Chapter Text
If someone asked Dazai why he is sat on a ridiculous magenta sofa with mustard-coloured cushions, surrounded by disgustingly abstract wallpapers and currently being interviewed by an explosive redhead, he would probably be too lazy to answer you.
Because it’s not a very short story.
And Dazai is a lazy man.
He prefers the word ‘efficient’ sometimes. Because it’s a bit fancy, and makes him sound more productive than he really is. It refers to someone doing as little work possible for the best results—much better than lazy. Though lazy certainly fits better for the moments he spends trudging to and fro the one cabinet in his shack where his canned crab is stored and then returning to his bed to eat it in the ghostly silence of his room, filled only by the monotonous ticking of his clock.
Dazai has never liked his bedroom at all.
Too quiet, too dark, too dirty, too small.
But this room is a hundred times worse.
It’s surrounded in colours far too bright for Dazai. They abuse his pupils, and usually, people are dark and dull and ugly, so they’re easier to look at.
But the man opposite him also explodes in colour.
Fiery red hair, sharp tongue that can work at a hundred miles an hour when he needs to get a point across, eyes a stark cerulean that dulls the shades of blue lining the walls.
Everything in the room is unbearable to Dazai’s eyes.
But, there is at least he,
who is not such a pain to look at.
Nine days earlier, Dazai was simply sat in his boss’s office, reading over the information for his new mission. It’s not necessary because he knows just how to perfect the operation in his own way, but protocol is unfortunately still protocol.
Mori’s office does not give any better a vibe today than it does any other day. The walls are painted a solid brick colour, similar to that of a human’s tainted blood, encasing the entire room with its four walls. There are no windows; a given, since they’re so deep underground that sunlight cannot even graze the highest corners of the place. Dazai doesn’t like places with no windows. Other than that, it’s a seemingly normal office: a desk at the farthest wall; a small collection of sofas, which are mostly unused, save the few times Mori allows guests into his office. (The guests seem to never make it out alive.) In the farthest wall, right behind the desk, and right behind the seat that Mori usually occupies, is a copy of Reading in a Bamboo Grove by Shubun Tenshou. Dazai briefly remembers Mori telling him about its history. Clearly—considering his lack of successful recollection—Dazai had not cared.
“Ugh,” Dazai groans subtly, looking away from the file in front of him with an exaggerated frown, lifting his eyes to only briefly glance at his boss. “Is all this reading really necessary? It’s hurting my head.”
Mori seems to be a bit loose at the ends today, because he doesn’t immediately shove the file in his face and force him to read it. Instead, he smiles—that usual shrewd smile, that emphasises his unnervingly guileful voice even more. It’s usually enough to make people cower in their shoes. Unfortunately, Dazai has spent nearly his entire life with the man, so it doesn’t affect him nearly as much as it does everyone else.
“Do you want me to get highlighters for you, Dazai-kun?” the man drawls, raising a taunting brow. “Perhaps that teenagerly act will entice you enough to drop your head and read the information.”
Dazai is not amused. “It’s just a lot of boring reading. I can’t even concentrate.”
Mori stares at him for a few seconds. Dazai stares right back.
Neither backs down, but Mori does eventually let out a short sigh, rolling his eyes slightly. Dazai considers it a win in the back of his head, even though it can’t really be considered anything of the sort.
“Let me explain it to you, then,” Mori says, pulling the file towards himself. “I have enough time to indulge you for a few minutes, even though I’d much prefer not to.”
Dazai doesn’t want the man to read to him. That’s even worse. Having to listen to his painfully devious voice, having to glance at his pale face, having to stay in the same room as him a second longer.
But it seems that there’s no way out of this, since his boss starts speaking up before he can even manage a word of smooth protest.
“I’m sure you’ve heard, haven’t you?” Mori asks, tilting his head in mock curiosity.
Dazai sighs. “I have,” he answers.
The man smiles his creepy smile and nods thoughtfully. “It seems that the leader of the Ozaki Mafia, Ozaki Nao, has a missing husband,” Mori starts. His eyes glimmer with unshielded wicked. “And... a missing weapon. A very valuable one.”
“I’m aware,” the brunette simply deadpans.
“Right,” Mori mumbles. “Well, what do you make of that?”
Dazai sighs. He yawns briefly, mumbling something that’s incoherent even to himself. “You know what I’m going to say,” the brunette says eventually, looking up at his boss with boredom. “The rumours about him running away. They’re probably true.”
“You think Nakahara Genzou ran away with One Order?” Mori questions, tilting his head a little.
Dazai shrugs with one shoulder. “Pretty much. I doubt he took it to actually use it, though.”
“Then what do you suppose happened?”
“I can’t say for sure.” Dazai glances away from Mori, looking down at the desk in front of him instead, focusing on the subtle swirl patterns in the mahogany. “He was probably being forced to manufacture it.”
“By...?”
“His wife.”
“What makes you say so?”
Dazai sighs. He really wanted to avoid using up his brain power so early in the morning, but Mori loves backing him into a corner every chance he gets. “He’s an intelligent neuroscientist, and yet he never manufactured anything in the first half of his life,” the brunette states, setting his elbow down on the table in front of him so that he can lean his cheek into his palm. “Meaning he was never an inventor before. But as soon as he got married twenty-seven years ago, he’s been working on one single project, which has been kept in the dark from everyone for so long that its existence isn’t even confirmed. Nakahara himself has barely seen the light of day since the marriage too. It only makes sense that he’s been forced to build and perfect One Order for the past twenty-seven years.”
Mori grins wildly. He nods in response, to show that he’s keeping up with what Dazai is saying, and then flips some pages over in the file in front of him. “Do you truly believe One Order exists...?” the man asks, meeting brown eyes.
Dazai frowns. “Of course it does,” he mumbles, watching whilst Mori continues flipping through the file.
“No one has ever seen it, you know.”
“I’m sure it exists.”
“Hm.” With an amused smile, Mori finally finds the page he was looking for, and sits back down on his seat, pushing the file into Dazai’s line of sight. “What do you think it does?”
The brunette shrugs with a shoulder, letting out another small yawn whilst dropping his eyes down to look at the file in front of him. “I couldn’t say. Not enough information on it.” Dazai’s pupils immediately latch onto the picture in the top right-hand corner of the page. It’s a picture of a person, clearly taken without their knowledge, where they’re stood outside a building, eyes looking off somewhere to the left.
Dazai notices the person’s hair, first of all.
It’s an unbelievable shade of red.
“That’s Nakahara Chuuya,” Mori says, observing closely whilst Dazai stares intensely at the picture. The brunette’s eyes slide off the picture to check the person’s profile. His sex is listed as ‘Male’, which is a given.
“He’s the youngest child of Ozaki Nao and Nakahara Genzou,” Mori continues, watching whilst Dazai’s eyes scan across the redhead’s profile, drinking in the information laid out for him: blood type, date of birth, eye colour, hair colour, height. The genetic eye and hair colour corresponds with what his eye and hair colour is in the picture, but something about his appearance is still completely unbelievable to Dazai.
There’s no way in hell that someone could be so...
“He adopted his dad’s surname because he’s not the heir to the Mafia,” Dazai’s boss continues. He leans over, and flicks the page over again, pulling Dazai out of his subtle entrancement. “The heir would be his older sister, Ozaki Kouyou. But she is extremely protected, especially after the recent disappearance of her father, so infiltration through her is near impossible. You know what that means, don’t you?”
Mori flicks back to Nakahara Chuuya.
“I need you to infiltrate the Ozaki Mafia. And I need you to do that, through this boy.”
Dazai tears his eyes away from Nakahara Chuuya to look up at his boss. Mori simply smiles down at him, eyes glowing red under the incessant pouring of light from the bulbs in the ceiling.
“Why him?” Dazai asks, even though he knows why. And it sounds stupid, even to himself, even in his own head, but... something in his gut does not want him to get anywhere close to the redhead in the picture.
“He’s our weakest link,” Mori answers, leaning back into his chair. “He has Ozaki blood, so he probably knows about One Order. And he’s the only one who isn’t fiercely protected right now. Considering that he’s the best martial artist in his mafia, he’s probably still on the line-up for missions. You can infiltrate through him. If you get close enough.”
Dazai frowns slightly. He glances down again, at the picture, at the fiery red hair, and those stupidly blue eyes. “And how do you suggest I do that?” he mutters.
Mori shrugs nonchalantly. “In any way that suits you,” he states, intertwining his fingers together again. “As a friend, as a subordinate, as a lover—it doesn’t affect me. What affects me is the intel you gather. I’d like for you to confirm One Order’s existence, once and for all. Where it is. What it does. And what happened to Nakahara Genzou.”
Dazai clenches his jaw so tightly that it clicks. His eyes drift over to meet his boss’s yet again. “And what do you want me to do, if One Order exists?” he asks, voice monotone.
Mori grins.
It is nothing short of malicious.
“Steal it,” he says.
Dazai wasn’t expecting anything less. “The process would mean having to kill Nakahara Chuuya in the end, right?”
Mori smiles. “Of course. He would know it’s you that stole it. We can’t be having that.”
Dazai looks down at the picture again.
He does not know when Mori stands up, or when he walks over, but after a minute and a half, there’s suddenly a weight on Dazai’s shoulder, in the form of a heavy, gloved hand.
“That won’t be a problem,” Mori states, smiling so hard down at his subordinate that his eyes almost disappear from how hard he’s squinting. “You gather my intel the best, because you never develop attachments. Isn’t that correct?”
Dazai stares up at the man tiredly. “Mhm,” he says, resisting the urge to roll his eyes.
“And you won’t be starting now.”
“Of course not.”
“Wonderful.” Mori retracts his hand, and walks back to his seat. “Take the file with you. It has the operation’s details in it—there’s too much that I don’t have time to read to you. Once you’ve managed to read it, report back to me. We’ll begin the mission promptly. Until then, you’re dismissed.”
Dazai sighs.
With one last yawn, he stands up, grabs the file, and leaves.
Above ground, Dazai sits cross-legged on his small, dirty bed, frowning down at the file in front of him.
Of course, he still hates reading the file just as much as he hated it before.
But it’s a little more bearable, because... well, there’s something interesting in the file, too.
And it comes in the form of Nakahara Chuuya.
The man is the same age as Dazai. He’s almost two months older than the brunette, too. At first, when Dazai saw the picture, he thought the door the boy is stood next to was built a little bit taller than usual. But after reading that his height is a mere five feet three—and that’s rounded up—it turns out it’s just the redhead who is weirdly small for a boy (and probably using that disgusting hat to look even a fraction taller).
It makes Dazai's eyebrows raise with amusement.
What a chibi. And he’s meant to be the best martial artist in their mafia?
After a few more minutes of blatant staring, Dazai flicks the page over, his eyes landing down on Nakahara Chuuya’s sister, Ozaki Kouyou.
Unlike Nakahara Chuuya, Ozaki Kouyou is looking right into the camera, pink-ish eyes staring right into Dazai’s non-existent soul. It can’t be a mugshot. It must be just a normal picture someone managed to get a hold of. She seems more poised, more perfected than her brother. Unlike Nakahara Chuuya, who has a subtle grimace on his face, Ozaki Kouyou adopts a tranquil expression, eyes relaxed and lips curled only the tiniest bit, in a calculated way. Her hair is pinned up in a neat bun and she’s dressed in traditional floral Japanese clothing. She’s older than Dazai and her brother by six years, and is almost as tall as the brunette.
For an heir, she seems perfectly suitable.
Dazai can tell just from her face that she is lethal, but composed. The two qualities that make a perfect leader.
With a sigh, Dazai flicks the file over to the infiltration component, and reads it over. Obviously, he struggles to pay attention to such a boring article consisting of just words on paper. He has to read the same paragraph over at least twice before he can move on to the next. At some point, he gets fed up, trudges over to the kitchen for a canned crab break, and then returns after an hour of procrastination.
The first few paragraphs explain Dazai’s made-up background for the infiltration. He’ll be portraying a poor man, of course, but an exceptional one, that is so intelligent he brings everyone in his slum to their knees. It fits well with the life of normal Dazai. Living a double life with Mori has been the norm for him his entire life. Underground, the man runs a mafia, with his most prized subordinate as his confidant. Overground, they’re a poor dad-and-son combo just trying to get by in the slums. It turns out that being poor makes it much easier to infiltrate. The excuses pile up like sand; “Oh, I need money to treat my sick father,” or, “I’m tired of being pushed around in the slums and want to join your mafia,” or, “I want to kill everyone who wronged me.” Basically, living a double life as a poor man and son overground is surprisingly beneficial to the entire mafia. It also means that their documents are more realistic, so mafias like the Ozaki Mafia can easily be fooled by their backgrounds.
Dazai will be given a criminal record for the operation. It’ll be forged that he’s been previously charged with embezzlement, fraud, and even attempted murder. This is meant to make it more believable that he’d want to join a mafia.
He’s allowed to keep his real name, only because the Ozaki Mafia can easily get their hands on Dazai’s birth certificate if they wanted to, and then he’ll be quickly suspected of wanting to infiltrate. Especially since Nakahara Genzou has gone missing. They may be wary of people wanting to join to get information on One Order; which means that it’ll, in turn, lower the suspicion on Dazai, because they’ll think he wouldn’t be stupid enough to join in such fragile times unless he genuinely meant it.
It seemingly adds up.
But...
With a sigh, Dazai flicks back to Nakahara Chuuya’s profile, frowning down at him.
Is there really not going to be any information on him? Dazai doesn’t know what to expect from his face alone. Which is odd in itself, because the brunette is specialised in reading people’s faces, but...
It’s strange.
Dazai doesn’t like being surprised. It’s easier when he knows what’s going to happen, what he can expect someone to say, or think, or do. When he knows the general idea of how the day will play out.
But he doesn’t know what exactly to expect from little Mr. Hat-Rack.
Hm...
Dazai settles his elbow onto his knee, letting his cheek fall into his palm, gazing down at the picture again.
He can infiltrate however he wants, right?
As a friend.
Or a subordinate.
...Or a lover.
For the first time that day, Dazai’s lips pull up into a smile, eyes softly twinkling with mischief under the dull light of his tattered bedroom.
Well...
If he’s really going to have to do such a hectic mission,
He might as well have some fun with it.