Title: Black Hole of Destruction
Characters: Osamu Dazai, Chuuya Nakahara, Ryurou Hirotsu, OC
Summary: What happened the first time Chuuya invoked Corruption? Done for Soukoku Week day 1 (prompt: Port Mafia/"Once upon a time on the same side").
Notes: Gun use. Young! Soukoku (platonic).
Disclaimer: I don't own any characters in this.
Calling the first meeting of Dazai and Chuuya "tense" would have been an understatement. The two boys, attended to by Hirotsu, met in a rundown warehouse as requested by the boss.
A cold silence pierced the air between the two mafia boys, and when Chuuya opened his mouth to speak, Osamu had already beaten him.
"I don't know what the boss was thinking to put me with you, but know this - I will not be bested by the likes of you, puny hat wearer," the bandaged boy quipped curtly, shaking his crutch as threateningly as an injured boy could.
"Who are you calling puny?!" the redhead fired back, striking a punch, but Dazai blocked it with his free hand before their chaperone could.
"They say to keep your best friends close by and keep your enemies closer, but this is ridiculous." Osamu gave a barking sarcastic laugh, presumably to lighten the mood, and folded his arms as if he knew he could conquer the world someday. He probably could, even though he was too young to be anything like the mafia portrayed in late-night movies. "I don't need backup."
"You never know," Chuuya grinned and tipped his hat in a mock bow, "I might just need your backup someday."
Suddenly, Hirotsu's phone began to ring in his pocket.
"Someone's trying to take care of Mafia members with abilities, and they're close by," he told them once the call ended.
The euphemism "to take care of someone" was enough to turn hostilely frigid conditions into negative-degree territory.
/
A mysterious man in a cork hat, tartan shirt and jeans was outside the warehouse as they rushed out to find the killer.
"I wonder, what are all youse up to?" he drawled in English in a country accent, the likes of which the boys had never heard before. Brown eyes gazed past the corks on his hat, landing on the boys first, then Hirotsu.
"Stand back!" Hirotsu barked, shoving Chuuya behind him with one hand while he blasted the man with Falling Camellia simultaneously. Blood rose from the man's mouth, but he was otherwise unfazed.
"Hah, you have that kind of ability mate? I'd like to see you take this!" With this, the man in the cork hat performed a similar gesture to the one Hirotsu did, and a rush of water appeared from nowhere, the heads and manes of brumbies forming from the stream. If one listened hard enough, they could almost hear the horses' hooves pounding…
"I think we're going to need that backup now!" Chuuya yelled as the trio were washed away with the stream, slamming on to the warehouse wall as a result. Before the man could unleash any more water onslaughts, Chuuya slid across the concrete floor, using the trail of water the ability user left behind for momentum. The man tossed aside his hat to reveal he was a brunette with cropped short hair as Chuuya tried to dart close enough to activate For the Tainted Sorrow on him.
Osamu ran over to the fighting duo as quickly as his injured leg could take him and, tossing aside his crutch, flung himself at the man before he could invoke his ability again.
"Little mite has a death wish, eh? Well, if my name weren't Banjo Paterson, I'd save you to work on my homestead, but those back in 'Straya don't want none of you," the man hollered, pulling up his sleeves in what he believed to be a threatening manner and then invoking his ability...but nothing happened.
"Oi, mate! What did ya do to me? The Horses of Snowy River ain't comin'!" Paterson protested, throwing the boy off with a push of his arm.
"Let's just say I just disqualified you from using your horses, for I have No Longer Human on my side," Dazai told him in perfect English, a mocking smirk playing on his lips.
Chuuya plucked Paterson's hat from the ground just as the Caucasian man whistled with two fingers in his mouth. At least one hundred men, all dressed in suits and bearing arms of some variety, positioned themselves around the foreigner, the loud cocking of guns going off repeatedly as they readied themselves to shoot. More men kept appearing from every possible nook and cranny.
"You can't do this to us!" Chuuya snarled, crushing the hat with a determined grip then tossing it aside. As he began to dodge bullets with an alarming accuracy, Osamu squinted at his mouth and realised he was muttering something, getting louder as he approached Paterson.
"Oh grantors of dark disgrace, do not wake me again," he synchronised his lip-reading with Chuuya's words. A mantra of some variety, maybe?
Judging by the dark swirls crawling up Chuuya's face, he would most likely never hear this mantra again...and neither would all of the men shooting at them.
/
The redhead began to shoot orbs of compressed gravity at the suited men, all the while cackling as if he were possessed.
"What's this?!" Osamu, having now retrieved his crutch, demanded Hirotsu.
"'This' is something Chuuya-kun has tried to keep under control from a young age. However, hitherto the present day, he has been locked up as a trump card of the Mafia's." Hirotsu ducked as a large chunk of concrete flew by him. All the men, Paterson included, lay unconscious on similar chunks of concrete while Chuuya ran off into the distance. "That's where you step in," Hirotsu finished, his eyes following Dazai's erratic running.
/
"Chuuya-san, stop!"
Osamu finally caught up to him three blocks later, both boys heaving with the strain of running. After Chuuya flung an orb of gravity at him, he grasped it just before it reached his face and it fizzled out, a dark firework in the afternoon light. Chuuya's look became even more determined, and an animalistic, almost sorrowful howl escaped his lips. His beloved hat had flown off at the invocation of this mysteriously evil power, and its absence only made him look more insane.
Before any more harm could be done, Osamu slapped Chuuya, its echo resounding in the ruins. "I envy you, for being able to touch others without having their powers nullified," he added as the orbs Chuuya had held slowly disintegrated, leaving dark motes floating from his hands like ash. The redhead then collapsed on the spot.
/
"Argh, just what did I do?" Chuuya grumbled, sitting in a woodland cabin with Osamu and Hirotsu a few days after the incident. The Mafia had paid for all damages done by their weapon and, as if by magic, the ruined blocks were the same as they used to be, all the attacking foreigners gone. The only evidence of the incident was a newspaper article about the "foreigners' secret weapon", which was "darker than black" by an eyewitness account, and this was what Osamu was laughing at - it called this "weapon" "Black Hole of Destruction".
"Why not we just call ourselves Double Black after this incident?" the bandaged boy guffawed.
"It will never catch on!" Chuuya shot back, chucking Paterson's hat on to Osamu's head playfully as Hirotsu began to puff on his pipe lazily. The smoke drifted to the outside world, a world that could not ever learn the true cause of the "Black Hole" event.
I brought out the OC I've been wishing to write for a long time - the Australian author/poet, Banjo Paterson, who has an almost Fukuzawa-like status in his home country (he's even on a banknote!).
Calling Dazai "Osamu" was actually pretty tough, but I had to do it to make him more youthful and vulnerable-seeming.