Chapter Text
“You want me and the weretiger to work together?” Was the first thing that Akutagawa said once agreements had been made and the detectives had left. “Permanently?”
Chuuya snorted at the younger man’s bluntness, but eyed the mentor and student pair warily. He didn’t know everything about their history, but he knew enough about Dazai’s past teaching methods to keep an eye on the pair, the other fixed on the fourth mafioso in the room, Q.
“That was the idea from the start,” Dazai said easily as he stood and started walking towards the door, the others within the room knowing without being asked to follow. That office was something that only held horrible memories for the new mafia boss and was going to be renovated into a meeting room and a new office to replace the executive office that Dazai was taking back over, the one that had been his when he was one.
Chuuya waited outside the office door and motioned for Q to do the same, knowing that this was something private between the other two. Something fragile that could break as easily as it might form.
“What?” Akutagawa asked, sounding the most confused and least angry that any of them had ever heard the man.
“You are the new Double Black, aren’t you?” Dazai asked softly as he walked into his old office and leaned against the desk there that still had personal notes and copies of documents on it from years prior. It looked as if no one else had been in there since he’d left after Odasaku had died, but he knew that wasn’t exactly true as it had been dusted regularly. “I’ve been looking for a partner for you since I found you that day in the woods.”
He said it casually, as if the level of commitment there given to the boy that had been abandoned by Dazai himself wasn’t enough to startle Akutagawa into silence.
“I might ruin him,” the mafia’s hellhound says softly, looking anywhere but the man before him.
“Gods, I hope you do.”
“What?”
Dazai sighs and drags a bandaged hand down his face. “I can’t wait for the day that someone asks too much of him and he says no like none of us in this damned place ever learned how to. So ruin him, give him that anger that he only feels around you, maybe he’ll ruin you too.”
It wasn’t an apology for their past, or a thing of the like, but it was permission to change another and to be changed by them. Akutagawa didn’t know if that was better or worse, but it felt strangely as if he was letting a sharper part of himself go as he bowed and then left the office.
Q bounded into the room as Akutagawa left, their smile just south of crazed as they cradled their doll in their arms, each of them dressed in a set of clothes that Dazai had gone out with the teen to buy the day before like he had when they were younger. The younger ability user had looked at him with a strange sort of twisted silence on the car ride back to the Port Mafia towers when they had asked if they were going to be locked up once more, something that Dazai knew Q was aware of his part in the first time around. His answer had been dull no, holding little emotion within it as he’d spoken. Q didn’t need his pity or regret, and they both knew that the child would never receive it, not when they had both been under the command of the same demon.
“I don’t think your detectives like me very much,” Q stated as they plopped themself down on one of the guest chairs in the room, setting their doll carefully down on the other.
Dazai shrugged. “Nothing you can control,” he said easily. “I don’t think that they like me very much either right now.” He knew that they didn’t and wouldn’t for a while. “They’ll have to get used to you though if you’re going to be a runner now and maybe an executive one day.”
For the second time that hour there was a child looking at Dazai with a surprised expression as they muttered the same word:
“What?”
“I already told you that I’m not going to lock you back up,” Dazai explained smoothly, uncaringly of the other’s confusion. “I have no reason to now that Mori is dead and can’t use your ability anymore. That means that you can finally start doing work within the mafia.”
“A runner? An executive?” Q asked, knowing that this was one of the positions with the most field work and contact with others, knowing that there tons of other places that the new boss could have placed them that wouldn’t have involved this.
Dazai nodded. “Nothing big to start with,” he said easily, ignoring the younger’s turmoil as they came around to the idea, to the promise of freedom. Something that they could almost believe since the demon before them always kept their deals. “You don’t have the people skills for delicate jobs, but we’ll work on that along with catching you up with schooling. Executives should at least have some even if they aren’t taught until they are within the mafia itself, Black Lizards too. And you’ll need to become more comfortable with your ability regardless of which you pick but I’ll be there to help with that.”
“You want me to become an interrogator like you?” Q asked because of that last remark, knowing how suited their ability would be for the job.
“No,” Dazai said quickly, knowing that the teen would hate it because of how much they hate their own ability and themselves for being cursed by it, “though we should practice on those brought in. I just want you to have options and you can’t learn anything from Kouyou if we risk losing those you spar against to insanity each time you do so.”
“Sparring?” Q asked, a little disbelieving in the needing of doing so.
Dazai only laughed. “We can’t have you knocking into people forever, especially now that the barbed wire is gone for good.”
The teen nodded knowing that their arms were already on the way to healing fully, something that made them feel more grounded in a way but made it harder for their ability to act. “But why an executive?”
“You’ve been raised in the mafia,” Dazai said bluntly, “it’s unfair but it’s true. Those of us raised within it know it better than anyone. It’s our home. The executives are those that feel this as well and are bound to the mafia even if they leave it. What else would a child of the mafia become if not one of its leaders?”
A home, it was a lofty promise for children like them that had never truly had one. But both Q and Dazai knew that they belonged in - to - the mafia in ways that the grunts that came to it because they had nowhere else to go never would.
“I’ll have to study a great deal,” Q said, warming up to the idea as Dazai had known that they would, “especially if I want to beat the record that you set, Mr. Youngest Executive in mafia history.”
“There is almost always a seat open,” Dazai said, amicably accepting the challenge as he thought of his own seat that he would need to fill and that of Ace’s once he had the bastard killed. The fact that the gambler was an executive at all made the new mafia boss wonder for a moment if his predecessor had begun to lose his mind as the mafia boss before him had. He’d need to gather the other three executives soon about the needed replacements and see if the child before him could learn for a bit from each of them after rising within the ranks and learning to control their own ability more fully.
“Right.”
None of this was an apology either , no one within the mafia put much stock in them, but it was something. It was more than Dazaiever thought that he would give and Q ever thought that they would get.
“You did good today,” Chuuya said softly as he slipped into the room as the two - toned child left, still giving the kid a wide berth regardless of Dazai’s feelings for the teen. The gravity manipulator still only saw body bags lined up in too neat rows outside of their building when he looked at them. He figured that he always would despite the new boss’s plans to integrate the mind controller back into the mafia and the world around it. “Better than I thought a mackerel like you could.”
“Humanity has never been my strong suit,” the new mafia boss whispered as Chuuya pressed close, wrapping one arm around the younger man’s waist as the other played absently with the blue scarf, running gloved fingers over the wave patterns. This close Dazai could smell the faint scent of ozone and smoke that was buried beneath an expensive cologne that the former detective didn’t doubt was from Kouyou. Chuuya had never been one to buy things for himself other than wine. “But that’s why I have you to keep me human.”
Blue eyes meet green as Chuuya looks up at the other mafioso with an urgency that he hadn’t thought he’d need to possess after the meeting with the detective agency had concluded. Yet here it was now.
“I’m not the best example of that,” Chuuya said in a startled voice that bordered on anger as Dazai could all but see the older man’s walls rising up.
He could see the other ability user’s panic, could almost feel it as if it were his own. Dazai didn’t waste time thinking and leaned down to kiss the other, feeling everything still as he pulled away from the soft press of lips. Even just a graze like this was enough to make the demigod’s heart race as if he were about to go into battle as it always did when he touched, though for completely different reasons this time.
Dazai reached down to the still man and grabbed the wrist holding onto his scarf with a gentleness that neither used very often with the other outside of hotel bathrooms when patching up injuries that Dazai hadn’t been quick enough or cared enough to avoid, and removed the glove there. He felt Chuuya watching him more intensely as he placed it down on his desk before threading their fingers together in a way that Dazai was almost sure whispered of his reluctance to ever be apart again.
Arahabaki went blissfully still with the cool touch that reminded Chuuya of the sea that ran through the other’s veins.
“Lines of code or DNA,” Dazai started, his thumb pressing against the other man’s pulse as he watched with a slight wonder at the fact that he was allowed to so casually touch the other now after years of never thinking that he would, “you are more human than I will ever be. You are human enough.”
The next kiss was hungrier as Chuuya pushed to meet the other, something blissful feeling him at the thought of doing so for eternity. He wasn’t stupid, nothing was truly fixed between them, not fully anyways. There would still be days when Dazai can’t stand another’s touch - Chuuya’s included - when his casual cruelty becomes too much as he spends more time back in the mafia. There would still be days where human is the last thing that Chuuya feels. Days when he’ll hate Dazai for leaving and Dazai might just hate him for being the reason that he came back and lost both his family in the states and the dynamic that he had built in the Armed Detective Agency. When brief talks with Atsushi for joint missions and brief meetings in a cheap bar with Ranpo and Yosano aren’t enough. When letters with Nico weren’t enough and the sea forever felt like a hostile place now that the god of it had shunned him as much as Dazai has shunned him.
They both knew all of this, all these reasons that things should have stayed the way that they were, but it hurt more to be apart than it ever did to be together. It wouldn’t be easy, each of them were a shattered pot that the other man has had a hand in breaking, but they each had enough gold to piece each other back together with delicate hands.
Chuuya pulled away and pressed his lips to the stars on the other man’s throat, a galaxy under his lips as he kissed the track marks that they hid, evidence of just how much more similar they are with one another than Chuuya ever wanted them to be.
They would heal, the both of them would as they built a world that wouldn’t anymore children like them.
They would heal, together.