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The first thing Atsushi notices about the woman is that she’s pretty, an intimidating kind of beautiful with her sharp eyes and copper hair. The second thing he notices is that Dazai stops in his tracks upon seeing her, his eyes almost as severe as hers. Atsushi gives him a concerned look but Dazai only smiles at him in response.
“I was told by your receptionist to come here.” the woman says, and her voice is low and hard. “I hope that’s okay.” But she doesn’t seem all that concerned if her presence was wanted or not.
“Of course.” Kunikida says as he stands up from behind his desk to make his way to her. “How can we help you?”
If possible, the woman stands up straighter as Kunikida approaches her. She looks ready for a fight but she doesn’t look afraid; there’s something Atsushi both admires and envies about her steady back and harsh expression.
Kunikida must have noticed the woman’s clenched fists because he keeps himself a generous distance from her, eyes suddenly softer and body language open.
“My name is Kashimura Fuku and I need to find my son.”
Kashimura Fuku has a demanding presence, and Atsushi finds it hard not to look at her. She’s short but seems to stand taller than most, hands small but knuckles covered is old white scars from fights Atsushi thinks she probably won.
She wants to find her son and she won’t take no for an answer. Atsushi thinks she’d probably burn the whole city to the ground if it meant finding him, the boy she hadn’t seen in twenty years, the boy she’d given up when he turned two because she’d been eighteen and alone and scared.
“Have you gone to the police?” Kunikida asks, “I’m sorry ma’am but we specialise in Ability related cases, not missing persons.”
“Are you stupid or have you not been listening to anything I’ve been saying?” Fuku says hotly, “I’ve been searching but no-one can help me, no-one will even try. You specialise in difficult impossible to solve cases and you solve them. They took him and they hurt him and I want him back.”
“It doesn’t sound like anyone took him.” Dazai, who has been quiet the entire time so far, says casually with an air of easy cruelty. “Sounds like you gave him away the first chance you got.”
“Dazai!” Kunikida hisses. Dazai blinks at him, a mock innocent expression on his face.
Atsushi thinks for a moment that Fuku is going to lunge at Dazai, but instead she lowers to gaze to the floor.
“I’ve regretted that decision every day of my life,” she says, “it eats away at me, do you understand?”
“Do you want to find him for his sake? Or do you just want to clear your own conscience?” Dazai asks, and he seems genuinely curious.
“I loved him, my beautiful boy. I thought I was doing the right thing by him.”
“Who took him?” Atsushi asks.
“The government.” Ranpo says like it’s obvious while he lazily pops a lollipop in his mouth. “Human experimentation wasn’t uncommon back then, and the government took kids no-one else wanted or would miss. I’d wager he’s still in Yokohama.” He gives Dazai a significant look. Dazai flashes him a lopsided smile in return. Atsushi felt like he was missing something, like he was on the outside of an inside joke. No-one else seemed to notice the silent conversation between the two.
Fuku’s posture breaks. She heaves out two struggling breaths. Atsushi had no idea what it would feel like to be so close yet so far away from someone he loved as much as Fuku loves her son.
“I’m begging you,” she says desperately, “please find my son.”
“We’ll do our best,” Kunikida says kindly.
Hesitant hope shines brightly in the woman’s eyes for a moment before she beats it down in an attempt to keep her dignity.
“You’ll do better than that.” Fuku says back and there’s something dangerous in her smile, in the way a threat curls around her words.
Atsushi wants to find her son, if only because he doesn’t want Kashimura Fuku to kill them all.
“What was his name?” Dazai asks, “your son, I mean.”
Fuku smiles so gently she almost looks like a completely different person. “His name is Tsugurō.”
When Dazai steps into her office and makes himself at home on the couch on the far side of the room, Yosano doesn’t expect him to say anything for quite a while. And she’s right. He lays on his back, eyes closed, humming to himself. Yosano isn’t foolish enough to ask him what was wrong. Dazai wasn’t the type to speak without having the first word. Yosano thinks to herself that maybe she isn’t completely fluent in the strange language of Dazai Osamu, but she’s slowly getting there.
Twenty minutes pass before Dazai opens his eyes and sits up.
“Sensei,” he whines, “I need your grand wisdom.”
“If you’re going to ask me about suicide methods you can go ahead and throw yourself out of my office yourself.”
“Have some faith in me!” Dazai cries.
Yosano simply raises a perfect eyebrow at him.
“What would you do if you knew something about someone that they themselves didn’t know, and it would hurt them if you were to tell them?”
Yosano blinks at Dazai, a little stunned. Well, she thinks, I wasn’t expecting that.
“Do you care about this person?”
Dazai doesn’t answer.
Yosano sighs.
“I think we owe it to the people in our lives to be honest with them.” Yosano tells him even though honesty has been an elusive thing for all her life. It seems like the right thing to say, and she almost believes it.
“It would break them,” Dazai says after a long while.
“Maybe,” Yosano says, “but if something is taken from someone that belongs to them and we have the chance to give it back, I think it’s our obligation to do so.”
Yosano had once been robbed of everything that was ever her own and had managed to build a new self in its wake. There are times she wishes she could bring back the child she’d been so long ago, the child she’d been before she met Mori, the girl she’d never even gotten the chance to say goodbye to. Her girlhood had been stolen from her and there are times she misses it, there are times she wants it back; maybe not to stay, maybe just to make her own choice to let it go.
Dazai stands up, hands in his pockets. There is a steadiness in his posture that he didn’t have when he first walked in.
“Thank you, sensei.” he says, and Yosano knows he means it.
Chuuya blocks Gin’s knife with one of his own, aims a kick at her stomach, and manages to give himself enough momentum to push himself backwards to dodge the hand Gin shoots out to grab at his leg. She doesn’t waste any time for another attack, catching him on the side of his face with a well-aimed punch. He’s fast enough to grab her wrist, pulling her close and then flipping her onto the training mat. He knocks the knife from her hand, and laughs when she huffs at him in frustration.
Chuuya’s the first to get up, offering his hand to Gin while he grins at her with pride beaming through him. She accepts his open palm, allowing Chuuya to pull her up.
“You’ve gotten better.” he says, and he sees Gin blush at the praise.
“I want to be the best or nothing.” Gin says when Chuuya hands her a water bottle, “when I beat you, that’s when I’ll know I’ve made progress.”
Chuuya feels as though a fist is clenched around his heart. He feels proud to know her, to have watched her grow up from the little girl hiding behind her brother to the Mafia woman in front of him. He knows it shows on his face, knows that he’s never been the type to hide what he’s feeling.
Gin goes to say something else when Chuuya’s phone rings. He frowns, looking over to where he had dumped it. It was his day off, which didn’t exactly exclude the possibility that it was his boss but at least made it less likely.
It rings again. Gin looks at him and Chuuya sighs.
He says, “Go home, kid. Rest. Another round tomorrow?”
Gin gives him a slight incline of her head, a yes in her own way. She leaves as Chuuya makes his way to his phone. Digging it out of his discarded jacket pocket, he puts it to his ear without bothering to check the caller ID.
“Yes?”
“Chuuya!”
Chuuya wants to throw his phone on the ground and stomp on it. He could picture that bastard’s smug face on the other end of the line.
“What the fuck do you want?” Chuuya hisses.
Dazai laughs. Chuuya tries hard to control himself as to not break his phone in his now clenched grip. The first phone he’d ever gotten at fifteen was broken in a day, thrown at Dazai’s face and breaking apart against the wall when Dazai dodged it easily.
“I know something you don’t,” Dazai sings off-key.
“I don’t want to play your fucking games.” Chuuya snarls. He’d been the victim of Dazai’s warped sense of humour since they were kids.
“You’re no fun, Slug. You know, children with bad attitudes grow up ugly and stunted.”
“I’m hanging up.”
“You’ll never guess who came into the office today.”
Chuuya scowls. “Why would I care about anything that happens in that poor excuse for an agency you laze around in?”
“I think you’ll really care about this one.”
Chuuya frowns. There was something staining Dazai’s voice that unnerved him. He sounded like he didn’t want to be on the phone either, but was pushing through some barrier Chuuya couldn’t see.
“Hurry up.” Chuuya says, humouring his ex-partner despite his better judgement.
“A woman,” Dazai says, “she was looking for her son. You see, she left him. Well, gave him away. He was two. His name was Tsugurō.”
Chuuya had replaced all his sadness with anger a long, long time ago. He’d shut off that part of himself before he’d even known what the Port Mafia was, the part of himself that ever thought his life could’ve been different. You got the cards life dealt you and you tried to play the hand as best you could.
“Fuck you,” Chuuya says, “fuck you.”
“As eloquent as always,” Dazai drawls.
Chuuya wants to tell him that this isn’t the time for his insufferable self, wants to break his neck through the phone, wants to tell him not to cross the unspoken line they’d drawn when they were kids; Chuuya’s past was his own, Dazai’s scars belonged only to him. But Chuuya didn’t know if he could say it without coming off as weak in Dazai’s eyes, didn’t know if the rules they’d set in place to protect themselves and each other even mattered anymore. The only thing Chuuya knew for sure was that he hated Dazai so much it was tearing Chuuya in two.
Dazai’s waiting for an answer and if Chuuya doesn’t give him one he’ll start talking again. Chuuya wasn’t like Dazai, so the only thing that comes out of his mouth is the truth.
“Her son is dead,” he says, “he’s been dead for a long fucking time.”
A strange silence settles between them. Chuuya moves the phone away from his mouth when his breathing starts coming out choked and fast.
“You didn’t get your ugly face from her.” Dazai says after what feels like a lifetime, “she’s beautiful.” He says it quietly, sounding as if he had meant to say something else entirely. He did that a lot, probably on purpose. Chuuya can’t help but hate him for it.
Chuuya presses End Call on his phone screen so hard it cracks slightly up the middle. He gets a text a moment later; an address. This time, Chuuya does throw his phone onto the ground. It leaves a dent in the floor.
Atsushi looks at Kashimura Fuku and he wonders again if she will launch herself at Dazai. Dazai only stares back at her, an unreadable expression on his face.
“What?” Fuku says. Her expression is open and devasted. She’s wearing her sorrow on her sleeve; she is an open wound. Atsushi wants to cry for her, wants to cry for the child Dazai had just told her was impossible to find.
The only people in the office are Atsushi, Ranpo, Yosano and Dazai. Once again Atsushi feels as though he is on the outside of a secret. Ranpo looks at Dazai as if he expected this outcome all along, while Yosano looks as though she just cracked a case wide open in her mind.
“It’s only been a week,” Fuku says furiously, “and you’re telling me you can’t find him?”
“Any files on any human experimentation have been destroyed,” Dazai explains, “there’s no way to prove he’s even still alive.”
When Fuku begins to storm out of their office, Dazai says something strange but oddly sweet.
“If your son is still alive, I bet he’s strong. I bet he’s something fantastic.”
“Fuck you,” Fuku says, “fuck you.”
Dazai watches Fuku leave with a look Atsushi would almost describe as fondness. He looks stuck in a memory.
Kunikida arrives sometime later and hears the news. He yells at Dazai until he’s blue in the face while Dazai spins around the room on his swivel chair. He’s about to upend the chair when Ranpo tells him Dazai is right, that the whole case was solved. Kashimura Fuku’s son is dead. Kunikida calms down slightly at that. He attempts to force Dazai to write the report but Dazai whines so much Kunikida chases him around the office until he’s too tired to do anything but mutter curses at his desk.
Dazai walks over to Atsushi and sits on the corner of his desk.
“Do you really think he’s alive?” Atsushi asks.
Dazai shrugs. He doesn’t say anything else and Atsushi doesn’t think he ever will. There are things that only belong to Dazai, things that exist in a past version of him that Dazai had buried a long time ago. Dazai only places a hand on Atsushi’s head, ruffling his hair.
Atsushi doesn’t say anything either. A part of him thinks Dazai is grateful for that.
He hopes Fuku’s son is alive, he wishes it with everything inside of him.
The longer Chuuya looks at Kashimura Fuku the more he sees it. She looks exactly like me.
Chuuya stands behind a tree and feels stupid as he watches Fuku play with two young children. A man who Chuuya presumes is her husband laughs at the way one of the children throws themselves into Fuku’s open arms. Fuku laughs and it sounds like soft windchimes. She moves next to her husband when the kids begin to wrestle one another on the grass. She leans into him, a sad longing on her face. Her husband kisses the side of her head with a reverence so fierce Chuuya has to look away for a moment. Chuuya's breath is shaky and his eyes sting. They look happy, they look like a family, and Chuuya knows he doesn’t belong amongst them. It was better to walk away now but Chuuya couldn’t move.
Just a little bit longer, he thinks to himself, let me have this for one more moment. He wants to laugh at himself, wants to mock his own weakness, his bleeding heart. He feels like an open wound. He hates Dazai even more, for making him see all the things he could never have. But maybe this was enough, to have someone remember a version of himself that could have been anything he wanted if he'd been given the time.
He would die one day, as people are wont to do, and there would be no-one in the world who’d mourn the man Chuuya had become. But there would always be a woman, copper-haired and pretty, who would mourn the little boy Chuuya had been and the person he might’ve turned out to be. Kashimura’s son would have been weak, too soft to survive on his own, but he also could’ve been happy; the thought was as laughable as it was beautiful.
That child would be always be alive in some way or another, as real as anything else in the world. He would live on in the secret part of Chuuya's heart where he'd laid everything else that once had been his to rest. Nakahara Chuuya was a Port Mafia Executive, he had things to do and people to see, a city to protect and a god inside of him.
When Chuuya walks away he doesn’t cry. There is something powerful about the way he doesn't look back.