Work Text:
Tanizaki doesn't really hallucinate; he creates.
“Tanizaki-san?”
Junichiro startles. Atsushi. He closes his eyes. 1, 2, 3.
Disappear.
But Atsushi is still in front of him, a frown on his lips. Junichiro’s shoulders unwind as he sends the boy a reassuring smile. The boy who is concerned. There. Alive. Real.
“What were you staring at?”
Tanizaki blinks before chuckling nervously. “There's a vulture on top of that building, I was just looking at that.”
Atsushi’s frown deepens as he follows his gaze. “Vulture? Here? Where is it? I don't see anything.”
Tanizaki freezes. 1, 2, 3.
Appear.
Atsushi points at the bird perched on the side of the building, gasping, “Oh, there it is! I've never seen one before. What is it doing in a city?” he turns to the ginger. “They look a bit scary, don't they?”
Tanizaki gives him a strained smile. “Scary. Yes.”
So no, Tanizaki doesn't really hallucinate. He creates.
Some nights, Fukuzawa dreams.
All his dreams follow the same route, just with different faces. Or rather, abilities. The physical form of his agency members’ abilities sit with him in his dreams, comfortable to share their space. No Longer Human is a streak of light that lingers by his side, one that fills him with an inexplicable sense of melancholy. Kenji’s ability is a faceless kid with a laugh bright enough to rival the sun. Doppo Poet is a man with long hair, one that reaches down to his lower back, wearing a green yukata similar to his own. They make polite conversation every now and then or share a cup of tea. It's simple. It's pleasant.
And then there is Tanizaki’s ability.
Light Snow looks different every time he sees it. Sometimes, it takes the form of Tanizaki, quiet and timid. Sometimes, it's Naomi looking at him with a cheery smile. Sometimes, it's the devil.
And sometimes, it's all three of them together.
Like every other dream, he sits in a room with walls painted white. It's silent until it's not.
“Fukuzawa-san,” a voice croons. Tanizaki. “It's been way too long since we met, don't you think?”
The silver haired man holds very, very still. He tilts his head down slightly in greeting. “Light snow.”
A form that he recognises to be Naomi’s materializes in front of him. His eyes widen.
Naomi, with her lips stretched wide in a manic grin. Naomi, with a vulture perched on her shoulder. Naomi, with her eye hanging out of its socket and half her face caved in. Fukuzawa feels sick.
Naomi hops closer to him, humming an eerie tune. She settles beside him and bumps their shoulders together. “Say, Fukuzawa-san. How long do you think you can keep me under your control?” Her grin widens. “how long do you think you can keep him from bringing ruin to you all?”
The shackles that were once invisible glitter gold around her wrists. Fukuzawa forces himself to meet the devil's eyes and says, “I don't have to keep him from doing anything. Junichiro is not his ability.”
That seems to just delight her further. She throws his head back and laughs. The vulture on her shoulder caws its song of death. Blood drips from what used to be her eyes and stains her shirt red.
When she speaks, her voice warps into something sinister. She is Junichiro, Naomi, and the devil. She is one and she is all. He has to remind himself that this is not what he sees when he looks at the real Junichiro.
Is it not?
“Maybe,” she agrees. A chill runs down his spine when she leans close, closer, till he can smell the rotting flesh on her face. “He might not be his ability. But he is his grief, his insanity. One day, it will eat him up to his very bones till he's nothing but red.”
He wakes up soaked in his own sweat, trembling. Every time he looks at the redhead, her last words echo in his head.
You can hold me back, swordsman and king of nothing. But what will you do when you find out that the monster has been him all along?
Once upon a time, there was a boy who cried wolf.
He is not exactly a liar, you see. Because there was a wolf, to him and to no one else. There was a wolf and it sat by his leg with its brilliant grey eyes, staring, waiting. He lived in fear of when it would gobble him up, but his mother and the villagers called him a liar.
Everyone except his sister.
The wolf liked his sister. She was the only one who could see it apart from him. She ran her fingers through its fur as it laid its head on her lap and Tanizaki, he was afraid, so afraid, because what if it gets her instead of him? What will he do?
But nothing ever happened. Until one day.
Their village was wrecked by terrorists and later, bandits looking for things to loot in the ruins. No one came to their rescue for a month. Tanizaki was trapped under a collapsed building with no way to escape and there was so much pain. So much pain that he could barely open his eyes, could barely lift his head. He wanted to scream but he didn't because Naomi was beside him, holding his hand. She was there. And he'd be okay if she was with him.
Help did arrive eventually. When they finally lift him out of the rubble and usher him to the ambulance, he thrashes in their grip, screaming, “My sister! You have to help her! She's stuck in there too!”
Eyes full of pity. Eyes full of pity and faces crumbling and his chest hurt. Everything hurt. He follows their gaze to the place he was once trapped in and sees—
A vulture. A carcass. Flesh pulled apart by the scavenger’s beak.
Naomi.
“She has been dead for a while now, son. I'm sorry.”
There was a boy who cried wolf and his sister who was loved by said wolf. He was the wolf and the wolf was him and it disappeared under his touch and his sister was dead but was she, really? How could she be, if she was right by his side, holding his hand? How could she be, if everyone was screaming in terror, looking at the corpse and the very same girl, breathing, talking, and alive, right beside him?
There was a boy who cried wolf. He was a liar, but was he, really?
Naomi watches Dazai sigh for the umpteenth time from the chair opposite his couch. She rolls her eyes. “Oh, come on! I just asked you to teach me how to fight, it's not that big a deal. We've been going through case solving tactics for a week now! I'm going to die of boredom at this rate.”
Dazai scrambles upright, mock offended. “How dare you underestimate the effort teaching takes, Naomi-chan! Especially fighting! You are asking for a lot, you know. What's in it for me?”
Naomi looks at her supposed mentor and hates herself a little for her poor choices. With a heavy sigh of her own and a last reassurance to herself that Dazai is a capable detective who can teach her a lot of things, she says, “I won't tell Kunikida you still haven't done the paperwork you claimed you finished. The ones you were supposed to finish a week ago.”
Dazai waves that away. “Weak. Kunikida-kun is going to find that out by the end of the day anyway.”
Naomi narrows her eyes. “Can't you just be a good senpai and do it for free?”
Dazai blanches at that. “Ugh, don't ever call me that.”
“Good or senpai?”
“Both.”
“Dazai-saaaaaan,” she smirks when he winces at that. He wasn't the only one who could annoy his way out of everything. “Please please pleaaaseeeee-”
“Okay, okay!” Dazai cuts in, grimacing. She whoops and jumps from her seat to do a little victory dance. He glares at her, sour. “I still don't understand why you chose me of all people to teach you how to solve cases. If you wanted to be a detective, Ranpo-san and Kunikida-kun would've been a better choice.”
She scrunches her nose at that. “Detective? Me? Please, I'm happy to watch you guys do all that, it's exhausting and really not my thing. I'm only picking your brain because I want to learn how to think fast like you do.”
“Ranpo-san thinks fast.”
“Too fast. Plus,” she grins, lopsided. “you don't really solve things in a very straightforward manner, Dazai-san. You play dirty and you know how other people work; not based on cold, hard facts but from your people-reading skills. That's fun. I want to learn how to do that.”
He leans back on the couch, his gaze assessing. “Then what about the fighting? Kunikida-kun is a better fighter than I am.”
“I'm not concerned about power or even fighting, really. All I want to know is how to outsmart people, physically and mentally,” she wiggles her fingers in front of his face, raising her eyebrows playfully. “I just wanna have fun with it.”
He huffs out a breath that Naomi recognises as one of his genuine laughs. “Alright then. I'll teach you how to fight. Change into something comfortable and meet me on the terrace.”
Naomi watches, disturbed and fascinated all at the same time, as Dazai stretches his back and lets out some satisfying but frankly concerning popping sounds. She is worried about his bones.
“I'm worried about your bones,” she says, watching warily as his knees creak when he shakes them out. “are they supposed to make those sounds?”
Dazai looks unbothered as he works out the cricks in his neck. “Don't worry about that, that always happens when I stretch.”
“That doesn't sound normal, but okay.”
He cracks his knuckles and finally looks at her. “Alright, so we'll learn dodging and how to close the distance between you and your opponent today.”
Naomi looks around. The terrace, while a decent place to train, didn't seem wide enough to practice dodges in. As if sensing her hesitation, Dazai says, “I chose the terrace specially because it's not very spacious and there's a mild element of danger. It's the closest we can have to a real fighting environment. So here's what we're going to do.”
Dazai pauses for dramatic effect. Naomi hates to admit that it works; she leans forward eagerly. He flashes her a smile. “Your task is to land a hit on me.”
She waits for him to continue. When no other instructions follow, she frowns. “Just one hit? That's all?”
“Yup!” he says, popping the ‘p’ obnoxiously. “Just one hit. If you do that, you win. Sounds easy enough, right?”
She opens her mouth to agree, only to falter when she sees the amused glint in his eyes. She can sense the danger of a trap in his smile, his gaze. She shakes herself out of it and shrugs. “Yeah, it does.”
Turns out that it's not as easy as it sounds. Even in the limited space of the terrace, Dazai dodges all her attacks like he's as light as a feather, basically gliding through the air. And his movements aren't casual, either. It takes her quite some time to peel back the layers of nonchalant energy and his playful laughter to see the deliberate placing of his footwork and the calculated distance he puts between them. She isn't sure if minutes or hours have passed when she doubles over, gulping a lungful of air greedily. “What… the fuck was that?”
Naomi raises her head to see that Dazai is barely sweating. He throws her a cheeky grin. “Thought you said it sounds easy?”
She scowls. Dazai was usually annoying, but he was downright infuriating when he was goading someone on. She really, really wanted to do some damage to his stupid, smug face. With only that thought in her mind, she crouches like she's about to drop on the floor and waits for Dazai's position to relax.
The second it does, she plants her hand on the ground and flips around, trying to nail a handstand kick on his head. Sure, she had only seen this executed in TV shows and a handful of times by Kunikida, but she can do a handstand and a flip so how hard could it be?
The element of surprise throws Dazai off, but he still manages to narrowly dodge the kick. She grunts in frustration and lands upright.
Or tries to.
The moment her right leg hits the ground, it twists awkwardly, throwing her out of balance and in the last fucking minute, she realises that she was wobbling dangerously close to the terrace railing. She curses loudly when she feels herself stumbling and pitching forward, torso pressed forcefully against the railing and she can't breathe, can't think.
Shit shit shit shit shitshitshit-
A hand clasps her wrist and pulls her back. But instead of relief, all she feels is pain.
She thinks she's screaming. She wants to but she can't. She can't think. She can't breathe. Because her skin was burning, her flesh was tearing away from her bones and every vein was set on fire. The sinews of her muscles were all being picked apart, thread by thread. Gone were her dense black locks and her eyes that once twinkled with emotion. Gone, gone, gone. Blood, did she have that before? There were a thousand suns drying up every drop of liquid in her body and she would be screaming if she knew what it was. But she knew nothing but pain and her eyeballs melting into her skull and her lips stretched and stretched till it tore apart into the goriest version of a smile, the widest grin she could muster. Teeth crumbling, bones rotting, lugs shriveling. She was unmade, undone, broken down and she wasn't dying, no. She was being wiped out of existence. Every inch of her, gone.
The touch on her wrist jerks away like it had never been there before. And this time when the pain hits, she is screaming.
Becoming hurt more than un-becoming. Being made into something that wasn't shredded flesh and splintered bones and dried up blood was excruciating. She dies a hundred deaths while she is remade. Bones pop back into place. Teeth shoved forcefully into gums. Once unspooled brain now sits tamely into the skull that jammed itself together and there's a layer of flesh and skin over that and her scalp is pried open to plant every strand of her hair in. She is screaming. Her muscles are sewn into place with a merciless needle and she is torn back into existence and she is screaming, screaming, screaming-
When she opens her eyes (brand new and clean, like nothing ever happened), she finds herself on the floor. Dazai is staring at his hand and back at… at…
Her brother.
Naomi makes an aborted motion to crawl towards him, ready for the pain to hit and almost throws up when nothing comes. The contrast between the pain from seconds before to the nonchalant way her body moved now made her sick with something she couldn't explain and she looked at her brother despairingly, searching for answers in his eyes.
And find answers she does.
Junichiro is pale, his breath coming out in short, panicked bursts as he stares at her. He looked feral, eyes glazed over and hands clenching by his side. Dazai is staring at him, wide eyed, hand still raised in the air.
No.
“No,” Naomi whispers, tears filling her eyes. She was unmade and remade and-
She was made.
“No,” she chokes out, dragging herself away from her brother. “Please tell me I'm wrong.”
Junichiro stays silent. He takes a step forward, hands outstretched. Dazai steps in front of him. “Tanizaki-kun,” he says lowly, almost like he was pleading. “Don't do this.”
Her brother is crying. He is shaking and crying and his eyes are so, so afraid. She wants to hold him and wipe away his tears, wants to tell him to not be afraid. But she doesn't, because she's afraid too. Afraid of him.
“I'm sorry,” he whispers, broken. Dazai lunges towards him but before his hand could touch him, everything in her world goes blissfully black.
Naomi twists the pen buried in her eye deeper. Junichiro screams.
“Why are you screaming?” Naomi asks, inching closed. Her head is tilted to the side. Blood is pouring out of her eye socket and he is screaming. “Does it hurt?”
In the night light, the agency looks menacing, haunted. Tanizaki regrets his decision to stay back when he watches her sister, a shell of what she once was, walking closer to him. She knows, his mind screams, she knows she knows she knows.
She jams it in further. He hears a sickening squelch and he scrambles back, gagging. She takes another step forward.
“It doesn't hurt me. You know why?” The raven plucks out the pen. Tanizaki watches in muted horror as her bloody eye hangs limply out of her head. “Because you can't replicate pain that you haven't felt before. I can't feel anything you haven't felt before.”
“Naomi,” he begs, “Naomi, please-”
What is he begging for? For it to stop? For her to stop? To make it all disappear? To make it all better, shiny and pretty and clean? Not broken, not bloodied. Perfect, pearly rows of teeth. Eyes that twinkle, ones that don't bleed. It's all in his hands. Then why is he screaming?
Naomi crouches in front of him. Her nails feel like claws when they drag down his skin. “Won't you let me go, brother mine?” She leans forward. Close, closer. He can't breathe. “You can't, can you? You've always been selfish.”
The halls of the agency is quiet as he sobs into his hands. “Please,” he cries. “Please.”
Leave me alone.
The force of his sobs rattle his chest and threaten to pry his ribs apart. “Please.”
Don't leave me alone.
A hand on his wrist. Ice through his veins. Blinding light. Silence.
Dazai.
Tanizaki almost chokes on the relief that slams into his chest. He huddles closer to the brunette, shivering. He vaguely registers that his teeth were clacking together. Dazai's grip on his wrist tightens.
“It's okay,” Dazai says, softer than what Junichiro thought he was capable of. “You're okay. It's over.”
Junichiro's heart jumps to his throat.
“No,” he whispers, eyes searching the room desperately. “No! You can't take her away from me, not after I tried so hard. No no no no-”
Before he could finish talking, Dazai clamps down his other hand on his shoulder firmly like he already knew he was about to lash out. Junichiro struggles against his grip, eyes stinging with unshed tears as he yells, “Let me go! I need to bring her back! Let me go!”
Nails dig into his wrist hard enough to draw blood. The pain tears through the fog in his head, making him gasp. Dazai looks grim when he meets his eyes. “I'm not taking her away from you. You need rest. You look like you haven't slept in weeks.”
“But-” He can't bring himself to care about how weak he sounds with his words trembling and cracking under the weight of his fear. He is shaking, shaking, shaking. “she's gone.”
Dazai pulls him down, forcing his hunched shoulders to unwind. Junichiro falls against his side without any resistance, whimpering, “She'll come back, won't she?”
“Yes.”
It had never been so cold in the agency before. He sounds numb when he says, “I can't stop.”
A hand on his head. Hesitant. Pitying.
“I know.”
Stones were tied to his wrist and pressing down on his chest. His lungs burn. He is drowning.
“Make it stop,” He whispers, “Make her go away.”
Dazai doesn't say it, but the words hang in the air anyway.
I can't. You won't let me.
In the end, all Dazai ends up saying is. “Go to sleep.” All he does is hold on to his wrist long after he passes out against him.
Every month, at least once, the Tanizaki siblings are late to the agency.
This time, Ranpo watches Naomi hop into the place with her usual smile fixed in place. It looks impossibly wide. An inch longer, and it could tear her cheeks. No one notices anything amiss, of course. Everyone greets the duo with a smile and Kunikida grunts his usual, “You're late.”
Naomi laughs. It's a pleasant sound. She assures Kunikida it won't happen again and walks towards Haruno.
Her mole is on the wrong side of her face.
Junichiro looks like he wants to die.
Ranpo watches. He watches, but doesn't say anything. It won't matter anyway.