HELLO, BSD FANDOM!
Bungo has officially risen to be my favorite anime series EVER in the past few months. I love it. The characters, the plot, the angst, the humor, the banter, everything makes this anime everything I've ever been looking for in a show.
Here's a plot bunny that refused to leave me alone- Chuuya growing up in the Mafia.
This is not a linear timeline.
Disclaimer: I don't own Bungo Stray Dogs
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He is a small thing, Kouyou can see, skinny and frail, his clothes torn, tattered, dirtied, bloodied. Normal, she supposes, for a child on the streets in this part of the city. Strips of glowing red wrap around his arms, snaking up his neck to his jaw, the magic pulsing as he moves. His dirty hair hangs from his skull in tangled strands, matted and knotted, covered with so much dust and dirt that it is nearly impossible to tell what color it really is. He is outlined completely in red, the force of his power almost drawing them in to their doom if she hadn't called Golden Demon to shield her and the rest of her subordinates from it.
Although, if she's being completely honest, she did not expect the problem to be a child when the Mafia were notified of a threat that needed to be taken care of.
Luck is on her side in that they arrived before the Agency, but with the way the situation is playing out, Kouyou finds herself almost wishing that they didn't. The child's ability is intense and immense; his magic is creating an almost magnetic field around himself and pulling them in. Raising his arms, his power channels into balls outlined in the same glowing red as the markings on his skin, and then he throws them, each blast creating a crater wherever it lands.
There's no reasoning with him. His eyes are wide and unfocused, pupils completely constricted, irises turned into slits as a crazed smile hangs on his lips. Blood is dripping from his temple and flowing from his nose, blood the exact same color as the manifestation of his powers.
This child is going to die.
The Mafia, however, is nothing if not resourceful. Ogai Mori's newest protégé, a child not unlike this one, steps forward. He has been taken everywhere since he joined their ranks, both for training and as the Mafia's failsafe. They found him in the middle of a raid nearly a year ago, and it had been pure luck that his ability activated right when the Mafia arrived, allowing them to take down their targets easily, ruthlessly, and sparing him. Only him.
No Longer Human.
Every person who has to learn to harness their ability are taught to go through hours of meditation, for the power to unravel and to become one with its wielder. Of course, there are always cases where the ability is so prominent that those at a young age had already instinctively learned to use it.
Osamu Dazai is one such child. One step out of the safety barrier that the Golden Demon provided, then another, and then another.
The other child notices him, flinging an energy blast in his direction. Upon impact with Dazai, the ball fizzles away, the boy calmly making his way forward, and in a flash of blue light, he grasps the child's arm. The red markings immediately shrink back and disappear, his eyes becoming normal, blue, unfocused, focused on them, and then closed as he falls. The Port Mafia immediately takes the boy back to headquarters, giving him the finest medical attention they can provide.
Nakahara Chuuya remembers nothing of that day.
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What he does remember, months and years later, are the wine bottles, broken and smashed against his skull, against a woman's head full of long red hair. His mother, he thinks he remembers, but he really doesn't remember much of her at all.
Maybe that's why he hoards the wine, because to him, it is a symbol of power. It signifies a life that is infinitely better than whatever life he was living before. Maybe that's why he makes it a habit to take his subordinates out to lunch every so often, or to the spa for a job well-done. There are things he remembers and things he does not, and being hungry and starving is etched into his brain like a hollow, haunting memory, phantom pain that he fights to shake off. He does not remember, not really, but his body does. And instead of the warmth of the blood flowing from his head from the half-remembered wine bottles, he can lie to himself and say that it had been the hot water from the spa and the jacuzzis all along.
Maybe that's why when Kouyou takes him under her wing, he takes one look at her red hair and immediately follows.
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When Mori asks Kouyou to speak to the child, she does not refuse. The cot seems to be too big for him, wrapping around him snugly and threatening to pull him under in its plushy depths. His hair is still dirtied and matted, but he had been given clean clothes, and his limbs and face washed. The boy needs a proper bath, he does.
He tells her the only thing he can remember- his name.
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Chuuya is shy, but he is not quiet. He orients himself into the Port Mafia lifestyle rather easily, never talking about the half-memories he thinks may be figments of his imagination, projecting into his dreams. He demands martial arts lessons after stumbling into a training session one day, a request which takes Kouyou pleasantly by surprise, and one which Mori immediately agrees to.
Raw talent, he realizes, plays a big part in learning martial arts. He clings to that thought when he returns to the rooms he shares with Kouyou, who is now his pseudo-mother, with bloodied knuckles and bruises and broken bones all over his little body.
He tries not to think too hard about the first time he performs a perfect jumping round kick the month after he turns fourteen, and how his foot easily smashes in a (gifted, dangerously gifted) woman's head and the blood that spurts out from the impact after, splattering onto Kouyou's kimono. After returning to Mafia headquarters, he avoids the laundry room for a week, not wanting to see the white silk kimono with beautiful red blossoms blooming at the hem, red petals floating in a pattern all along the cloth. He tells himself it is because he ruined a beautiful article of clothing, but he thinks about the red that blended in so perfectly with the red flowers and retches when he sees the kimono anyway before it is washed, the blood drying to an old rust-brown and looking like a trunk and branches in the midst of the blossoms.
The Mafia grunts remember his death threats if they so much as breathe a word to anyone when they find him outside two nights after the attack on the woman, scrubbing his expensively imported leather shoes.
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He revels in the moments he can spend in his room with his hats and his wine and does not tell the red-haired woman he keeps seeing in his mind, the one that has a different face than Kouyou, that this is a better life.
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The hats are all Kouyou's fault, really. She goes shopping twice a week, typical, and she brings him back a hat because he has now taken to tying his long hair into a ponytail to keep it out of his face, and because she thinks that his suit is incomplete without said hat.
He never tells her that he loves the fedora, but he thinks she's onto him when she just buys him more and more after the first week he wears the hat every day. He never tells her that it is the first gift he has ever received, even after Mori gives him the suit and expensive leather shoes.
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Images make a person, he finds. The vest and the dress pants and the jacket and the gloves, well, he likes to think they make a point. He is not weak. He never will be anymore.
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Chuuya is two days fourteen when he and Dazai meet again. Whereas Chuuya is loud and arrogant, laying claim to a better life that should have been his from the beginning, Dazai is silent, cold, and does not care for life. Mori takes his position as the new boss of Port Mafia, and Dazai stands at his side.
His first memory of him is not that Dazi had once saved his life, but of the same boy, only fourteen years old and the youngest executive of Mafia history, effortlessly neutralize a Mafia agent's ability in retaliation against Mori's proclamation of his own promotion and shoot him just as effortlessly right in between the eyes. Chuuya remembers the one eye that no one could see, wrapped in bandages, the other hard and calculating, and tries not to think of how cold his own must have seemed when he shattered the woman's skull.
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For the Tainted Sorrow, his ability seems to whisper one day when sweat is pouring down his face and his back, his shirt completely soaked through and body drained of all energy after an afternoon of training. It makes sense, Chuuya thinks, when he watches the glowing red outline of everything he touches, everything he can manipulate the gravity of and around, and thinks, this is what I am.
Red like the sunset, red like his hair, red like his anger and his fire and his drive to be better, better, better, red like the blood he spilled red like the blood he has spilled red like the sunset red like death.
It is an accident when the words come to him, as naturally as breathing, the first time he can consciously remember uttering them.
Grantors of dark disgrace
You need not wake me again.
He feels it building inside, coiling up his legs and his arms and his body and his neck, more and more and more until it finally bursts and Chuuya feels nothing but elation, drunken with power as he laughs and gravitrons appear out of thin air, destroying everything he touches. He laughs and laughs and laughs and forgets why he's laughing; he keeps walking, keeps destroying, keeps forming gravitron after gravitron after gravitron and does not notice when blood begins to flow from his nose, does not notice when Kouyou and Mori and Elise run to the sidelines in his rampage, does not notice Dazai running and grabbing his arm.
Chuuya feels it, remembers it this time when his ability is nullified and power drains from his body. He remembers his knees falling to the ground, him not being able to move a muscle, body feeling as heavy as the gravity he uses to crush his enemies. The second before his head hits the ground, someone has already caught him, and he recalls the distinct feeling of bandages over his face when he finally loses consciousness.
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Kouyou is laughing behind her long kimono sleeve, he knows. Suppressing another groan, Chuuya glares daggers at his new partner, who looks back (down) at him with wary eyes. Already aware of his short stature, Chuuya draws himself to his full height, pushing more malice into his glare.
"What are you looking at?" he seethes. Damn the fact that Dazai is an executive, that changes nothing when it comes to being partnered with the rumored suicidal maniac, and a condescending one at that.
Dazai sniffs. "Looks like your temper is shorter than you are," he replies, looking up and down at him in disdain.
Chuuya growls and is ready to retort with another snippy comment with Kouyou clears her throat and briefs them on their first mission as a pair, the one that would start a chain of events that Chuuya, looking back at that moment several years later, could never have foreseen (and, of course, blames Dazai for all of it. Most things are his fault anyway).
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Mission complete.
The enemy is completely (and quite literally) crushed. Chuuya breathes in hard through his mouth, trying not to accidentally catch any of the blood coming from his nose in the process. His arms feel like jelly, his head a little fuzzy and just a touch woozy, and if he is to be very, very honest, if Dazai so much as loosens his grip a little, he knows he will fall over, and that sort of humiliation is not something he wants to carry around for the rest of his life.
"You weren't half-bad back there," Dazai murmurs next to him, the older teen supporting him as they make their way back to headquarters.
"You bandage-wasting idiot, I will have you know that I am much better than 'half-bad'," Chuuya bites back with as much threat as a newborn puppy at the moment. His words are slurred and slow, and Dazai hides a small grin by looking in the opposite direction.
They make it back to headquarters by midnight, and the next morning, all opposition has come to fear Port Mafia's Soukoku.
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They have their moments, Chuuya supposes. He hates relying on Dazai to stop Corruption from taking his life time and time again, but he knows as the years pass that Dazai will not let him die, despite the many banters and death threats that they throw at one another. He does not miss the wary glances that the Mafia members give them when they are in the heat of another round of insults, nor does he care about the complete and utter disrespect he knows he is showing Dazai, and vice versa. He climbs the ranks quickly, both under Kouyou's tutelage and his own achievements with his ability and his title as the strongest martial artist in the Mafia.
He kicks Dazai in the back of the head one time, and nearly falls off his chair when all Dazai does after sitting up and rubbing his head is complain about how that didn't kill him.
The next day, all of the fedoras in his room mysteriously disappear.
In retaliation, he hides all of Dazai's bandage rolls. The medics complain about their stash being gone the day after that. Dazai strolls into the common areas with brand new bandages, much to Chuuya's chagrin.
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Akutagawa is a responsibility Dazai doesn't want. Chuuya has no idea how no one other than him can see it, but his partner is nothing if not resilient, stoic, and just like his torture methods- ruthless. He obeys Mori's orders without another word, his dark eyes hard.
The child goes through his training each and every day with Dazai pushing him to be harder, better, stronger. His kid sister is a little luckier; Gin, her name is, follows after Chuuya's ex-teacher, becoming an assassin in her own right. Her brother spends his days getting hit, yelled at, shot at, tossed like a rag doll despite Dazai's thin frame. Chuuya sees the hard lines in his partner, growing deeper day by day.
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After two years of working together, Chuuya likes to think he has seen all of Dazai. They have strong rapport in battle, and their banter is always scathing and lively. He knows that Dazai, like him, has memories he does not want to remember. He knows that Dazai is always at least five steps ahead of everyone else, and has the fastest mind he has ever encountered; he would one day be a threat to Mori himself, should Dazai ever wish to step up as the boss of the Port Mafia. He knows he is cold, cruel, and calculating behind his smiles, knows that the biggest misfortune of Dazai's enemies is that they are Dazai's enemies.
Chuuya sees Dazai interrogate a prisoner once.
He prides himself on being strong, on never failing in doing what needs to be done. He does not throw up at the sight of bodies, of murder in cold blood on missions. He does not mind getting his hands dirty to finish the job.
He never wants to see it again.
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There are days Chuuya wonders when exactly he grows accustomed to working with Dazai. Now that he is older, he is given subordinates and a comfortable rank within the Mafia. Soukoku is rarely called upon, but they are a devastating duo when they are.
He wonders if he and Dazai could be considered friends, whatever that word means in their world (because if you trust someone, all you get is a knife to the back the second you turn around. A gun, if you are very, very lucky. Kouyou is the one exception, Chuuya thinks).
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Then, after they both turn eighteen, comes the day Dazai goes on the solo mission Mori specifically assigns to him, and he is not heard of for another two years. Chuuya does not spend the month after his disappearance completely trashing Dazai's room. It's not like he needs it anyway.
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He is no longer the child who chokes up bile when he kicks someone's head in, when he sees the blood splattered on his hair, flecks across his cheeks. The road to becoming an executive in the Mafia is drenched in blood built upon countless, sleepless nights in pain from training and battle. Chuuya is twenty-two when he sees Kouyou's signature amused smirk, the woman chuckling at his expense. He growls at her before he walks out of the room, his footsteps firm and solid against the pavement as he makes his way across the city.
The boulder he picks along the way is from the nearby park; he flings it over the dingy building in front, punching a hole in the enemy forces. When the dust clears, he makes sure he gets the first word in. The bloody bastard doesn't deserve it when the last time they saw each other he blackmailed him.
"Let me set one thing straight," Chuuya says, words drawled out just a little. The dramatics never really go away. "Once I finish taking out the trash, you're next."
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He wakes up right before the dawn, with his jacket covering him like a blanket, instead of the extraction point. Chuuya yawns and stretches his stiff muscles, cursing Dazai with every single horrible name he can think of.
Yet, he is not surprised.