Chapter Text
"Your ponytail is long enough to be used as a noose now," Dazai chimed.
Kunikida didn't dignify the comment with a response. He wasn't even sure if it was meant to be an insult or a compliment.
Though, looking in the mirror when he got home, he realized his partner was right, objectively speaking. Ever since he worked at the school, he tried to cut it before it went past the length of his elbows. With a sinking feeling, Kunikida realized he's had this haircut since he started teaching.
Maybe… it was due time to consider other possibilities. Maybe something shorter could be just as professional.
A minor change couldn't hurt.
At his barbershop he browsed for a hairstyle that wasn't too short, should he miss the old one and want to grow it back. He could deal with something that slightly curtained his neck, possibly even something akin to Dazai's hair length—except Kunikida would rather the front bangs be trimmed shorter than the brunette's fringe, as well as for the layers all around to stand out more. Nevertheless, he could admit he somewhat liked the way it framed his partner's face. Something like that could be nice.
He picked out the ideal style in a magazine and—looking at his reflection afterwards—he didn't hate it, which was better than what some people could say so he was grateful.
Kunikida didn't expect much of anything when he returned to work, but what was the Armed Detective Agency if not unpredictable?
"Woah!" Ranpo immediately shouted, causing everyone else in the office to jump and look at who entered.
Some of them deflated—realizing it was only their coworker—before presumably noticing his hair and perking back up. Others were still staring.
"You almost look like Fitzgerald!" Ranpo exclaimed, and Kunikida cringed at the worst deduction the detective has ever made.
"He looks sexier than that capitalist," Yosano challenged from Kunikida's right. "Much more rugged."
"Kunikida-san's hair does look better than his," Naomi agreed.
That was generous of her considering the other man's hair was slicked with undoubtedly expensive products while Kunikida's now fell freely. He almost thanked Naomi as he walked to his desk, but kept quiet so Yosano wouldn't fuss about being ignored.
"What a big change," Kenji said in awe. "Should we all get haircuts?"
It was a genuine question but too many eyes flicked to Atsushi and his uneven bangs. Thank God the boy didn't seem to fully understand and just turned to Dazai.
"What do you think, Dazai-san?"
Kunikida, now sitting across from the man in question, realized the brunette had been oddly quiet among the commotion. Staying silent was somewhat uncommon for Dazai, but not jumping at the chance to pester Kunikida was downright weird.
"I'm thinking," Dazai finally answered without hurry, "what did Kunikida-kun do with the leftover hair? Besides making me a custom noose as an early birthday present, that is. Surely there'd been enough to make a wig for some poor unfortunate bald child, or even two! Or a cat-toy perhaps…"
There he was. Kunikida barely withheld rolling his eyes. "I did donate it."
Dazai beamed. "And who's the lucky cat?"
"I swear to God—"
Kunikida stopped himself (needing more willpower than he'd care to admit) and began working on the report in front of him. It was too damn early to get roped into Dazai's antics.
To remind himself his partner was full of shit, Kunikida glanced back up, expecting to see unbridled amusement on Dazai's face.
He was instead met with an eerily empty gaze. It was so wildly different from Dazai’s demeanour a second ago that it stopped Kunikida in his tracks.
In the wake of Kunikida's staring, Dazai's face pulled into a smile again, all mirth and mischief. Kunikida wasn't convinced, but he let his eyes fall back down to his work anyways.
Trying to decipher Dazai's thoughts was a losing battle. Kunikida had learned this already.
—
Dazai surprised himself by actually writing his report that day. He was starting to become a real functioning member of society!
In reality, scribbling random crap on that piece of paper had been all Dazai could do to keep from staring at Kunikida's new haircut. The moment he'd seen it, he made a connection he couldn’t stop thinking about despite every effort to derail it.
Not that he’d ever been good at focusing on what he was supposed to. Subordinates and fellow executives alike used to seethe under his unwavering poker face when—honestly—it's that he just couldn’t be pissed to pay attention. Regardless of what was happening, it'd only reach his brain in blurry snippets. Although, on certain occasions, his focus could tunnel vision hopelessly.
This had been one of those super fun days where both mentalities combined.
He’s not sure how long he’s been zoning out on his bedroom floor, running in mental circles.
It's not even remotely close to the same hair color!
No, but the length is exactly similar, even his bangs.
Okay but it's parted slightly to the left, not down the middle.
But the layering is the exact same.
I don't know that.
Yes, I do.
The stark difference in color should’ve dismissed the association right away. Dirty blonde looked nothing like dark reddish-brown.
But with the way it furled past his ears and across his forehead, the resemblance was enough. Sometimes the smell of gunsmoke intertwined with cologne was enough.
Smell was a surprisingly underrated sense considering how much it triggered in the brain; memories to be exact. Dazai veered his thoughts away from his aversion to Yosano's clinic and thought back to an old American TV show instead. There'd been an episode in which one character couldn't stop sneezing despite showing no other physical signs of sickness. None of his fellow army doctors could diagnose the cause and, in the end, it turned out to be a repressed memory plaguing him. A present-day patient had come in from a swamp or something, and the smell triggered a childhood memory when someone pushed the character into a lake—a prank that stung like betrayal for reasons Dazai couldn't recall. His memory was good but not good enough to remember whether or not it’d been a family relative who pushed him. If it'd just been a friend, then there was maybe some underlying homosexuality that came with that trauma because why else would a friend's betrayl hurt that badly?
What had Dazai been thinking about? Right. Kunikida’s haircut. Blonde versus auburn. Nothing alike. Why was Dazai even drawing such a far gone correlation?
Probably because it was a resemblance Dazai had already picked up on. One that had nothing to do with appearance and all to do with that stupid, stubborn, responsible, idealistic disposition.
The solution was either shaving the rest of Kunikida's hair or tipping over the scales of that polished moral courtroom inside his head, bringing him down to Earth before something—or someone—less kind did.
The former option sounded tempting but Dazai already had minor plans in motion for the latter, so that would have to do. Expending more energy than necessary was not his forté.
Though shaving Kunikida's remaining hair off really couldn't hurt, he thought when images from another lifetime flashed behind his eyes with more force than usual. Fuck.
They didn't relent until he finished his third glass of whiskey for the night and effectively passed out.
—
Kunikida had to plug his nose to keep from gagging at the stench of dog waste everywhere. Just another day at work, he thought.
When Dazai brought up an anonymous tip the Agency received about dog fighting that morning, Kunikida hadn't been sure what to expect. The three of them—including Atsushi—barely had time to even discuss a plan before they heard barking and screaming out on the streets.
The other two were still trying to rangle in the dogs while Kunikida followed the path they'd come from. He gripped his pistol tightly and swept his gaze over the building he eventually arrived at. (Either the wind or the stench was so strong that the smell hit Kunikida two minutes before he actually reached the place.)
He deduced that it’d been a jailbreak, not an intentional release of the animals. Judging by the warehouse's wrecked appearance, the dogs had escaped—though not before attacking their ring leader.
Inside the building, she lay among the wreckage of what must've previously been a chain link dome—the fighting pit—with huge bites taken from her arms and legs. The largest chunk missing was from her face. It looked like the dog had aimed for the side of her jaw and its mouth had been big enough to take part of her lip along with it.
It was a miracle she hadn't bled to death yet. He had to get her to Yosano quickly.
Her breathing was ragged as if her throat was dry, but her voice sounded waterlogged with the blood likely choking her.
"You have a gun,” she said, her words grotesquely garbled. "Shoot me."
Kunikida grimaced at the request and steeled an authoritative tone. "No. I’m with the Armed Detective Agency. We need you alive to tell us who did business with you."
She made an attempt to point to her left, but it undoubtedly caused her a new wave of pain because she screamed and collapsed back onto the floor.
"Every—" she coughed up more red goop, "—everything is there. On the desk. Every contact. I beg of you just put me out of my misery. I beg of you—”
Kunikida began to list the reasons why he legally could not do that, but the woman just repeated in growing hysteria, "Kill me, kill me, kill me, please."
"We—" he started. Keep calm. Keep calm and then attempt to calm her down as well. "There's a doctor we have—"
"I don't fucking care!" she sobbed. "Everything hurts—are you that cruel you'd deny me relief? You're a fucking sadist!"
"No! I'm saying we can save you!" Kunikida shouted back, voice wavering. He began lowering his gun.
The moment the woman realized she wouldn't get her wish was the moment she desperately grabbed a piece of ripped up chain link and made a wide arch with it, ending in Kunikida's sternum. Recoiling, Kunkida had only enough time to see the woman pulling back for another swing—a last ditch effort—before he instinctively pulled the trigger.
The metal scrap, dripping with his blood, clattered behind her as she herself fell forward into the puddle of her own. Kunikida looked down at the added pool of red joining the preexisting one. Both of them spilled from her face.
Footsteps and the calling of his name echoed behind him for who knows how long until Atsushi was suddenly at his side. The rest of the day was a blur after that.
He somewhat snapped back into reality when he heard a tap at the door. Dazai was already standing at the foot of the ADA's medical bed, but knocked on the wood to get Kunikida's attention.
“Good news!” he said. “They say they'll work on the rehabilitating most of the dogs instead of immediately putting them down.”
Kunikida closed his eyes, relieved, but still playing over the scene in the warehouse; the woman's pleas for death seemed to echo back especially.
"You do realize she wasn't innocent, right." Dazai stated with an abrupt amount of condemnation, like he knew what Kunikida was thinking. Then with casualness, "She didn't even let me place my bets when I approached her this morning. How rude is that?"
Kunikida processed this, then raised his head to look up at his partner.
"...What?"
"She told me to place my bets on who would win. I said all of them! She didn't like that," he said with mild disappointment. "She liked it even less when I bet that she'd lose."
"You planned this?" Kunikida spat.
Dazai smiled calmly.
"I just happened to be in the neighborhood," he answered. "And I just happened to loosen some screws on the cages."
Kunikida stared at him. All at once he remembered Dazai's insistence that Kunikida find where the dogs came from—how that should've seemed odd since there hadn't been an ability user present in the streets, which would've given Dazai a reason to stay. If there had been an ability user responsible for the mayhem, the person would've probably been at the dogs' original location waiting for the ADA; Dazai should have gone, but he'd encouraged Kunikida to.
It wasn't the first time Dazai had manipulated the time and place of an enemy encounter, nor the first time he'd sent Kunikida to do the dirty work.
But Dazai released the dogs knowing they’d maul their captor to the brink of death.
He had to have known Kunikida would try to save her from it, and wouldn't be able to.
Not only had I failed to save her, I shot her dead. Like she'd asked me to.
"It's not like the blood on your hands belonged to a good person." Dazai said, reading Kunikida's thoughts with ease. "Death was merciful, even. What with all she must've done to those poor animals, she probably deserved worse than what she got. Or do your ideals say otherwise?"
Confusion clogged Kunikida's throat next to grief and frustration. "My ideals? You—this was about my ideals?"
The look on Dazai's face was both foreign and familiar. Kunikida had only seen it once. But he had no trouble reconstructing the memory. In fact, he suddenly felt as if he was back in that abandoned hospital—watching two other figures bleed out on the cold, hard floor.
Despite his solemn expression, Dazai shrugged one shoulder in an aloof manner. "You'd do well to let them go."
Kunikida glared at his partner with full force now. "You'd do well to realize I'm not going to!"
"It'll be the death of you."
"Shut up. You don't know that."
"I do."
Kunikida bit his tongue hard enough to hurt. Dazai had done all of this and now had the audacity to act unaffected? There had to be more to it. Kunikida had failed to call bullshit earlier, so he wasn't going to now. He rolled the words around in his mouth then let his anger fuel the bite behind them, accusatory and bitter.
"...I wasn't aware you cared this much."
Dazai regarded him impassively instead of responding. For a moment, his gaze travelled over Kunikida's bandaged torso, then stopped at his face. He looked centuries away from all of this.
Dazai turned away before Kunikida could say anything else, briskly walking out of the medbay. When he paused in the doorway, Kunikida expected him to say the same thing as last time—about ideals, and fire, and justice as a weapon.
"I never did like betting on losing dogs." he said instead.
—
Dazai fully expected Kunikida to ignore him after that.
He expected to sit at his office desk across from the blonde in tense silence, condemned to ride in the backseat of the car while Atsushi rode shotgun on missions. Dazai even prepared some comebacks in case the cold shoulder dragged on for too long.
"I don’t know why you’re so angry,” he would say. “It was a win-win if you ask me. We cracked a criminal, and innocent animals were spared a lifetime of fighting!"
Then, if he was feeling particularly dramatic, he’d make a grand metaphor between the dogs and the lifetime of fighting that awaits Kunikida should he keep clinging to his ideals.
Dazai never got the chance, though, for a multitude of reasons. Shit kind of hit the fan with the Port Mafia, then the Guild. Fuckin' Americans, a voice like Yosano’s said in his mind.
If anything, it had given Kunikida even more of an opportunity to distance himself from Dazai.
(Especially since Kunikida experienced Q’s ability first hand. Dazai hadn’t been there to witness it, but he can guess what—or rather who Kunikida’s hallucinations had shown him. Dazai entertained the thought of that dog fighter appearing alongside the Azure Apostle, standing behind a boy in a sand-colored sweater vest.)
Instead, Kunikida seemed to linger over Dazai's shoulder even more. Nagging him ceaselessly about reports, paperwork, filing, everything! It was inescapable! Too late did he realize Kunikida was actually going through with the "How to Make My Ideal, Serious, Hard-Working Dazai" journal.
He didn’t know whether he should laugh or groan at the idea of Kunikida checking off boxes like a helicopter mom every time Dazai completed his work.
He should throw the book out (again) is what he should do.
And he did just that, tossing the accursed thing into the trash bin. Brushing his hands together like a job well done, Dazai turned back towards Kunikidia's personal locker to close it when his name caught his eye again—
Eh?
He scanned and rescanned the words a few times, wondering if he'd misread.
But sure enough, the spine of another book read, "Volume 2: How to Make My Ideal Dazai & Helping an Ex-Mafia into the Light."
Slowly, he picked the journal up the same way someone would pick up a potentially booby-trapped artifact, or a bomb. The beginning of the book had been written in, judging from the way it stood out amongst the otherwise neatly compact page ends.
A quick glance at the locker's remaining contents confirmed that: no, there weren’t any other repeat journals for their coworkers.
Hm. Dazai went through his usual “Screw it, why not?” reasoning before opening up to the first page.
Unless the words hit him properly, he rarely retained anything while reading. As it was, unfortunately, these words did the thing where they glued themselves to Dazai's memory.
“Exposition Notes: I’m making this second volume in light of my newfound knowledge regarding Dazai’s past. With the proper research, I believe I can truly get through to him this time. As the title suggests, I now have to take into account that Dazai was previously part of the Port Mafia and the effects it could’ve had on him.
Medical records reveal very little, so I have to make educated guesses in certain areas. From what I’ve gathered Dazai was of high ranking, which rules out poverty as a factor to his severely irregular eating habits. It’d be an understatement to say the mafia doesn’t appear to take care in monitoring workers’ mental health.”
That had to have been the funniest thing Dazai has ever read. He snorted before continuing.
“Because he came from this environment, I likely have to gradually work him into any kind of routine that resembles a healthy lifestyle. I plan to initiate this by first bringing in extra lunch for Dazai, primarily brain food and other healthy alternatives to combat the alcohol he intakes. The bottles accumulating in his trash are another area to tackle, as are the cigarettes and the bandages—”
Dazai closed the book, feeling slightly off kilter. He also felt pretty damn stupid, having previously assumed that Kunikida was just on some new health kick he didn’t actually enjoy when he started offering Dazai his leftovers. (They tasted pretty good, so Dazai kept accepting them. He wondered if Kunikida did that on purpose...)
What the hell.
Up until right about now, he recalled Kunikida’s discovery of his past occupation with amusement. The blonde had fainted and Dazai had teased him for it mercilessly after he woke up, dodging his partner’s questions and right hooks.
Yes, he knew Kunikida’s perception of him had been shaken to say the least. Of course his partner would look at him differently after finding out he was once a mafia executive.
But out of all of the possible scenarios Dazai considered, he hadn't assumed it’d kickstart a whole new mental health analysis, for fuck's sake. Only Kunikida's charity could take it this far past arrogance...
He wondered when Kunikida had gotten the impression that Dazai was something malleable; something Kunikida could mold with his idea of "the light."
Was it before or after they met the leader of the Port Mafia for a truce, and it greeted Dazai like an old friend? (Before the memory could wake more phantom pains along his body, Dazai quickly shoved the it back with the others in the part of his mind dedicated to the thing named Ougai Mori.)
Was it before or after Dazai used less than even a fraction of what Mori taught him to set up a hot date with Kunikida and someone he'd have to kill? Fucking hell. Maybe Kunikida was just as bad at paying attention as Dazai was...
Kunikida's voice jolted him from his stasis.
"Dammit, Dazai! What did I say about picking my locks!"
Dazai lifted his head to look at his partner, who’s hands rested on his hips in such a motherly fashion it almost made Dazai snort.
The book in Dazai's hands grounded him, though—feeling far too heavy for something that was actually so pointless.
Kunikida had been saying something in his usual rapid-fire condescension. Dazai cut him off.
"You made a second one,” he said curiously, not exactly a question.
The blonde glanced at the journal in Dazai’s hands before nodding once. "Yes."
Dazai stared at him for a moment. There were a number of things he could do right now.
He could wave the book around and call it a diary like he did on occasion, he could throw it at the other man’s chest and tell him it was a waste of time because 'only one of us is fixing the other' in this partnership. He could smile and say there's a reason the Port Mafia doesn't keep records of what happens to the kids there, he could sing and dance and taunt Kunikida for having such a big crush on him that he made an entire second book.
He could ask, "What makes you think you can change me?"
None of these were really worth it, though, so Dazai went with the quickest escape route. He tossed the book over his shoulder and the sound of metal told him it successfully landed in the bin.
“Hey!” Kunikida shouted, striding over to retrieve it.
"You are most certainly just wasting paper now," Dazai lamented dramatically. “You might as well be chopping and razing down the forests yourself, Kunikida-kuunnn. I thought you cared about the environment?”
From where he was bent over the trash, Kunikida started avidly defending his journal maker. Something about suppliers and conservationist papermakers and eco-friendly binding, but Dazai was already waltzing out the door.
As Kunikida’s voice faded behind him, Dazai tried to recall the last person who'd given a shit about his eating habits before terminating the train of thought altogether.