable force, pressed face-first into his futon by no hand that he could feel.

Something sharp touched the exposed line of his nape, and a voice he couldn't recognize said, "Don't move."

"Please," he whimpered.

He didn't know what he wanted to say—please don't kill me, please let this be a dream—but it didn't matter. He had to plea.

There came a hiss. The blade resting on the side of his neck was shaking.

"Please, oh God, don't—"

"Shut the fuck up," the voice said—it hissed once more with the words.

Katai had no room in him for shame when tears started dripping down his face. It was still mostly pushed into his pillow, unable to move, and so they crashed there and wetted the fabric until his entire nose felt damp.

"Calm down," the voice said. "I'm not going to hurt you as long as you do as I say."

Katai choked on a whimper.

Some of the weight on him shifted. He hadn't realized that someone was straddling him, and he found that the sudden absence did nothing to alleviate whatever kept him trapped where he was.

An ability, he thought, and terror knotted up his throat tightly.

"You're Tayama Katai," the voice said. There was something pained about it, about the regular intakes of sharp air and the uneven grip on the knife. It did nothing to reassure Katai at all. "You're an information broker. Your ability allows you to have complete control of any electronics you set your eyes on, as long as you're not touching them."

The person shifted again, level with Katai's left shoulder. Something made them stumble forward, and the hand that the stranger put on the wooden floor to catch themself broke through Katai's eyesight. It was marred with bruises, covered with slick blood.

"Answer me," the voice panted.

"Yes," Katai rasped. "Yes, yes, everything you said is true, I'm Katai."

"Good."

The knife left the side of his neck. Katai thought he would soon wet himself with more than tears.

"I screened your place for any electronics I could find," the stranger continued. "Destroyed most of it. Sorry about that. I kept your phone, but I took out the battery, so you won't be able to call for help."

"You can have all my money," Katai sobbed.

"I don't want your money. No—shit, stop crying, you're a grown man," the person said, as more hiccups wrecked Katai's trapped body. "Fuck, listen, I'm not going to kill you. I swear I won't even put a scratch on you. I just need a favor."

"I'll do anything, anything—"

The weight lifted.

Katai didn't move at all at first. He heaved into his damp pillow, breathing through his mouth, tasting salt on his lips. His toes wiggled when he made them. His arm bent at the elbow, once he brought his hand closer to his head.

Once he had checked each of his fingers and found them whole, he pushed himself to his knees shakily and turned around.

The darkness was thicker in the absence of his many laptops and tablets, at least one of which was always lit as if to make up for daylight; but his windows was ajar, the blinds pulled up by force and the latch awkwardly bent, and the nighttime breeze wasn't the only thing filtering through its opening.

Streetlight made out the silhouette of a boy, crouched by the bed, wavering slightly. It shone off of his matted hair. It belied the unfocused quality of his eyes. The boy had a hand on the floor and another pressed against the side of his face—blood was running between his fingers and down the length of his bruised wrist.

"What," Katai let out. "Who, who are you?"

The boy didn't answer. "I need a place to stay for a couple days," he said. Each word pulled a grimace out of him, made him press his hands closer to the bleeding on his cheek. "And I need you to use your ability for me."

He was shaking from head to toe, Katai realized; he was pale, very much so, with blood loss or something else, and his grip on the long knife he held was loose-fingered.

"Okay," Katai said.

The boy held the knife more firmly. "I'll be watching," he threatened. "So don't even think of doing anything funny. If you tell anyone about my presence here, I will kill you."

He let go of the floor and pulled something from behind himself. A laptop, and soon after the battery to go with it.

There were about a dozen ways for Katai to call for help unnoticed with a laptop at his disposal, but he wisely said nothing of it. "What do you want me to do?" he asked, with what he hoped was no relief at all.

"Turn it on," the boy replied, pushing laptop and battery toward him.

Katai grabbed it with the tips of his fingers.

It didn't take long for him to turn the laptop on. It was a sleek thing, expensive and new, protected by better security than even he used for himself. Katai kept it half a meter away from himself as he slowly worked his way through password upon password, and he thought he might open an email right there and then and send it to Kunikida or the police or both, unseen by all but the sharp static of his ability. This trail of thoughts halted once he finally saw the name of the machine's owner.

"This belongs to Taneda of the special ability department," he said, stunned.

"Yeah," was the boy's reply.

Katai didn't even think of looking at him; his eyes flew over the screen, opening secured file after secured file, and his wariness grew with each. By the time he closed every window and came back to the innocuous desktop background, he felt nauseous with nerves.

"This isn't just Taneda's personal laptop," he said.

The boy sat on his behind. "No," he replied. "It's the masterkey of the whole department's archives. You can access everything with it."

"How did you get your hands on it?"

"Don't ask questions you don't want the answers to."

Katai looked at him again. He took in the cold distance in his eyes, the blood splattered all over him, the trembling hand he kept pressed against his wounded face.

Instead of insisting, instead of emailing Kunikida, Katai asked: "What do you want me to do?"

The boy's knife lowered. He looked exhausted. In the distant light of the neighboring building, his eyes were very bright.

"I want you to erase everything you can find about Nakahara Chuuya," he replied. "Can you do that?"

Katai could. Easily. "How erased are we speaking?" he said. "Should I make it look like the file is simply empty or—"

"Erase everything. Every single mention of the name and everything associated with it, even if you have to take down half of the damn archive to do it. I don't want them to be able to look up the name and find any result."

"They'll know instantly," Katai replied. "There must be at least a dozen people monitoring the data."

"Then you better hurry up before they realize their chief didn't only lose his head."

Katai wanted to protest, but something about the boy's eyes then told him that it would be a bad idea. Or perhaps the menacing glint of the knife, shining oil-like in the soft light.

"How do you write it?" he asked, eyes shifting back to the screen.

Pulling up the file, once the boy spelled it out for him, was only a matter of seconds. Katai wasn't surprised at all to find that Nakahara Chuuya was the name of his intruder himself; he took a moment to look over the whole gallery of pictures kept by the department, most of which were taken outside of Nakahra's knowledge, judging by the face he pulled. Katai found row upon row of feral smiles and dangerous looks. He found videos. He found Nakahara scowling and Nakahara smiling, and he found him, in one, blurry enough to be unrecognizable, surrounded by black spheres of sizzling energy.

He deleted them all. Nakahara said nothing.

Katai saw the words port mafia repeated enough times that he thought he would never get them out of his mind. He saw a body count, which he chose to forget. He worked his way through the data until everything bearing Nakahara's name was either empty or viciously edited. About half of the information related to someone named Dazai Osamu found itself lost that way.

"Thank you," Nakahara said, once Katai ran a search of his name to prove that he could no longer be found in the archive.

It had taken only ten minutes, and the moment it was done, Nakahara clenched his fist. The sleek laptop glowed red. It flattened itself against the ground until it was thin as paper, the scent of burned plastic bristling through the air once again, every coil and screw become useless sheets of metal.

It was completely broken. Katai hadn't even thought of sending that email.

Some tension seemed to drop out of Nakahara, then. The line of his shoulders eased, the hand he kept over his face lowered, unveiling a deep, thick gash, running horizontally through his cheekbone and still seeping droplets of gleaming blood. This entire left side of his face looked swollen.

"I'll pay for the stuff I destroyed," he said, startling Katai out of his numb stupor. "And for food. I'll be out of your way in a couple days."

"Are you—"

"I'm going to do something really fucking stupid now," Nakahara interrupted. His voice was growing rougher by the second. "So I'm sorry for that too. You can go back to sleep if you want."

And then he burst into tears.

Katai's mouth hung open, wordless and probably ridiculous, but Nakahara didn't seem to mind. He wasn't even looking. He shook and cried and sobbed with all of his body and, it seemed, all of his heart; he dragged his knees up against his chest, pushed his bleeding face into the space that opened there, and did everything short of scream out the grief wrecking him.

It was somehow more terrifying than anything Nakahara had done until then. It made Katai feel like the intruder instead of the other way around, and he could do nothing but watch each hiccup shake in Nakahara's shoulders. He could do nothing but feel each drawn-out moan reverberate through his chest. There was something heartbreaking about the way Nakahara held himself, making himself smaller, choking every sound he made into the cage of his arms. There was something painfully, infinitely child-like about the way his voice cracked not even after a minute, out of gritty depth and back to higher wails.

Katai didn't go to sleep.

He stood to his feet shakily, waiting for Nakahara to notice and threaten him again, but the boy didn't. He showed no sign of having heard or seen him. So Katai walked to the tiny kitchenette on the other side of the room and put some water to boil. He stood by the kettle until it hissed at him, and not even that sound was enough to cover the expiation going on three meters away.

The tea was long seeped by the time Nakahara quieted. His violent sobs turned to whimpers; his gushing tears to quiet weeping. He stilled as he was, face cradled into the crook of his folded arms, looking at the space between his chest and knees, silent and immobile.

Katai set a mug full of hot tea next to him on the floor. He sat with another on the unmade futon he lived in, resting it in against his thigh until it cooled enough to be drinkable.

"Well," Nakahara said, voice scratchy with the aftermath of his breakdown. "That's out of the way at least."

Katai debated with himself for a moment before asking, "Are you okay?"

Nakahara's head lifted just enough that he could meet his eyes above the barrier that his arms made. The deep gash in his cheek looked even more inflamed now, and Katai winced, thinking about how painful tears must have felt.

"I, ah, I made you tea," he said awkwardly. With his free hand, he gestured to the mug sitting by Nakahara's left leg.

Nakahara looked at it silently.

"Do you make tea for everyone who breaks into your home and destroys all your shit?" he asked weakly.

"Only when they start crying in front of me," Katai muttered. He took a sip of scalding tea, hoping the burn would help him feel less out of his depth.

He barely noticed that all of his fear was gone.

Nakahara spent another moment as he was, hunched over with misery; then he dropped a hand to the floor and grabbed the mug by its handle. It shook badly in his grip, the way the knife had before. It was even easier now to see the bruises marbling his skin from fingertips to elbow.

"I lost someone," he said faintly.

Katai chewed the inside of his cheek lightly. "I'm—sorry for your loss," he replied.

The glance Nakahara gave him then would've been amused, he thought, if not for how tired he looked. "Anyone ever told you that you're a fucking idiot?"

"It's been brought up occasionally."

Nakahara looked at his tea with red-rimmed eyes. It seemed his wound had stopped bleeding at last, but it remained crimson and raw-looking. It looked very out of place on him, cutting through the handsome features he must have boasted all his life.

"She used to make me tea too," Nakahara murmured. "Just… every time she was upset, or she thought I was upset, or we'd argue about something. She'd just shove her damn tea into my face like some miracle fucking cure. I started drinking wine instead to piss her off."

"Many people find tea calming," Katai replied mildly.

Nakahara drank from the mug; he shoved his trembling fingers through his unwashed hair; he hunched over again, eyes wet, mouth tight. "The funny thing is," he said harshly, "I'd give anything to hear her yell at me again. Anything."

There was nothing Katai, or anyone, could say to that.

Sleeping with an assassin of the port mafia in his home did not turn out to be as horrific an experience as Katai would have expected. He offered his first aid kit, once Chuuya—as he requested to be called—asked for it. He sat by him when his wavering hands failed him, holding disinfectant to the awful wound in his face, cringing when it touched skin, even though Chuuya himself only winced.

"I don't think you can get that stitched up," Katai said hesitantly.

It was a deep cut, wide of a centimeter and stretching for at least five in length, a whole strip of face gone and leaving slick muscle exposed. The skin around it looked burned as well.

"That's fine," Chuuya replied. "Just get me one of those gauze things. The greasy ones."

He couldn't put it on himself, because his shaking was too severe, so Katai ended up doing that for him too. For all that Chuuya had berated him his kindness, he didn't seem very worried that Katai would use the occasion to hurt him. He sat as still as possible through the process, and by the time Katai was done, he was only sporting a square piece of bandage over his left cheekbone.

"That's going to take forever to heal and scar horribly, isn't it," Chuuya said to no one, eyeing his reflection in the broken window. The blind had been shut back down behind it, hiding Katai's entire place from view once more.

"Who did that to you?" Katai asked.

He wasn't talking only about his face; Chuuya had taken off his jacket and shoes sometime during the night, laying the skin of his arms and feet bare, and they were stained with blue and black. The bruises crawled all the way up his throat.

"Myself, mostly," Chuuya replied. He had been strangely forthcoming ever since the tea, maybe because he didn't care, maybe because his light fever was clouding his judgment. "The face was a parting gift from a friend, though."

Katai wanted to ask more, but Chuuya silenced him with a look, before asking to use his shower.

He left him to it while rummaging through his closet for clothes that would fit an eighteen year-old half his size. He found old high school garments at the very bottom: a rumpled uniform shirt whose logo he cut off with kitchen scissors and a pair of jeans way too tight on him now. It would still be too long for Chuuya, but at least Katai had once been skinny enough that the waistband should fit.

Chuuya came out of the bathroom washed of all grime and blood. He had tied up his wet hair with something, took the offered clothes with a murmur of thanks, slipped them on right in the room with no care at all that someone else was present.

He slept, after that. Curled up in a corner where a computer had stood only hours ago and dropped out of consciousness almost instantly. Katai watched him for almost an hour before feeling tired enough to do the same. He took the time to drop a spare blanket on Chuuya's shoulders, waking him instantly, before passing out himself. Chuuya only said, "I'm a light sleeper, so don't try to pull any shit."

Katai didn't wake up paralyzed this time.

Actually, he woke up before Chuuya, and so he gathered his strength and headed toward his kitchen, wincing at the sight of the dirty dishes he had let accumulate there for weeks now. He washed enough of them by hand to make for a good breakfast. His fridge still had some eggs, thankfully, as well as an sealed bottle of orange juice.

He didn't open the blinds, though the day felt like one when he might appreciate a touch of sunlight—there was Chuuya to contend with, after all, and he was obviously running from something. Or someone.

The entire port mafia on the hunt, Katai thought in quiet panic, and I'm the one hiding what they're looking for.

Maybe he should call Kunikida after all.

Chuuya stirred from the corner of the room only a few minutes later, looking groggy and pained but not shaking nearly as much as the previous day. The bruises over his hands had turned more green than black already.

"You're too fucking nice," he mumbled, sitting down at the table and accepting his half of the sweet omelette Katai had made.

He ate it slowly, sparingly, his chopsticks clicking against the plate in time with his tremors. The only outward sign of irritation he showed at that was a frown, which made Katai wonder if he suffered them often. Physical health issues of the sort didn't seem very compatible with the number of kills or rumored kills associated with him.

Then again, neither did his age or stature. And he had implied, very strongly, that he had murdered the special ability department chief himself while injured.

Katai wondered what it said about him that he couldn't find it in himself to be more afraid of him for it.

"Say, kid," he said, idly playing with the last piece of his food.

"What?"

"How did you even know about me?"

Chuuya took the time to finish chewing before answering. "Someone I used to work with told me about you ages ago," he said.

"Who?"

Another pause. "Sakaguchi Ango."

"Oh," Katai said, smiling. "Haven't heard from him in a while. I was wondering where he'd gone."

His words halted under the look Chuuya was giving him. "What do you mean?" Chuuya asked.

"Well, Ango's always been my contact with the special ability department," he replied. "Up till a year ago when everyone said he'd quit. But then no one could tell me where he'd gone, so I guess, if he was working with you…"

It was hard to imagine someone like Ango in the port mafia, but Ango was the type of smart who could adapt to any work environment. Katai doubted that whatever Ango had done there had much to do with gunfights.

Chuuya wasn't playing with his food anymore. Katai eyed him warily. "Is there something wrong?" he asked.

"No," Chuuya replied. "Tell me about him. Sakaguchi."

"Why?"

"Just curious. We never talked much."

"I don't know what to tell you," Kazai replied, puzzled. "He's the one who got me this job, pretty much. Found out about my ability and gave me a use for it. He was always nice to me—he used to pay for maids to come clean up my place once in a while, just because, he said. Weird guy."

"Yeah," Chuuya echoed, staring at his empty plate. "Weird guy."

Chuuya looked away before Katai could ask anything; his eyes found the edge of the sink, and he rose from his chair, grabbing the wide scissors resting there.

"You wouldn't happen to have any hair dye with you, right?" he asked.

"No," Katai replied, surprised by the change in topic. Then, licking his lips surreptitiously: "I could go buy some if you want."

It wasn't an easy offer, even to escape the attention of the criminal holding him hostage; Katai hadn't left his apartment in months and always ordered his groceries online. He never so much as took the trash out of the building either—there was a chute right outside his front door. The last time he had tried, a panic attack had stuck him to the bottom of the staircase.

But Chuuya had no way of knowing that.

He seemed to consider the thought, weighing his options without ever looking away from Katai. Katai felt sweat gather at his temples. He felt it slick his back and stick his shirt to his skin.

"All right," he said. "Where's the nearest convenience store?"

"Right outside the building."

"You have ten minutes."

Katai held his breath. Chuuya raised an eyebrow.

He found himself at the entrance of his building with his panic kept tightly in check. He still lost almost a minute standing there, staring at the stretch of street separating him from the store; in the end it was thoughtless obligation that made him push the doors open and walk out.

The cold was very harsh on his skin in spite of the many layers he wore. He wondered, waiting for his turn to cross the road, if Chuuya had suffered from it while coming to find him, what with the injuries he sported.

Katai couldn't see anything or anyone suspicious around. He entered the store to a gush of too-warm air, skin rippling with instant shivers, and made his way toward the cosmetics section.

He picked the first bottle of black hair dye he found regardless of the price. He took more gauze and wound-cleaning things, as well. He hesitated, and grabbed a prepaid phone so quickly that his wrist ached with the movement.

Once he was out of the store, he called the only number he knew by heart.

"It's me," he said as soon as the line opened.

"Katai?" The sound of Kunikida's voice sent a shock of heat through Katai's chest, made his heart beat fast enough to ache. "Can you call me back later, I'm at work—"

"There's someone in my house," Katai blurted.

"What?"

"He let me out to buy a couple things and I won't have any other occasion to contact you so I thought I'd let you know just in case something happened." He sucked in a breath once he was done, and the icy air did nothing to appease the frantic pace of his heart.

"Hang on—are you being threatened?"

"No," Katai said. "Well, yes."

"I'm calling the police—"

"No!" His shout startled a passerby; Katai swallowed painfully. "No, he's, he hasn't hurt me. He won't hurt me. I think."

There was a second of silence. "What happened," Kunikida said. It sounded like an order.

"He broke in. Needed my help with something. He said he wouldn't do anything to me if I obeyed and he hasn't. Listen, Kunikida, I don't have much time—he's just a kid. Eighteen years old. He's injured too."

"What did he want you to do?"

That wasn't something Katai felt much like answering. Getting access to the special ability department's archives had been a blessing, and he had glimpsed quite a bit of useful information as he deleted everything pertaining to Chuuya himself—including the contents of his own file, which he had edited liberally. He didn't want to admit to his own participation in something this illegal, or to his enjoyment of it.

"He's a member of the port mafia," he said. "I think he's running away from them."

It took a moment for Kunikida to absorb that information.

"You're harboring a fugitive of the port mafia," he repeated faintly.

"Yeah. A pretty notorious member too, I think."

"So the police is out of the question, because they'll know immediately, and then you're going to be in danger when they come and fetch him." He sighed. "How do you get in these situations without ever leaving your place?"

"I don't know!" More people were looking at him now. Katai bit his lip, and it split open easily, because the cold had dried it so quickly. He walked across the road with the rest of the waiting walkers and sucked the blood into his mouth. "Listen, Kunikida—you said you were scouted for something. Some gifted police agency."

"Detective agency," Kunikida corrected instantly, unable to help himself despite his obvious worry. The thought made Katai smile. "Yeah, I met with their director a week ago."

"Are you going to take the job?"

"Probably, but why—"

"Could this detective agency protect someone running away from the mafia?"

Kunikida sucked in an audible breath. It cracked over the line in endless static, similar to the sounds that ran through Katai's ears whenever Futon was in use. "Katai," he said. "I can't show up on my first day on the job and ask if my new boss would be okay with protecting a criminal."

"Please," Katai forced out.

"There's something you're not telling me."

The words almost made him laugh.

"It's nothing."

"It's not nothing if it's making you ask for help on behalf of the guy holding you hostage."

"It's really nothing, it's just—he was crying." Katai pushed open the door of his building, groceries in hand, his numb fingers keeping the bulky phone pressed onto his ear. His fear of being outside couldn't push past the threshold of his current conversation. "He hasn't even been mean or rude. He just needed a place to stay for a day, and some help erasing his presence. And then once that was done he cried, and he let me help a bit with his injuries, and I just think he doesn't have anyone right now. He's running away from an entire criminal organization on his own, and he's a kid. He's—he's short, and he's bruised all over, and I know he's probably done horrible things, but he's just a kid, Kunikida. He's trying to get away."

Not that Kunikida wasn't a kid himself in many ways still, no matter that he had turned twenty and earned the right to his first drink, no matter that he was a legal adult with a job. But Katai had spent the night dreaming of the numbers he had seen, of the pictures of Chuuya much younger than he was now, surrounded by armed men or cleaning knives free of blood, looking all the way a child looked.

He wondered how young Chuuya was the first time he had been made to hurt someone. He wondered how one could ever recover from growing up that way.

"Just think about it," he finished, starting his climb up the stairs. "It's okay if you can't. I have to hang up now."

Kunikida sighed again. "I'll see what I can do," he muttered. "Be careful."

"I will."

The line cut with sinister beeping. Katai took a few seconds in the staircase, leaning against the old wooden railing and catching what was left of his breath, before stepping out into his floor's hallway. He threw the phone down the garbage chute. Opened the door of his apartment.

Chuuya grabbed him by the neck in the following second, slamming the door shut and then slamming him against it, his grip tight enough that almost no air came through.

The otherworldly weight of the previous night was back, sticking him to the floor, disabling him of movement; yet somehow that threat felt less consequent than the dark gaze leveled with his, than the vicious fury etched onto Chuuya's face that made him look a lot older.

"You called someone," he said lowly.

Kata pawed uselessly at the hand suffocating him, arms heavy, eyesight blurring at the edges. "A—friend," he managed, "he's not going to tell anyone—"

Chuuya's grip tightened. "Did you tell him my name?"

"No—"

He was released, then, of all but the foreign gravity. Katai slid toward the floor helplessly and didn't move again. If he hadn't had the door at his back, he would've laid down in full.

He had completely forgotten about the fact that the store he had gone to could be seen from his window. Chuuya must have peeked through the cracks of the blinds.

The wide knife Chuuya had threatened him with was in his hand again, and this time, his grip was a lot more secure when he pressed the blade to the side of Katai's face. "Why did you have to go and do something stupid like that?" he questioned tiredly. "I really hoped I wouldn't have to kill you."

"It's not what you think," Katai wheezed. His throat burned with the words, burned with the air.

"You think I'm about to trust you now?"

He shook his head helplessly.

Chuuya crouched in front of him, putting their faces level; he slid the knife under Katai's chin to make him lift it, to make their eyes meet. "Do you think this is a game, Katai?" he asked.

"No," Katai replied.

"You know who I am. You probably know that better than anyone alive right now." The blade dug further into his skin, not yet to the point of a cut but not very far from it. Katai dared not breathe at all. "I probably have the entire port mafia looking for me right now," Chuuya said. "And trust me, you don't want to know what they can make of the smallest clue I leave behind. Such as a passerby hearing you talk about me on the phone."

"I didn't say your name," Katai repeated breezily.

"These people know me through a lot more than my name."

Something warm dripped down the hollow of Katai's throat; with a jolt of pain, he realized that it was his own blood.

"Do you want to know why I left?" Chuuya asked softly.

Katai couldn't think of anything he wanted to know less. Chuuya looked nothing now like the broken child Katai had glimpsed, the young man curled in on himself and choking on every sob, on every tear, as he tried to pour all the grief out of himself in one go. His eyes were very dark under the unflattering light. His hair looked like spilled blood.

Chuuya didn't seem in the mood to share more than that, thankfully. "Tell me what you told your friend," he ordered. "And tell me everything you can about him."

Katai opened his mouth and said, "I called him to ask if there was a way for the gifted organization he's a part of to shelter you."

Chuuya stilled.

"What gifted organization?" he asked.

"It's very new," Katai explained shakily. "A detective agency, specializing in cases involving ability users. I, I heard their director only got the permit a few weeks ago. My friend's going to work there very soon, I might work with them too—he's an ability user, his name is Kunikida Doppo, and I promise you he's not going to tell anyone about you being here. He's a good man. Never broke a promise he made to anyone."

The knife drew back from his throat, and Katai raised a trembling hand to touch the stinging cut left behind. It was barely deep enough to bleed at all, not life-threatening in any way.

"You called someone to ask if there was a way to protect me," Chuuya said.

Katai kept his fingers on the cut. "Yeah," he replied.

"Why would you do that?"

He flushed, knowing without needing to ask that Chuuya would not appreciate the reasoning he had laid out for Kunikida earlier. "It just seemed like the right thing to do," he mumbled.

Neither of them moved for a while. Katai touched the cut until he stopped aching, until blood stop seeping out; Chuuya crouched in front of him and looked at the floor in silence.

"You're a fucking idiot," he said.

He didn't sound so angry anymore.

Katai startled when he rose up anyway, and even more so when Chuuya's ability loosened its hold on him. "I'm not staying in Yokohama," Chuuya declared. "I need to get out of here and lay low until they start having better things to do than look for me."

"Kunikida said the agency didn't only operate in Yokohama," Katai replied roughly. "They need help scouting members all over the country—"

"Thank you," Chuuya said abruptly. The sincerity in his voice made Katai's falter. "But I'll be fine on my own once I'm out of the city. And I'll be leaving today, so you can go back to your life and never think about this again."

Katai blinked at him tiredly. "I thought you needed a couple days," he replied.

"I just needed to hide until the shaking calmed down."

He lifted his hands, which indeed were no longer trembling. The bruises were still very stark on his skin.

"I'm borrowing your bathroom," Chuuya declared then. He took hold of the bag of groceries, satisfied with what he saw inside, and with his free hand, he grabbed the kitchen scissors. They left the side of Katai's counter with an uncomfortable shriek of metal. "Don't do any more stupid shit or I'll kill you."

Chuuya emerged from the bathroom an hour later.

He had cut his hair to about the same length Katai sported himself, dyed it black, and changed the dressing of his wound. With the ill-fitting shirt and jeans he wore now, he drew a very different picture than the boy with red hair who had waited for Katai to wake up with a knife at his neck.

Katai didn't say anything of the change, or of the way Chuuya's eyes seemed even more striking with black than red. Chuuya didn't look like he would care very much about his opinion.

There was nothing to do but watch from the comfort of his bed as Chuuya meticulously destroyed every hint of his passage. He shoved all of his bloodied clothes into a plastic bag, swept the whole place up, wiped clean of fingerprints everything he had touched. With no care in the world, he opened Katai's closet and rummaged through it until he found a pair of gloves his size. They were woolen, soft to the touch, Katai knew; they had been his favorites until he had outgrown them.

Then Chuuya dropped a ridiculous amount of cash on the coffee table. Katai choked at the sight of it.

"Sorry about the stains," he said, waving vaguely. "Just tell people you had a nosebleed or something. That usually works."

"This is way too much," Katai replied faintly.

"I threatened your fucking—you know what, never mind. Never fucking mind." Chuuya sighed. "Just take the damn money," he said tiredly. "I have enough left on me to last me a while, I don't need this much, and you're gonna need to pay for all the stuff I broke."

Chuuya put on the green coat he had been given, despite the fact that its sleeves fell way over his hands. He wrapped a thick scarf around his shoulders until most of his lower face was hidden in it. If not for his eyes, he would have been unrecognizable.

"Wait," Katai let out, right as Chuuya took hold of the doorknob.

He scrambled for paper and pen under Chuuya's curious eyes; with trembling fingers, he wrote down what he needed, and then handed the paper to Chuuya.

"Kunikida's number," he explained, as Chuuya looked over the digits.

"I don't need it," Chuuya said. He held it back toward Katai.

"No—please," Katai said. "Just keep it. Call him, whenever you come back to Yokohama."

"Katai—"

"Call him," Katai cut in. "Kunikida's a good guy. He's not going to tell anyone about you, and if you tell him about your situations—he'll help. He'll let you meet with the agency director."

"You think what I want now is to be part of another gifted organization?"

"You'll need to, eventually," Katai said. He swallowed before adding, "You know they can't let someone like you be on the run forever. Not with… with what I saw on those pictures."

Not with Corruption ranked at such a high danger level in the ministry's archives. Only three other files had been there alongside Chuuya's own, for the entire country.

"If you don't join a group eventually, they'll all be after you," he went on. "Not just the port mafia. This agency… I don't think it's a bad one to be a part of."

"I'm not really made for catching criminals," Chuuya replied quietly. "I'm more the kind to pat them on the back for a job well done."

He looked over the slip of paper for another moment before pocketing it.

He met Katai's eyes, then, watching over his face intently. Kazai withstood it with as much grace as he could.

"You're not a bad guy," Chuuya said.

Katai laughed nervously. "I'm a shut-in living in a dump, and you're a murderer," he replied.

"Yeah, well."

Chuuya took hold of the door once again. He pushed it open, letting the kinder light of the hallway fall onto him. It shone off of his hair with unnatural blue tints; it washed over the reddish stain that had already spread through the new bandage he wore.

"Thank you for the tea," he murmured. He bowed at the neck, surprisingly proper.

Kazai nodded back wordlessly.

He stood by the door for a very long time after it had fallen shut.

[NEXT]

#bsd #skkchristmas17 #soukoku #nakahara chuuya #dazai osamu #fic: nothing noble

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house-of-ocs · 5 years

Text

I’m not a Dancer Unless I’m Dancing With You

A/N: Okay so I honestly don’t know where this one-shot came from, but here you go. This is a high school AU with Attaka and Atsushi as the main pairing. Everyone is around the same age. Attaka, Kyouka, Kenji are sophomores, Atsushi, Danielle, Dazai, Oda, and Ango are juniors, Nina and Chuuya are seniors, and Akutagawa, Akkata, Gin, and Abi are all juniors. Enjoy!

“I don’t know about this Danielle,” Attaka whispered as she sat on the bed of her friend Danielle Osa. “Come on Attaka it’ll be fun, there’ll be dancing, good food, good-er friends, and who knows, Atsushi might be there.” Danielle listed. Attaka flushed at the mention of the beige-haired teen. Attaka has had a crush on Atsushi for years now, he was her best friend, the one she could come to if she had a problem, and vice versa. Attaka didn’t want to ruin her friendship with Atsushi so she kept her feelings to herself, but they were growing stronger everyday and she didn’t know how much longer she could keep them hidden. “That’s exactly why I don’t think I should go,” Attaka said her gaze focused on her shoes.

“What do you mean? That’s exactly why you should go.” Danielle urged. Turning around she crossed the room to her bed and sat down adjacent from Attaka. “Attaka, I can see how in love you are with him why won’t you give this a chance?” Danielle asked Attaka looked up shyly “I can’t ruin this friendship with him. Danielle, he’s the most important person in my life if I lose him because I can’t control my feelings I’ll never forgive myself.” Attaka said her head hung low. Danielle placed her hand on Attaka’s shoulder “Attaka, you have to at least give it a shot. You don’t know if he feels that way for you, and there’s a big chance that he might, you just have to take a leap of faith. If I had your thought process before I confessed to Dazai, Oda, and Ango I wouldn’t have three amazing lovers right now.” Danielle said. Attaka looked up at that, she had to admit Danielle had a point. When she confessed to Dazai, Oda, and Ango, if they didn’t like her back, or if they hadn’t wanted to be in a polygamous relationship, she ran the risk of losing all three of them and not just one, luckily she didn’t lose any one of them.

Attaka looked up at Danielle the older girl’s rose eyes shining giving Attaka the strength to utter her next words. “Okay, I’ll go to the dance,” She said Danielle shot up and squealed in excitement she grabbed Attaka’s hands and the two jumped up and down in excitement. “We have to find a dress! The dance is on Saturday night and that’s the day after tomorrow, and you need a dress, shoes, makeup, all the works. We have to go right now!” Danielle grabbed Attaka’s hands and started to drag her out of the room, but the voice of Danielle’s mother, Kari, stopped them in their tracks. “Girls, Attaka’s parents are here to pick her up!” Kari called. “Or, we can go tomorrow,” Danielle muttered Attaka smiled and hugged Danielle. “I’ll see you tomorrow Danielle,” She said. Danielle hugged back and stood out of the way as Attaka picked up her bag, and ran down the stairs, saying a quick goodbye to Kari on her way out. Attaka ran out to her parents’ car and got in, she waved to Danielle as they drove away.

The next day flew by fast for Attaka she floated through most of her classes most of her thoughts on Atsushi. Soon it was time to go home, and she met Danielle outside of the school for them to go shopping. That day Danielle had driven her Fiat 500 car to school so she could drive herself and Attaka to the nearest dress shop. “You ready to go?” Danielle asked, “Yeah, Oda, Dazai, and Ango don’t mind you going shopping with me today do they?” Attaka asked, hoping she didn’t pull Danielle away from her lovers. “Of course not, they still needed to get their tuxes ready so this was a good thing for them,” Danielle said, “Okay” Attaka muttered. Soon the two were at a dress shop that was a common hang out for most of the people she knew when there was a dance or formal event happening.

Danielle and Attaka split up to find the perfect dress for her, Danielle already had her dress picked out. They were searching for an hour before they each found a dress for Attaka to wear. “Ah, they’re both cute. Just try on both” Danielle said. She handed both dresses to Attaka, who scurried to the nearest dressing room. A few minutes later Attaka came out in the first dress it was pastel pink, the top was pink and glittery, and the bottom was made of a mesh of the same color, it stopped just above her knees. “That one looks cute on you, but try the other one on just to make sure,” Danielle said. Attaka followed her directions, and went back into the dressing room, she came out again a short time later in the second dress. The top was a glittery silver drawn into floral patterns, the skirt flared out, and it stopped just above her knees. “I think I like the first one better,” Attaka said Danielle nodded in agreement “Yeah, it matches your skin tone better, go put your clothes back on and we’ll buy this one. Shoes are next” Danielle said Attaka nodded and went back into the dressing room.

The two paid for the dress and moved on to the nearest shoe store. After searching for a few minutes they found a pair of shoes in Attaka’s size. They were a silver sandal, with a small heel, there were fake rhinestones on the fabric on the top part of the shoe. Attaka picked up the shoe, and tried it on “I like these shoes” She said “Okay, let’s look around some more to see if we can find any more before we settle on those” Danielle said. They looked around, but there weren’t any shoes that caught Attaka’s attention. The two paid for the shoes, and left the store they stopped for dinner before Danielle dropped Attaka off at home. “Meet me at my house tomorrow Attaka!” She called, “Okay!” Attaka said as she walked into her house.

The next day Attaka met Danielle at the older girl’s house, and the two began to get ready for the dance. Danielle helped Attaka do her makeup, all she wanted was some lip gloss and a little eye shadow. Until now Attaka hadn’t seen Danielle’s dress it was a forest green knee-length dress, there was a bow sewed on in the front, and black floral patterns on the skirt of the dress. On her feet were black T-strap evening shoes with crystal flowers on the toes. Attaka’s hair was curled in waves and fell elegantly against her shoulders. Danielle’s hair was done up in a bun, she even had flower clips in her hair. “You look beautiful Danielle-chan” Attaka complemented. “Thanks, Attaka, you look beautiful too. Mom, we’re ready to go!” Danielle said as she grabbed Attaka’s hand. The two carefully made their way down the stairs and greeted Kari at the door.

Kari drove the two girls to the school “I’ll pick you both up at 9:00 okay?” Kari asked Danielle nodded “Okay mom is it okay if Ango, Dazai, and Oda spend the night tonight?” Danielle requested. Kari thought about it for a second before nodding “Okay, but all I ask is that you three keep it down and use condoms” Kari teased. Danielle and Attaka’s faces hazed “Mom!” Danielle whined “What? I’ll be back at 9:00″ Kari said before driving away. Danielle looked at Attaka “Pretend you didn’t hear that” Danielle requested Attaka nodded. The two entered the building and quickly found their way to the gym, the party-planning committee had gone all out. There were streamers strung along the ceilings, balloons littered the floors, there were colorful lights flashing, and party music playing over the speakers, there was even a DJ. Attaka felt her nerves start to kick in as she surveyed the dance floor “I don’t know about this Danielle, I don’t know why I let you talk me into this I’m not a dancer I’m a stay at home and reader” Attaka complained “Come on Attaka you have to break out of your shell at some point, look there’s Atsushi!” Danielle said pointing.

Attaka followed her finger and saw the object of her affections talking to Kyouka Izumi. He was wearing a white shirt, with a dark brown shirt over it, black dress pants, and shoes, he looked so handsome. Kyouka said something that made him smile and laugh, and Attaka wished she was over there talking to him, and making him laugh. “Well, what are you waiting for? Go over there and talk to him” Danielle urged pushing Attaka forward slightly. Attaka floundered “Wait! How will I even get to him he’s all the way across the gym, and the floor’s kind of crowded” Attaka said gesturing to the sea of bodies the gym floor had become. Danielle thought for a moment “I think I have an idea” She said. Danielle grabbed Attaka’s hand and lead her over to the refreshment table where Dazai, Oda, and Ango were standing.

“Hey, guys!” Danielle yelled over the music, all three males turned at the sound of her voice “Danielle! You made it!” Dazai cheered. He walked over to the two females, and kissed Danielle’s cheeks and forehead “We were starting to think you wouldn’t show up” Oda said as he came over, Ango following right behind him. “I wouldn’t dream of it, I said I’d be here didn’t I? Hey, I need you guys’ help” Danielle said, “What is it, Danielle?” Ango asked. “I need you guys to help me get Attaka on that side of the gym. That’s where Atsushi is” Danielle requested as she pointed to the opposite side of the gym Attaka flushed “Did you have to tell them that?” She muttered. All three males nodded “How can we help Danielle?” Oda asked, “Oda I need you to get Attaka to the other side of the gym. Dazai, Ango you two are coming with me so that we can move Atsushi into a spot that’ll be easier for Oda and Attaka to get to” Danielle ordered. With that the group broke apart Oda grabbed Attaka’s hand and guided her through the mass of bodies, but somewhere along the way her grip loosened and she let go of Oda’s hand, she was now being pushed and shoved in the crowd.

Someone bumped Attaka into a strong back she started to fall, but the person she bumped into reached out and grabbed her hand, keeping her from falling. “Chuuya!” Attaka exclaimed the older ginger looked down at her “Attaka? What are you doing here?” He asked as he helped her up “Well, I-I came with Danielle, but I lost track of her. Have you seen Atsushi?” She asked “Yeah, he’s over there,” Chuuya said pointing to a clear spot in the middle of the gym a few inches from where they were standing. “Oh, thank you Chuuya. Do you think you could help me get over there?” Attaka said. Chuuya nodded and took Attaka’s hand he led her through the crowd and into the clear space with ease. “Thanks, Chuuya” Attaka whispered Chuuya smiled “You’re welcome pipsqueak,” He said ruffling her hair. Attaka grimaced at the nickname and made her way over to the small group.

“Attaka there you are!” Danielle exclaimed as she moved over to her “Yeah, sorry I worried you guys” Attaka apologized. Danielle smiled “It’s fine Attaka, hey Atsushi wants to talk to you,” Danielle said wiggling her eyebrows suggestively. Attaka blushed and looked past her at Atsushi, who smiled sheepishly at her. “We’ll be over there if you need us. Good Luck” Danielle said as she, Dazai, Oda, and Ango walked to an open spot on the gym floor. Attaka gulped and walked over to Atsushi “Hey, Atsushi” She greeted Atsushi gave her that shy smile she loved so much “Hey Attaka you look beautiful tonight. I mean you always do look beautiful, but especially so tonight” Atsushi floundered his cheeks turning the most precious shade of pink. Attaka blushed “Thank you Atsushi you look handsome. Is that a new outfit?” Attaka asked Atsushi smiled “Yeah, it’s my dad’s he said I should wear it tonight” He revealed Attaka nodded.

Just then a new song came on it was a slower tempo than the others that had been playing that night. “Ah, Attaka do you want to dance?” Atsushi asked holding out his hand with a shy smile on his face Attaka blushed and placed her hand in Atsushi’s. He pulled her against him smiling down at her all the while, Attaka tilted her head back to look up at him her cheeks a rosy shade of pink. They swayed back and forth to the beat of the song Atsushi occasionally twirling her around ‘Okay, Attaka you can do this it’s just a leap of faith’ she thought with a gulp. “Hey, Atsushi?” Attaka began said male look down at her “Yes?” He asked Attaka took a small breath before looking Atsushi deeply in the eyes. “There’s a new bookstore opening not too far from here, and I was just wondering if you would like to go to the opening with me? We can go to this cafe a few blocks from the bookstore and get lunch after if you want” Attaka asked, “I-Is this a date?” Atsushi spluttered his whole face becoming red. Attaka’s face matched his “W-Well yes o-only if you want to be” Attaka backtracked her eyes on Atsushi’s face.

“I-I’d like that Attaka. When do you want to go?” Atsushi asked, “Well the bookstore opens in a week so how about next Saturday?” Attaka suggested. Atsushi smiled and nodded “I can work with that,” He said Attaka smiled and leaned her head against his chest, as the two swayed back and forth to the beat of the music.

A/N: Well that’s it for this one-shot. I’m really proud of this I thought of all of this on the fly you guys! I’m so proud of myself. There may or may not be another one-shot coming out soon I have a few ideas I need to get down on paper so stay tuned!

Oh and here are the dresses that Attaka and Danielle wore to the dance

Attaka:

Danielle:

And here are the shoes

Attaka:

Danielle:

I do not own the pictures. I found them on Google

#attaka x atsushi #my ocs #Attaka Lan #my writing #ship: what’s better than being loved by you?

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