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"Raising Ranpo like an ordinary person. What an astounding feat it must have been. To have Ranpo perceive his own world as ordinary, to have him think of himself as absolutely normal, without a single thing to distinguish him from others, how incredible of a challenge it must have been. Ranpo's parents managed to accomplish that, despite all the odds. With the transcendental mental skills both of them possessed. What on earth can you call that, if not love? The two of them - long before Ranpo could mature properly, long before he could stand up and face the world with enough resolve, they left this world, as if someone plucked them away. After that, his cocoon torn up and stripped off, what remained was just an underage, genius larva.
Fukuzawa's clenched fist was sweating. No matter how strong of an enemy he had been up against in the past, he had never feared his opponent as much as he did right now. Having lost his cocoon, Ranpo was now truly on the verge of being crushed by the outside world. If he were to make a mistake at this point, there would be no way to undo it."
-The Untold Origins of the Armed Detective Agency
“Do you ever think about my parents?”
Fukuzawa stared just a little bit harder into the wood ingrained in the desk below him. The marks, the curves, the echoes of a life lived and cut short, a forest of secrets hidden and halved. He looked up, and Ranpo seemed to have regretted the words as soon as they’d escaped him, like they’d rampaged through his throat to find freedom in the empty office. He had a sucker unopened in his hand, twirling it softly, staring at it like there were just as many secrets there as there were in a tree. He did better at pretending to find it interesting, though.
It could’ve been his intelligence, or his youthful mastery of avoiding things when they were awkward. He and Dazai were both oh so very good at that. What wonder it was to have two adults in this agency forged on a half baked dream who were both still so very fourteen.
At the quiet request of Dazai, they were fighting. While Fukuzawa wished to be able to claim he had no understanding of why Dazai wanted to fight, he did know. This was just another form of self harm for his newest charge, and he was allowing it, leaning into it, indulging it.
Fukuzawa drew his katana, the blade gleaming in the faint light, an echo living there. Dazai took a step back, his eyes childishly leaving Fukuzawa’s to watch the gleam of his sword, some trepidation miraculously intact in his large eyes.
Wanting for hesitation and still finding none, Fukuzawa moved first, closing the distance between them with all the force of a bullet, knowing and finding his target and taking sickly satisfaction in the distraction Dazai had offered. His katana sliced through the air, aiming for Dazai's shoulder, aiming for blood. Dazai barely managed to dodge, the blade grazing his coat. He countered with a swift kick, looking more like a tempering child for it, but Fukuzawa blocked it effortlessly, his katana ringing as it deflected the blow.
"You'll have to do better than that," Fukuzawa said, his voice calm but firm. If he looked into a mirror, he wondered if he would see blood on his maw, if only for a moment.
Dazai smirked, some three sizes too wide for his young, unchanged face, but there was a flicker of desperation living there, taking up home in the emptiness. "I intend to."
Though it wasn’t like seeing someone so very fourteen had ever stopped Fukuzawa from wanting for carnage. It was carved into his bones. He tried not to let it seep onto his face. Only experience let him succeed.
Ordinarily, Fukuzawa’s grievances lived only in words and terms that suited Ranpo, but they extended to their newest recruit as well, now. Self-imposed as they were, he amended in his own head.
Ah-
Soon-to-be not their newest recruit. Fukuzawa’s eyes tracked over Jun’ichiro Tanizaki’s name again.
Do you ever think about my parents?
“Yes,” he said, not knowing whether or not it was the truth until it escaped him. He was glad to find that it was; lying to Ranpo was a feat easily done for him, but not a feat easily forgotten.
Fukuzawa thought about Ranpo’s parents in the way one thought about the forefathers of a country. They existed, certainly, and perhaps their legacy was unclear in their moment, the echoes of which resounded cleanly in every facet of Fukuzawa’s life now, but they weren’t tangible. He’d had the thought many times since- if he could talk to Sakunosuke Oda for the barest iteration of a moment, could he reach just a little further, soothe a little bit better, encompass a piece of honesty that mattered, altruism not only for sake of being altruistic? If he could talk to Ranpo’s parents, to beings who had managed to harness some understanding of love and duty that Fukuzawa’s soldiered past had no right to hold, what would he ask them? It was a monumental task that they had attempted to accomplish, and no detective agencies could stack up to the gift they’d tried to give their son.
To the young man who was now Fukuzawa’s son.
What would he say to people…. to civilians…. to beings he could argue were made of pure love…. to people whose deaths he was, if only in the most secretive sense, grateful for?
Fukuzawa was a bad person entrusted with the well being of someone created by inarguably good people. What could he say that would soothe whatever thoughts were rampaging in his charge’s mind? What could he say that would be true and somehow follow through with the ardent task of hiding Fukuzawa’s shame?
How novel was it that Fukuzawa had the chance to want to hide his shame?
Ranpo fidgeted quietly, but the plastic wrapping crinkled all the same, disrupting tumultuous thoughts that spun around and around, clicking and clattering in Fukuzawa’s mind in a way he suspected would continue until he died. Was this comparable to love great enough to surpass all nature?
No.
“I am very grateful to your parents, Ranpo.”
And just like that, Ranpo was peering up at Fukuzawa. The pure trust only allotted to him by proxy of being borne from beings of love had those wide, expansive, expressive eyes parsing through his words gently on the surface, then finding satisfaction in the barest bones of understanding.
“I am too.”
Fukuzawa wondered if he should feel more guilty, letting Ranpo hug him then. He added the sheltering of his own arms around this boy to his ledger and pulled him in tight, an umbrella for the rains of sin that fell for his eyes only.
And then,
“Do you ever wonder about Dazai’s?”
A scalpel, a head of long brown hair, a gentle spring’s shore.
“Yes,” Fukuzawa said, lying once more, and his ledger infinitesimally darkened for it.