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Atsushi has a problem. A tall, lanky problem with greasy hair and no manners. Is this what Fukuzawa had in mind when he agreed to a truce with Mori? Atsushi getting immutably entangled with the public face of the mafia?
The problem is—
Well. It’s an embarrassing problem. Atsushi is embarrassed. But he stayed over at Akutagawa’s apartment after a job, and that’s… new. Atsushi wonders—is that the sort of thing they do now? See each other outside of work? Spend time together willingly? Not that Atsushi would willingly hang out with Akutagawa, but he supposes that, well, that’s exactly what he did. He submitted himself to Akutagawa’s villainous artifices. With some enthusiasm, even.
“What are you staring at me for, weretiger?” Akutagawa’s voice interrupts his train of thought.
Atsushi is staring because Akutagawa’s white shirt is stained red all the way up to his throat, like a gruesome ruby necklace. He isn’t sure whether he should be grateful or not that it isn’t Akutagawa’s blood, considering the state of his victim.
“Ah, nothing,” Atsushi says queasily, waving his hand vaguely and averting his gaze from Akutagawa’s grisly collar. The Ability user whose blood now decorates Akutagawa’s front had caught Atsushi off guard, and if Akutagawa hadn’t intervened, it might be Atsushi’s viscera dyeing Akutagawa’s white shirt dark. Now, Atsushi awaits extraction, that is, for someone to deal with the unconscious person lying between them, and Akutagawa has stuck around. For some reason.
Akutagawa scowls at the dismissal. “I didn’t kill her,” he says defensively, which is true, if barely. As if to prove it, he stands up and kicks the scarcely-breathing enemy. She coughs wetly. “See?”
“That’s not why I was staring,” Atsushi says, unsure whether he should laugh or cry at Akutagawa’s bald violence. “It was more the…” he gestures toward his neck. “The blood. Maybe don’t kick her anymore.” He can’t help but feel empathy for victims of Akutagawa’s brutality.
“Oh,” Akutagawa mutters, a little surprised, but the shock on his face soon gives way to piercing judgment. “You should be used to that kind of thing by now in your line of work.”
“Yeah, no thanks,” Atsushi says, laughing awkwardly.
Akutagawa hums. “The man-eating tiger, afraid of a little blood?” Atsushi imagines his voice would be tinged with glee if he were in the habit of expressing emotions other than rage or murderous intent. As it is, the words come out flat and vaguely self-satisfied.
“I wouldn’t call that a little,” Atsushi points out. “And I don’t eat people! That’s rich, coming from you!”
“Ah, so because I’m mafia scum, I’m a cannibal, too? What does that say about you, then?”
They bicker back and forth as darkness falls. For some reason, Akutagawa still doesn’t leave, even when Kunikida shows up along with a few members of the police. They do away with the rogue Ability user before Atsushi is dismissed with a curt nod. The tension between Akutagawa and Kunikida is palpable, but with motivations unknown, Akutagawa sticks around just out of the way until he leaves, haunting the boardwalk like a vengeful ghost.
“What are you still doing here?” Atsushi finally asks. “You look creepy, standing there like that.”
Akutagawa shrugs. He gives Atsushi a condescending look, like Atsushi is missing something obvious. “Are you coming?”
It takes Atsushi a few long seconds to process Akutagawa’s words, and by the time his brain catches up, Akutagawa is already off, totally confident Atsushi will follow him. Now that there’s a bit of distance between them, Atsushi notices he’s limping a little on the right side.
“You said you weren’t injured,” Atsushi calls after him, jogging to catch up. “And where are we going?”
Akutagawa doesn’t bother to look over. “I said no such thing.” Which, now that Atsushi thinks about it, is true; Akutagawa didn’t mention any injuries at all, Atsushi just assumed that he would have mentioned it if any of the blood on him was his own. “And I’m going back to my apartment because, while you may not believe me, I don’t enjoy walking around looking like I’ve robbed a blood bank.”
“You’re right, I don’t believe you,” Atsushi agrees easily, falling into step beside him. “But really, Akutagawa, you’re limping.”
“And I will stitch myself up. At my apartment. Where I am going.” He slants a sharp glare in Atsushi’s direction. “Are you simple?”
Feeling magnanimous, Atsushi doesn’t argue. Akutagawa’s insults feel less cutting when it’s obvious that Akutagawa waited to set off until Atsushi was free to come with him. “No Higuchi tonight?” he asks curiously.
“It’s a nice night for a walk,” is all Akutagawa offers in explanation. And it is. The night is young and cool, crisp wind blowing gently in from over the harbour. Akutagawa’s coat flutters out behind him, the tatters fanning out like the tail of a raven.
“Do you dress like that on purpose?” Atsushi asks suddenly.
“Like what?”
“Like a vampire,” Atsushi says, ducking out of the way when Rashoumon’s dark tendrils inevitably come for his throat.
“You’re not funny,” Akutagawa hisses venomously, jabbing Atsushi once, twice more with Rashoumon before relenting.
“C’mon. It’s a little funny.”
“Well, I’d say you dress like you just got kicked out of an orphanage, but—”
Atsushi follows Akutagawa all the way back to his apartment, waiting at each and every turn for Akutagawa to send him off, but Akutagawa… doesn’t. This time, it feels somehow more deliberate, though Atsushi can’t pinpoint how or why.
“Don’t make yourself at home,” Akutagawa calls over his shoulder when he disappears into his bedroom, presumably to find a less-bloodstained shirt and stitch up his injured leg.
Atsushi takes the time to poke around Akutagawa’s apartment. He has an uncomfortable-looking sofa with an ugly pattern, old but in good enough condition compared to the rest of the place that it must be the expensive kind of vintage. Similarly-aged curios pepper the place, interspersed with out-of-place modernities like a barely touched console hooked up to the TV and the air fryer.
“Do you like collecting things like this?” Atsushi asks when Akutagawa finds him again, gesturing to a teapot on the shelf shaped like a house with a thatched roof. It is free of dust where the shelf around it is caked in it. It paints a picture that is incongruous with everything else Atsushi knows about Akutagawa.
Akutagawa shrugs, avoiding the question and nodding toward the front door. “Are you coming?”
Again, Atsushi asks, “Where are we going?”
“I am going to get ramen,” Akutagawa announces, putting his black trenchcoat back on and looking over his shoulder, unimpressed. “I’m not sure what you’re doing.”
And this, more than anything else they’ve done—more than their increasingly common late-night rendezvouses and more than the new, strange sides of Akutagawa Atsushi has been exposed to, like the meticulously clean but clearly unused teapot in his kitchen—knocks Atsushi out of sorts. Getting ramen after hours with a coworker—it’s horribly, terribly normal in a way that Atsushi can’t reconcile with the mafioso in front of him. Akutagawa’s gruesome collar of blood is nothing but a memory as Atsushi follows him to a tiny hole in the wall just a few streets over from his apartment.
The place is probably run by the Port Mafia from the ground up, but no one gives Atsushi a second look when he sits across from Akutagawa, who glares when he sees Atsushi failing at subtlety as he inspects the place.
“I fail to understand how your agency keeps you employed if this is enough to make you nervous,” Akutagawa says, rolling his eyes. “We’re only cannibals, man-tiger, relax.”
It’s not the off-colour joke that releases the tension in Atsushi’s shoulders, but the fact that no matter how deep he is in Port Mafia territory, the greatest threat to his safety is seated right across from him, ordering—
“Noodles? With no broth?” Atsushi echoes incredulously. “You came all the way out here to get noodles with no broth?”
Akutagawa blinks owlishly, like he doesn’t realize he’s done anything strange. “And?”
Atsushi sighs. “Right,” he says, wondering when Akutagawa’s insane behaviour started to make his heart flutter. “God. Alright.”
The problem isn’t that Akutagawa has done anything. The problem is not even a lack of action on Akutagawa’s part. The problem… might not be Akutagawa at all, if Atsushi thinks about it. But he doesn’t really want to think about it. Thinking about it makes him feel all twisted up inside, like his heart is folding in on itself, tearing itself up on the little shards of Akutagawa that have made a home there. It would be easier if it was something Akutagawa had done, because then Atsushi could yell at him about it. Yelling at Akutagawa is familiar. Nothing else is. Whatever they’re doing now—it’s like Atsushi is standing on a cliff’s edge, and just one wrong step could send him down into the depths unknown.
Like now: they have a job to do, and Akutagawa is driving. Since when does he drive? When did he learn? Who taught him?
“You can drive?” Atsushi asks. For some reason, this fact throws him off. It’s another Akutagawa-ism that until recently seemed impossible thanks to its sheer mundanity. “I thought your—your mailmen or whatever drove you guys everywhere.”
Akutagawa huffs at you guys. “The mailmen have better things to do than driving you around,” he mutters. He seems to approach driving in the same way he does washing his hair, or human life: without a care in the world. Like nothing could possibly go wrong no matter what. Atsushi soon learns that Akutagawa’s definition of driving does not fit in with Atsushi’s. Not that Atsushi knows how to drive, but surely this isn’t it. There’s a lot of swerving and honking. Atsushi feels kind of nauseous.
“Do not throw up, weretiger,” Akutagawa hisses, entirely too focused on the road for someone who seems to have a fundamental misunderstanding of its laws.
“How do you always know that?” Atsushi wonders aloud, more to himself than to Akutagawa. He seems to have a sixth sense for it.
“You go green around the gills. It’s gross.” Akutagawa looks over at him with a grimace. “You’re not a very subtle person.”
“Am so,” Atsushi argues, though he’s not exactly sure what exactly he’s arguing against. Is a lack of subtlety a bad thing? Should Atsushi be more understated? It feels like Akutagawa is insulting him, but Atsushi can’t pinpoint how. “And if you don’t want me to throw up, you should drive better.”
“Says the one who can’t drive at all,” Akutagawa says under his breath.
“How do you know I can’t drive, huh?”
Akutagawa looks over at him, eyes sharp and condescending. “Well? Can you?”
Atsushi slumps back into the seat, clutching the handle above the window for dear life, and doesn’t reply. Who would have taught him? He’s thought about asking Kunikida once or twice, but Kunikida seems to have enough on his plate at all times without worrying about Atsushi, too. It just feels like yet another skill he’s missed out on after being raised in the orphanage, something most people are at least a little familiar with, but Atsushi just—isn’t.
“Chuuya taught me,” Akutagawa confesses after a too-long silence. His voice is quiet.
“What?”
“Chuuya taught me to drive when he realized I never learned. I didn’t ask him to.” This particular Akutagawa micro-expression falls somewhere around confused, which is as close to open and honest as Akutagawa gets.
The sudden admission sends Atsushi into silence. Coming from Akutagawa, whose intricacies and vulnerabilities are barred behind a thousand layers of hatred in all directions, it’s as if he’s divulged some great secret instead of a seemingly unremarkable fact about his life. When did Atsushi become Akutagawa’s confessional?
“Wait,” Atsushi says slowly, “does this mean you could have been driving me the whole time!? You’ve been making me meet up with you for nothing?”
Akutagawa huffs. “What, do I look like a chauffeur to you?”
What an asshole. Atsushi hates him so much.
The problem is—
“You’re awfully high maintenance,” Akutagawa murmurs into the darkness, hand tangled in Atsushi’s hair like an anchor. A gentler person might card his fingers through Atsushi’s hair, but Akutagawa’s hand just sits there, holding Atsushi’s scalp hostage in some kind of stranglehold.
Atsushi, blinking awake from a nightmare in Akutagawa’s increasingly-familiar bed, doesn’t respond but to try and calm his breathing. Akutagawa pulls at his hair, and infuriatingly, it helps. He’s sitting up, looming over Atsushi’s prone body, eyes wide and owlish. His creepiness is comforting in its familiarity.
“This isn’t helping the vampire thing,” Atsushi whispers finally. He leans his head into Akutagawa’s hand, resigning himself to having a few strands of hair ripped out, and sighs. “And I never asked you to maintain me. Or whatever. Go back to sleep for all I care.”
“You come into my apartment, taking advantage of my hospitality—”
“Like you’re the epitome of hospitality—”
“ —you sleep in my bed, and wake me up with your breathing.” Akutagawa tugs on his hair again, hard, and peers down at him with a withering glare. “You sound like an animal with all that panting.” It doesn’t look like Akutagawa was sleeping anyway; his eyes are red-rimmed and bloodshot, visible even in the darkness. Graciously, Atsushi doesn’t mention it.
“Yeah, well, comes with the territory, doesn’t it,” Atsushi says thoughtlessly, still feeling a little hazy after his nightmare. “Man-tiger and everything.”
Akutagawa huffs, finally freeing Atsushi’s scalp from his death grip. He runs his thumb over Atsushi’s cheek, but the touch seems more exploratory than comforting, like he’s testing out if Atsushi will retaliate. When Atsushi doesn’t react but to lean into his hand, too tired to try and pick through the twisted layers of their relationship, Akutagawa says, “Go back to sleep, Atsushi.”
And this is—this is new territory. New land. A new continent. Atsushi is staring down a chasm, heart skipping, hands twitching. It feels like he’s forgotten his own name, given how unfamiliar it feels coming from Akutagawa’s mouth. Why now? Why here?
“You called me Atsushi,” Atsushi accuses, sitting up abruptly. He jabs his fingers into Akutagawa’s chest and lets his hand rest there. “You said my name.”
“Did not,” Akutagawa lies outright. His gaze hardens as he steals the pillow Atsushi has come to think of as his own and whacks him with it. “You misheard me.”
The sudden self-consciousness is so out of character that Atsushi doesn’t seek retribution for the blow. He’s never wheedled Akutagawa about calling him by his name because it felt like a total impossibility. It just isn’t how they are—or, it wasn’t. But faced with Akutagawa’s fierce, defensive scowl now, Atsushi grins smugly.
Akutagawa raises the pillow to hit him again, but Atsushi steals it out of his grip and says, “Good night, Ryuu.”
“What?” Akutagawa hisses. He reaches toward Atsushi with purpose but his hand flutters aimlessly before falling back to his side. “No. Don’t call me that.”
Atsushi covers his head with the pillow. “I can’t hear you, Ryuu, I’m sleeping.”
“You little—”
“Atsushi,” Dazai says on his way out of the office with a jovial smile, “you should go over this one with Akutagawa before tomorrow.” He holds up a folder in front of Atsushi’s face. “It’s a bit tricky.”
Atsushi doesn’t think much of it. He texts Akutagawa that he’s going to swing by at Dazai’s behest—because that’s something that he does now. He swings by Akutagawa’s apartment. They’ve graduated from alleyways and fire escapes. Atsushi still isn’t sure how to feel about it.
It’s barely six o’clock, which means Akutagawa’s day hasn’t started yet and Atsushi is free to bother him as much as he likes. Not that Atsushi likes bothering him, exactly, but.
Maybe he does. A little.
Akutagawa takes one look at the file folder and dismisses it, tossing it onto the coffee table and shoving Atsushi down onto his weirdly-patterned couch with startling efficiency. Atsushi has, in time, come to appreciate Akutagawa’s lack of any kind of self-consciousness, but now is not the time.
“Ah, Akutagawa,” Atsushi says unevenly as Akutagawa mouths at his throat, “what are you doing?”
Akutagawa, who has progressed to making quick work of the buttons of Atsushi’s shirt, says, “I thought that was fairly obvious. I don’t have all night here, you know.”
“We have work.” But suddenly work feels much less urgent than the press of Akutagawa’s lips against his throat, the press of his body against Atsushi’s.
Akutagawa pauses only to frown. It’s funny—Akutagawa doesn’t really smile. His range of facial expressions goes from ‘mildly upset’ to ‘rage, of the homicidal kind’ but Atsushi has learned how to tell his micro-expressions apart: which frown means angry and which means frustrated and which means I am laughing at you, silently. This frown means something like you are the stupidest person I’ve ever had the misfortune of meeting. One of Atsushi’s least favourites.
“We do not,” Akutagawa says finally when he realizes Atsushi is serious. He returns to his single-minded conquest of Atsushi’s throat without another word, leaving Atsushi unmoored and breathless, hands fluttering aimlessly before settling on Akutagawa’s waist.
“I just—” Atsushi tries to say, but Akutagawa cuts him off with a kiss that’s all teeth. Admittedly, he’s not exactly sure how he got here, and finds himself increasingly unable to parse it out. He came here for work. Yes, work, because Dazai thought it prudent for them to prepare for their next job—and Akutagawa is the last person who Atsushi would expect to go against Dazai’s word. Something must be wrong, or Akutagawa knows something Atsushi doesn’t, or, or, or—
Atsushi doesn’t know, and Akutagawa doesn’t seem focused on helping him find out.
“We have work to do,” Atsushi tries again. His voice is low enough to almost sound inaudible, given their proximity. “Dazai sent me here for a reason.” But Dazai is very far away, and Akutagawa is very close.
Akutagawa scoffs. Sits back on his weird couch. Straightens his old-fashioned shirt. “Do you really believe that, you imbecile?” His voice is distractingly rough and gravelly.
Atsushi can hardly believe Dazai would send him here for the specific purpose of making out with Akutagawa, so yes, actually. “Why wouldn’t I?” he asks, irritated.
“The man-tiger’s stupidity knows no bounds,” Akutagawa laments, staring up at the ceiling like it pains him. “It is in Dazai’s best interests for us to…” he pauses to make a face like he’s sucked on a lemon, “…trust one another, and you and I both know whatever attack we might coordinate in advance tonight will fall apart as soon as the time comes, so…” he trails off, giving Atsushi an unimpressed glare.
It’s true that he and Akutagawa work best spontaneously. And it’s true that Atsushi had an inkling that this meeting between them was redundant. But Atsushi’s brain is still more focused on Akutagawa’s lips, pink and soft, than the conversation at hand. “Does that mean that Dazai…” he falters, avoiding Akutagawa’s eyes, “…knows?” The thought disturbs him.
Akutagawa doesn’t smile, but this is the closest he comes to it: his mouth flattens and his eyes narrow. “Does that mean he knows what, exactly?” Atsushi gets the distinct feeling that he is being laughed at.
“You know what I’m talking about,” Atsushi grumbles, reaching out to—well, he’s not sure, really, but before he can blink, Akutagawa is back on top of him, pinning him down with that strange not-smile, though this time his intent seems rather more violent than amorous. The arm of the sofa digs into the back of Atsushi’s shoulder uncomfortably.
“I don’t think I do,” Akutagawa says somberly, eyes bright, looking suddenly like the cold-blooded killer Atsushi knows he is. His hand settles gently on Atsushi’s throat like a collar. Contrarily, Atsushi feels breathless. Out of sorts in all the right ways. Like his heart has forgotten its rhythm. Is this what Dazai wanted? For Atsushi to react to Akutagawa’s hand at his jugular with affection rather than malice?
His pulse thuds under Akutagawa’s tightening fingers. “Well?” Akutagawa asks. “Does he know what, weretiger?” His put-upon solemnity cracks when his eyes flick down to Atsushi’s lips. The question, though badly timed and posed facetiously, must be genuine—Atsushi knows Akutagawa too well to assume otherwise.
To admit that there is something between them for Dazai to know at all feels like too big an admission, like giving up a front Atsushi can’t afford to lose. But what else does he have to lose? What barriers remain in place between them? Akutagawa has gone from his greatest foe to—
Well. Foe to… something. That’s Atsushi’s problem; has been the whole time. He still doesn’t know understand the flighty, tenuous thing between them, but he has a vested interest in finding out, so—
“Does Dazai know that you kiss with too much teeth? And that you’re holding me hostage here on your stupid ugly couch?” Atsushi answers without answering, closing his hand around Akutagawa’s wrist. “Does he know you have like five copies of the same shirt? And you go to restaurants to order noodles with no broth? I mean, what the hell is that? Does he know—”
All at once, the tension dissolves from Akutagawa’s frame. He releases Atsushi’s throat and collapses against him. “I’m going to kill you,” he says with venom. “You will die by my hand, you insolent little wretch. I hate you.”
“Yeah, right.”