Chapter Text
Kunikida wakes up slowly, putting his head in his hands. The world is spinning in front of his eyes, grass blending with trees blending with sky. He reaches up out of nervous habit to smooth down his ponytail and push up his glasses, but neither are there.
"What?" he mumbles, feeling around on the ground. Another surprise: he can see fine without them.
He looks up. Takes in the scene in front of him, remembers a report on the individual they were chasing.
"Holy shit, Ranpo! Kunikida fucks," comes Yosano's voice from in front of him.
"I'm going to die right here," he says, completely deadpan. "I'm going to die before I have to find out when my esteemed coworkers lost their virginity."
Yosano is dressed in a punk outfit, hair shaved into an undercut, nails cut short. Ranpo and Poe are both a few years younger, and if the eye contact they're making is any indication, the same age. Tanizaki looks to be around 19, lipstick mark on his cheek. Everyone is steadfastly ignoring that it's Naomi's favorite shade.
Fukuzawa... Fukuzawa is standing there dressed in ripped jeans and a leather jacket, daring anyone to mention it.
Someone does.
"Damn," says Ranpo. "Dad's hot."
Yosano nods. "Dad's hot.”
He fixes them both with a Look. "I'm going to fire you two. We all went through a rebellious phase."
Kenji sits up and rubs his eyes as everyone else at the site regains consciousness. He looks the exact same. Kaji stands, also unchanged. This mission was a joint effort between the two organizations, a tentative peace branch.
"Ha," Yosano says with a smile. "Loser."
"I don't wanna hear it from you," he says. Their friendship is a terrifying force.
"I bet you've probably gotten down and dirty with a lemon."
"I have not," Kaji says with a little too much force.
Yosano's face lights up. "He has!"
"I'm being bullied—"
Chuuya is observing the entire scene in silence, leaning against a wall. "I'm the same age as Akutagawa, then."
"Shut up," comes a voice from the ground, followed by several coughs.
"That's not what you said last night—"
"Gross!" says Atsushi. "I don't want to hear any of this, please, get a room." Kyouka is standing by his side, and Kunikida is relieved to see all the kids stay the same.
"We are immune to propaganda," she says quietly. Kenji high fives her.
"This isn't how the mission was supposed to go," Kunikida says to himself.
Poe laughs. "Did Kunikida really look like that?"
"Do you think he wrote about it in the Ideal?" Ranpo mumbles, and Kunikida flushes red.
Before he can respond, everyone grows silent. Kunikida follows their gazes over to a small form in the corner that rubs its eyes and groans melodramatically.
"What the hell is happening?" Dazai says. He looks down at his hands, at the people around him. They only stare back. He winces, rising to his feet in one fluid motion.
"Man, I really got the short end of the stick here. Like, Yosano got hot, Boss got..." He tries and fails to suppress a laugh. "Boss got hotter, and what do I have? The form of a twelve year old. Weird that the Ability worked on me, but maybe this was before I'd figured out how to work No Longer Human. Some sort of loophole."
He doesn’t stop talking as he moves forward, content to fill the silence with his rambling. "Did I say twelve? Probably? Hold on." He looks impossibly small, standing there a foot shorter than the rest of them. A coat is draped around his shoulders and the bandages are gone. His hair is pulled back into a low ponytail, curls framing his face. He pulls his shirt away from his chest and peers down at some hidden scar.
"Oh! Nine, actually. Explains why I'm so small, I guess? I'm just glad I don't have to go through puberty again because let me tell you, that would be a pain."
His expression falters for a second, becoming aware of the silence that's now threatening to consume them all, but he barrels ahead anyway. "What? Not used to seeing me without my usual roguish charms? I'd expect it from some of you, surely, but Chuuya knew me at age... Huh, how old were you, Hat Rack?"
"Dazai," Chuuya breathes softly.
Dazai turns around, eyes holding the faintest hint of uncertainty. There are dark bruises on his wrists; he smoothly tugs the sleeves of the coat down over them. Finally, he settles for making eye contact with Kunikida. "Okay, this is getting ridiculous. Will someone please tell me what’s going on? Why are you all staring at me? I know you're all aware I was in the Port Mafia if it's about the injuries, jeez."
Kyouka opens her mouth, closes it, then opens it again.
“Dazai,” Kenji says, delicate, soft. “The Ability turned our ages back to when we, uh, had sex for the first time.”
Dazai lets out a puff of air, almost a sigh but almost no noise at all. His eyes dart between his colleagues past and present. He looks cornered, afraid. Dazai never looks afraid.
“Oh,“ he says at last, high and reedy. “I see.” He claps his hands together with a nervous smile. “Well, I guess we should head back, try and figure out a way to reverse this. Can’t stay a kid forever!”
“A kid,” Tanizaki says to himself.
“Come on,” Dazai says, pacing back and forth. “I’ve never pretended my past was pretty. Shit happened. It doesn’t change anything. I had to make some deals with what I had.”
Ranpo takes a step forward and reaches a hand out toward Dazai, who flinches back and almost falls over. “Don’t touch me,” he hisses, sounding less scary and more panicked with the voice of a preteen. He regains his composure, stands up and coughs. “Not right now.”
“You were a child,” Fukuzawa says, looking pained.
“We all were,” Dazai says, cold and terrifying. “You can ask any of them; hell, ask Kyouka.”
Kunikida looks at him. “I’m so sorry.” It’s the only thing he can say.
A laugh devoid of humor tears itself from Dazai’s throat. “You’re— you’re sorry? I don’t need pity, Kunikida. You’ve seen me do horrible things, you’ve- you more than anyone! You’ve seen me torture for fun!” He runs a hand through his hair, breathing ragged. “I’m not a good person. I’ve ruined thousands of lives because I thought it would make me feel better, and it took a hell of a slap to the face for me to get even the tiniest bit of common sense. I mean, it- it’s not like I didn’t deserve this, it’s not like… Life sucks and then you die, and of course I was cursed with not being able to die.”
Kunikida thinks of all the times he’s escorted Dazai to the hospital, bleeding from his wrists or skull fractured or coughing up seawater. Suddenly it all seems a bit less harmless.
Akutagawa takes a step forward. “You were my master. I did all of this, everything, to please you. You could’ve…” His hands are shaking. “I would’ve torn them apart.”
Dazai pulls a gun out of nowhere, aims it directly at Akutagawa’s temple. “We are not talking about this.” His tone is brittle, about to snap. It looks absurd, Dazai’s small body all sharp edges and bones and darkness.
“Dazai,” Kunikida and Chuuya say in the same practiced tone.
His shoulders are shaking now, none of it traveling to his finger on the trigger. His eyes see nothing in front of them.
“Put the gun down,” Ranpo says, tone careful and measured.
“What,” Dazai says, breathless, “so you can get me under control, fucking- so you can deduce everything you’ve been trying not to see for the past six years? I’m, like, I’m sure you want to hear all the lurid details. There was a room, actually, for a while, where you could get a piece of the newest Port Mafia asset—“
“Dazai—“ Chuuya says, taking a step forward.
“I kept you safe!” Dazai yells, turning to him. There are tears streaming down his face, the mask cracking. “I made sure no one ever touched you!”
Chuuya’s face drops. “Wait,” he says, brows furrowing, “wait—“
Akutagawa covers his mouth with his hand.
Dazai turns on him. It seems like there’s no one else around, his body language stiff and dangerous. “You want to know why everyone left you alone? You and your sister, orphans from nowhere with an Ability that was unpredictable at best. You think people like the Mafia just decided to keep their distance?”
He lets out a laugh, a dreadful and hurt thing, unhinged. Akutagawa doesn’t move, his eyes fearful. “It’s because nobody dared to cross the Demon Prodigy, the youngest ever to reach executive, Mori’s right hand man. And I was terrible, wasn’t I? I made sure everyone knew you were my property.”
He turns to Chuuya, pointing an accusing finger in his face. “And you. You’re smarter than this. You really thought they were scared of you, the tiny French boy with gorgeous red hair. You showed up before I had any power,” he spits, “anything to scare them with. And I—“ Dazai’s voice breaks off into a sob and he sinks to his knees. The gun clatters to the floor in front of him. His voice lowers to a whisper. “I gave them me instead, Nakahara.”
Suddenly he looks too small, sitting there on the pavement, tears streaming down his face. All the bravado fades from him and then the scene is still. No one’s sure how to respond.
Chuuya kneels down to the ground, placing one hand slowly and deliberately on Dazai’s. “I am going to kill him, love. Painful. Drawn out.”
Kunikida realizes with a start that the jacket swallowing Dazai’s shoulders is Mori’s and almost dry heaves onto the pavement.
Dazai shakes his head furiously. “You can’t. It’d mess everything up and you know it. And I... I’m not worth that. Besides,” he continues, trying and failing for a playful shrug, “it’s not like it was just Mori.”
Chuuya, bless him, doesn’t react to that at all, but Poe lets out a low and strangled sound.
Dazai glances over at the noise and realizes where he is. Every part of his body closes in; he draws his knees to his chest. “Sorry,” he says.
“We sent you back. You were alone with him again,” Atsushi says.
Dazai waves a hand. “It was fine. I handled it.”
Kunikida thinks of all the times he’s been asked to tag along on missions Dazai could easily deal with alone. Suddenly a lot of things make more sense. “You shouldn’t have had to handle it.”
There’s a long moment of silence. Some make their way closer to Dazai, taking their next cue from him.
“It didn’t- I liked it,” Dazai says after a long time. His voice is quiet enough that anyone who didn’t know him might think he wasn’t trying to be heard at all. “I ran away and joined the Mafia and it was good for a while, a little kid trying to pretend he was on top of the world. And then I failed my first mission. They beat the shit out of me, a couple of executives. I was in the hospital for weeks.”
Now that the floodgates are open, no one moves, scared to break the spell, scared they’ll make Dazai put up the walls again. Yosano looks like she’s going to hurt someone. Dazai smiles. The sadness in it is so deep that Kunikida can feel it in his sternum, in the pit of his stomach.
“I didn’t really have anybody to look out for me, but I stayed out of the way and kept hidden. Until one night there was a big loss, everybody was on edge. This group of guys found my hiding spot and held me down with their Abilities and I—“
Dazai gasps for air. Kunikida makes his way over and slowly, slowly cards his fingers through the other’s curls until his breathing slows. “They were all twice my size and I just remember screaming but no one ever came. And then it was over. Like, what the fuck? Who- what kind of psychopath does that? So I started getting better. At everything. At violence, at revenge. I killed them all… two months later, I think. Then Mori promoted me and I thought that was the end of it, because no one would do anything to his, right?”
Dazai wraps his arms around Chuuya, buries his face in his shoulder. There isn’t the sound of crying but they can tell he’s sobbing all the same. “You came along and you weren’t… you weren’t good, you were never good, but you were something that was mine. You were something I thought I could protect.”
Chuuya looks down at him. It’s a moment of tenderness Kunikida almost feels like he shouldn’t be seeing. “Mori…”
“And I could’ve done something,” Dazai says, voice muffled by tears and Chuuya’s arm, “all those years. I thought it was better because at least it didn’t hurt, not like all the broken bones and burns. I could’ve stopped it. I asked him to stop but after a while, I just… it didn’t change anything.” It’s a terrible picture, nine year old Dazai sitting in Chuuya’s lap with a white knuckled grip on his jacket.
“It was just— fuck, it was just say my name like that and let me bend you over my desk and orders, I was always great at obeying, wasn’t I, that was something I understood. There were times when I begged him not to but he said it was either that or he’d throw me to the wolves and I couldn’t. I couldn’t do that. Not again.”
Dazai cries until his face is red before he remembers where he is, who he’s with. He puts a hand on his head, still disoriented by the Ability. “I’m so sorry you had to see this.” He takes several deep breaths, making even eye contact with each member of the Armed Detective Agency. “I understand if you don’t want to see me again.”
The silence breaks into an explosion of sound.
“What?” yells Yosano. “Why would we not want to see you—“
“There’s nothing that could change—“
“We would never—“
“It wasn’t your fault,” Kunikida says, and Dazai locks onto that over all the noise and commotion.
He turns around, face puffy, glances at Fukuzawa and then looks at Kunikida. “But… you heard what I just said.”
Kunikida nods. “A lot of people hurt you. They took advantage of you.”
Dazai frowns. He looks genuinely confused, and it cuts Kunikida to his core. “But I still did it. Mori told me to spread my legs and I asked him where he wanted me. That- that goes against everything we stand for.”
He pulls the coat off suddenly, like it’s burning him. Beneath it there are bruises, scars, rope burns, the world slut carved into his right shoulder. Kyouka steps forward and drapes her jacket around his shoulders, bowing in a complicated manner that the mafiosos seem to recognize.
“Thanks,” Dazai says, the ghost of a smile on his lips. He stands on unsteady feet and returns the gesture, steps light and practiced.
“He hurt you,” Fukuzawa says, sitting on the ground. “You were a kid, and he manipulated you into that situation.”
“Huh,” Dazai says, like he doesn’t quite believe him. “Can we go home?” He sounds tired now, more petulant, more like the child he appears to be.
“But—“ Tanizaki starts.
Akutagawa cuts him off. “Of course we can, and then we’ll figure out how to get us all back to normal.”
Dazai nods. “Sorry I can’t use my Ability.”
“We’ll find a way,” Kunikida assures him. “We always do.”
“Do you want me to carry you back to headquarters?” Yosano offers.
“That’s completely demeaning, Yosano. I would love it,” Dazai says, launching himself onto her back. Some of the old walls go up.
“I have some candy at the Agency,” Ranpo says in a sing-song voice, trying to pretend everyone can go back to something resembling normal.
Chuuya shudders. “Don’t. Don’t give Dazai that much sugar with a child’s metabolism. I am begging you. He’ll burn down the city.”
Dazai sticks his tongue out. “I will not.” His head is dropping onto Yosano’s shoulder, his eyes fighting to stay open.
“It’s settled!” Ranpo says, clapping his hands together.
“Do you have the sweet dip you eat off a stick?” Kyouka asks.
Ranpo makes a series of exaggerated hand gestures. “Of course! I’m not some sort of amateur.
“Wonderful. That’s what we need.” The reverence in her tone suggests it will solve everything.
And who knows? They’ll have to deal with this later, probably for the rest of their lives. It’s too much to process. Too many years to unpack all at once. Too many forced habits to ever break. But maybe, just for today, giving Dazai too much candy and surrounding him with people who love him will make things a little better.