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When Rashomon hooks around his ankle, dragging him over asphalt and the miscellanea of alley strewn filth, Atsushi doesn’t have time to blink. His jacket tears. Then his shirt. Then his shoulder blades, the knobby protrusion of his cervical spine. The skin catches and scrapes, stinging and then burning, and then, between one breath and the next, scraping turns to gouging, gouging to flaying, and the pain turns into something new, something novel.
Horrible, sure. He can feel the way his back has sloughed. The sticky-warm gush of blood.
The pain.
Of course the pain.
Atsushi’s never been flayed before. This isn’t exactly that. Really, it’s hardly even an imitation, but it’s new. There’s very little that’s new to him when it comes to pain.
There’s this, now, being dragged across asphalt, being torn open, lacerations all the way to the muscle, to the bones in his neck. It’s a death sentence—or it would be were he anyone else.
There’s this: brutality, normalcy, the usual bluster and dance.
And there’s earlier that week: a different sort of pain. A psychic headache. Something so terrible it cleaved him open the moment he heard.
Akutagawa must have heard, as well.
He’s usually not so careless as to actually rip him apart. Not anymore, at least. Atsushi thinks they must have conjoined at some point. He thinks that Akutagawa sees them as a two-headed lamb. Sickly. Monstrous. The same. Always the same. Atsushi’s continued survival, his clumsy grasping at happiness, could be Akutagawa’s survival, Akutagawa’s happiness. It isn’t. And it won’t be. Not because it can’t, but because Akutagawa isn’t capable of letting anything good crawl into his hands without leaving it to rot.
Atsushi thinks he’s pathetic, most of the time. He doesn’t mean it pejoratively. More as a point of fact. He thinks the same of himself, but, then, of course he does.
Rashomon hauls him into the air. He’s hanging upside down and the world tilts strangely, in fracturing blurs, and Atsushi realizes his head is swinging at an angle that heads should not swing at. His vision blots. Blackens. The ambient noise of Yokohama beyond this derelict alleyway fuzzes out. He feels blood slip down his face, into his nose, over his eyelashes, pooling and then dripping from the stringy ends of his hair onto the ground with fat plops.
He can’t count them, doesn’t even consider trying, thoughts too immaterial, but the sound of it resonates. There’s the warm, ticklish journey down his face. Then plop.
His body knits itself back together. The blood stops being so warm. It congeals a bit. The dripping stops.
Atsushi is still hanging by his ankle in the air. Akutagawa stands peering up at him. He’s coiled so tightly that it’s surprising the tension hasn’t snapped his spine straight in half. Were he the dog he acts like, Atsushi expects his muzzle would be pulled into a snarl, spittle flying.
Without the blood loss and haze of sudden, panicked adrenaline, Atsushi can’t find it in himself to offer more than an unimpressed frown.
What he forgets every time they go through this, is that Akutagawa excels when acting as part of a one man show.
“Jinko,” he starts, so angry he’s shaking with it. So angry that he has to stop and catch his breath, jaw spasming as he stares around him, eyes never landing on his face.
“Boy,” he can almost hear, so familiar. He could be fourteen, right now, hanging from his wrists, metal hooks pushed through the tendons, gravity causing the wounds to gape as he’s pulled down. He can’t remember what he’d done that time. Probably nothing. He probably crushed an ant or pulled a weed or breathed a little too easily.
He can’t remember.
Something like that and he can’t even remember why. Something like that and it’s commonplace in his head.
Akutagawa can’t even look at him.
He gets like this often. Privately, Atsushi finds it all a bit exhausting. That Akutagawa is undergoing an ethical metamorphosis is all well and good, but dealing with it is like pulling teeth. Worse.
He’s angry, which Atsushi understands, both in general and now, in particular. He’s angry and he lashes out. Case and point: before today, Atsushi’s never been flayed. Akutagawa, for all he sometimes acts otherwise, isn’t stupid. He causes death enough to recognize it.
It’s funny, almost, that Akutagawa feels badly over his near accidental manslaughter while Atsushi can hardly muster more than bland contempt. It just… gets old, that’s all. He doesn’t need to playact the same story over and over the way Akutagawa does. Eighteen years was enough.
Maybe that’s unfair. Maybe it’s different, since the Headmaster is dead, and Dazai is—
The thought curdles. Saliva pools in his mouth like he’s about to vomit.
He doesn’t struggle, because he’s been caught by Rashomon enough to know it’ll cause more harm than good, but he does begin weighing the pros and cons of sacrificing his right foot to get out of Akutagawa’s grasp.
Akutagawa gathers himself enough to continue, all bluster. He still can’t look at him and watching him waffle makes his stomach hurt. Akutagawa, for all he acts above it, is too transparent, too soft, too pitiful—and he thinks, maybe, right now, he’s mortified on his behalf. Atsushi knows before he speaks what he’s going to say, he can read it all over his face, he knew from the moment Rashomon first hooked around his ankle, and sure enough: “Where the hell is Dazai?”
And that’s the question, isn’t it?
Atsushi sighs through his nose. He considers, very briefly, sharing what little he knows: that Dazai’s been taken, that he’s being ransomed, that no one knows where he is or who’s keeping him or why. Really, if he brought Akutagawa on to help with the search he doesn’t think anyone would have an issue with it. That he’d help is a given. There’s not a single doubt in his mind.
Of course, that's the problem. At least, that's what Atsushi thinks.
He should tell him, if only because he knows Akutagawa won't rest until Dazai's found, and because the Agency is hitting dead-end after dead-end, and because Atsushi wants Dazai to be found, more than anything—or more than anything in reason.
It's all a little perverse. He'll admit that. Both his own hesitation and the idea of what the news would do to Akutagawa.
It’s not so much his desire to help, but the root of that desire, the idea of the magnetic pull between Akutagawa and Dazai snapping back into place when it had only recently snapped apart, their clean break being splinted, that sets his stomach twisting over in disgust.
And then there’s what comes with it: the idea that everyone would let him contort himself to fit his old skin just to find Dazai, as if there’s nothing wrong with hooking that leash around his throat again, as if the past is never really the past but just different configurations of the present…
“Boy,” he can almost hear, as if he never left that room, never left that man.
He'd wonder what Akutagawa hears, but of course he already knows.
Carefully, Atsushi twists himself upright, executing a move somewhere between an abdominal crunch and an unchoreographed flail. As his weight begins to tip his body over the opposite direction, he catches Rashomon with his hand, already transformed, and cuts the strand keeping him airborne with a careful snag of a claw. He lands in a crouch, unscathed apart from his shirt which hangs in tatters at his back.
“It’s always Dazai with you,” he says, preempting whatever vitriol Akutagawa is preparing to spew at him. “Would it kill you to say hello?”
“Hello,” Akutagawa snaps. “Jinko, answer my—”
“Did I miss something?” He interrupts, squinting at him in feigned confusion. For a moment, guilt bubbles through him and he almost holds his tongue, but Akutagawa is too persistent to let the question go without a distraction, and Atsushi has never been above playing his sore spots. “Since when have Dazai’s comings and goings been your business? You're not stupid, Akutagawa. I know you can take a hint."
All at once, Akutagawa tenses, braces himself, as whatever dregs of levity that exist in him are snuffed out. He says, clipped in his shock, "What."
Atsushi pushes closer, maybe a half-step from becoming too close—though he's not convinced such a thing exists when it comes to them, always in orbit, always looming or leering, taking ground or seceding.
He can taste the words before he says them, like bile in his mouth. "You're not his dog. You don't need to keep crawling after him." He pauses. Akutagawa doesn't let anything show on his face, but Atsushi knows him, he sees the tautness of his shoulders, the flex of his jaw. Shock transmuted to hurt transmuted to anger. A clean distraction. "Aren't you better than that?"
Atsushi takes another step. The tips of his shoes poke the tips of Akutagawa's just for a moment, then Akutagawa skitters back, face pinched, off-balance, furious, "What is wrong with you?"
He doesn't lash out. Atsushi thought he would. If not with Rashomon, then with his hands. He thought he'd strike him or strangle him, push him back, haul him up. Really, he thought he'd do anything but listen.
"Maybe you're not," he says, the words spilling out without him intending them to. He pushes closer again, snags a hand around Akutagawa's wrist, and says, "You're not better than that. You like that." Akutagawa stands frozen, dark eyes glimmering with something Atsushi regrets noticing, if only because he can't help but immediately grasp at it. "I was wrong, wasn't I? You're not Dazai’s dog anymore, are you?"
Horrifically, terribly, Akutagawa shakes his head in slow agreement, seeming out-of-body. He doesn't look away from Atsushi, not once, and his voice comes out in a choked, humiliated whisper as he agrees, "No."
Atsushi feels lightheaded. He feels like he's just been pulled down beneath a train he hadn't seen coming—only that's not really true for all he might wish it was or for all it might be easier. Unfortunately, he's not stupid and Akutagawa is far from subtle. He just hadn't connected this particular dot. And to think he's been so smug over knowing so much about his partner's special brand of neurosis. Unbelievable.
"No," Atsushi nods, something strange churning his stomach, something almost fond.
Akutagawa is so strange, he can't help but think. He's so wrapped up in roles and places that he can't help but slot everyone into a well trod routine. He can't help but find someone to hold his leash.
Slowly, Atsushi lets go of his wrist, probably already purpling from how hard he's been holding him, and lifts his hand to cup the side of Akutagawa's face, the pads of his fingers ghosting along the skin of his cheek, meandering down the curve of his jawbone where he strokes his thumb lazily, gently. He can feel the shuddering breath he takes, feel the way his pulse races, feel as his blood goes warm under his touch, feel the blush that's blotting itself down his throat.
It must be eating him alive, Atsushi knows, to so plainly want something. He wonders if it's desire or humiliation or a mix of both turning him red right now. He wonders if he'd ever share. Probably not.
Still, there are other things to get out of him. More interesting things.
With that thought, Atsushi finally asks the question, more out of his own desire to hear the answer then any doubt he has about what Akutagawa will say. "It's because you want to be my dog, now, isn't it? That's what you want? To crawl around for me? To be good?"
Akutagawa makes a sound in the back of his throat. A desperate, needy sound. A whine.
Atsushi supposes that's answer enough.