There was always something unnerving about the impeccably clean apartment that once belonged to her previously executed self. Quinn, however, always liked clean, so she considered it an odd gift and kept up with the maintenance of perfectly aligned boxes on shelves and tucked her quilt back in when she awoke every morning making everything as pristine as it once was.
Now, cleanliness was thrown to the wind as she burrowed through everything throwing old toothpaste bottles and shampoos into the empty hallway as she digs through the bathroom cabinet. The same was true of the kitchen where she cluttered all the pots, pans, and cleaners on the counters without any particular order as she scoured the house for something that she really couldn't describe. A diary, maybe, or a hidden room that's beneath the floorboards, or maybe just a sign of Juno's life before her that gives her a clue as to what the fuck is happening when she dissociates now.
When she sleeps for days and comes up with a head full of hazy dreams, Quinn understands it as an occupational hazard. When she blacks out in the office of the Boss only to awaken hours later confronted with a paper that she has no memory writing on nor what it was she wrote, that's just some bullshit.
"I hate this body, I hate this body," she mutters the words to herself and whatever demon has possessed her so they understand they are not on the same page, pushing past partially empty shampoo bottles to find: nothing.
Nichi… Is that a person? A meal? A password or some other code? Quinn feels the identity on the tip of her tongue but just can't place it, and with a sigh she pushes herself up from her hands and knees to face herself in the mirror, hands gripping the ends of the sink as she finds herself looking into the details of her reflection.
Her face is much of the same though her cheeks have become a bit more rounded rather than the sharply thin jawline she was met with in her earlier time, probably a result of the metabolism she hated finally giving in just as her new and poor(er) diet and lack of exercise kicked in at the rest of her hips and dips. It was nice, to feel like she was making this body her own, but proof of anarchy was still evident from the curve of her nose to the hair that falls (and tangles) down her back and over her shoulders. Pink roots spread across the top of her head and begin to trickle down strands of the poorly maintained brunette like someone took a dropper to her scalp with the 2016 Pantone color of the year. It's a strange contrast to see on her head, but it was almost ironic as it matched her dilemma; the color seeping through no matter how hard she tries to cover it the equivalent of Juno's seeping… Consciousness?
Quinn makes a gargling noise before leaning her head against the mirror, sighing when her hot head comes into contact with the glass. She really doesn't have time to dye her hair.
Days and a dye job later, she sits with Tachihara in an outside cafe eating ice cubs from her cup as the faux redhead opposite her seems incredibly focused on the menu in his hands. Quinn has had zero luck in her search on Nichi, but more profoundly she's had zero luck in finding anything about Juno's life. It's not that there's nothing there, but that she has no access—which is odd considering she was just self-promoted. When she tried to explain herself to the woman in charge of guarding all physical records in the basement of tower three she was forcibly removed from the underground by a security team she didn't know existed.
Thankfully no one knew she was thrown on her ass but Higuchi (the one who directed her to the records room after suggesting Nichi may be a nickname), which somehow made her job both easier and harder; a bug of caution seeped into her mind in the search after the incident, and Quinn's questioned no one regarding her past lives affairs, which meant that she's gotten exactly nowhere.
"Do you know everyone's nickname in the Port Mafia?" Quinn asks through the sounds of crunching ice in her teeth as the man across from her flips a page. He seemed to be the replacement-Higuchi whenever the woman was indisposed of—ie, now, parading across Yokohama in disbelief that Akutagawa has a female companion and in for a rude awakening regarding Gin's identity and her own sexuality—and their dynamic seemed to work for one another as he never actually listened to anything she had to say as she would follow him in his continued attempts to stalk Yosano no questions asked.
"Just immediate coworkers, and the ones people write about in fanfiction," he says the words like they're completely natural and Quinn spits shards of ice cubes back into her cup at her chosen term, suddenly feeling the kind of meta that threatened to make her lose her shit had she not already lost her shit.
"I'm sorry, what did you just say?"
Finally, he looks up from the menu, eyeing the drops of water that splattered off her cup and onto the table, and with a scoff he replies "It seems like you heard me,"
"Yes, I heard you, but did you hear you?" it was inane to consider the term said by any mafioso (okay, maybe a certain blonde fanatic could have been an author) but for it to be said by the brutish assassin and hunting dog in a way that insinuated one of his past times include actively reading the term… Did she really hear him?
"It's funny," seemed to be all he decided to say about the topic before shifting conversation to what he should order since Quinn was paying. Quinn, however, was not done, and still spoke her train of thought aloud ignoring him as he would often her.
"People write fanfiction about the Port Mafia?" she asks in disbelief, and hours later she's sitting in the middle of her turned-over living room with her laptop tucked between her legs.
People indeed write fanfiction about the Port Mafia, not unlike the thing's she's read about the Property Brothers or President Obama and his VP. The citizens of Yokohama seem to be fascinated by the organization shrouded in secrecy, even as they have no idea as to who anyone is. For instance, Mori is just the boss and lacks a name (yet he is still featured in crossover work with existing ADA members and often suggested to have a romantic history with their leader), and the existence of executives is made out to be like they are his pets. From lewd interactions in a high-rise elevator to platonic meetings outside of work she finds nearly everything and all sorts of misnamed people, the shock and awe nearly makes her forget about her quest for Nichi.
That was until she saw the name tucked between words in a lengthy paragraph about oceanside operations.
If she wasn't already seated on the floor she would have fallen over, but instead, she wobbled from the inability to understand how the name didn't exist except in supposed inaccurate accounts of illegal affairs, and what she could gather was the following:
Nichi was brunette. Some kind of dark brown hair mopped onto his head in some aerial direction that varied in details but what was consistent was the brown. He worked in shipping and she had good reason to believe he was the leader. Workers cursed him out and he had a trend for being a smug buzzkill except for lunchtime when he would fund barhopping that often ended work early.
As far as Quinn was concerned he had no reason to be inked on her workspace after a blackout. He wasn't important enough to sit in the subconscious of her mind, brown hair and occupation alike.
Closing her laptop she yawns, rubbing her eyes until purple showed up in the darkness. As much as she enjoyed good smut placed in between the budding war for Yokohama in fiction, she was still left with straws to grab of a person who may not exist. She wasn't any closer to understanding Juno or her connections, nor was she closer to finishing any work regarding the budget or whatever it was she was supposed to be doing as intelligence. Opening her eyes to the mess around her Quinn faces the reality that she wasted to much time on this one thread of an issue that she didn't bother to really dissect the bigger problem.
There's a chunk of her day missing.
Often times she's missing for weeks at a time, but being (theoretically) asleep in those cases gives her the peace of mind that nothing really happens.
But this unconsciousness was slipping into her days even if for seconds at a time, the plural growing from a deep paranoia that this has been happening more than once. What if her slips in memory haven't been poor concentration? What if there was something actively wrong with her beyond all that was at the surface?
What if Juno was coming back?
A shiver falls down her back and makes her hands clench. If Quinn ever had that thought before it was buried, and being brought to the forefront of her mind was a Victor Frankenstein move digging up the dead and letting their bodies sinfully run amuck again.
For months Quinn has successfully reminded everyone that Juno was dead and she was here to stay in her place, but how much could she be sure that was true? Wasn't she already an example of spontaneity? Who said it had to be a one-way thing?
"No, no, no, no," Quinn shakes her head like a dog standing from the floor and making her way to the bathroom mirror, staring into her greatest foe and longest companion, she points an accusatory finger. "You don't get to do this anymore, you had your shot," she continues to converse with her reflection despite the covered roots and rounded appearance.
"If you wanted to do something important you shouldn't have died." the words come out like a hiss, pointer finger nudging into the cold glass that further pressure may have actually caused it to crack.
"You're a ghost!" Quinn is screaming now as her finger closes itself into the rest of the fist she throws against the glass. Immediately she feels her knuckles sting and expects to see blood with shards of glass glistening from wounds that would only close up as time ticked by, but the mirror was whole and merely shook a bit at the contact. Under her breath she lets out a curse, shaking her hand at the sensation of a bruise lingers but does not show.
"You—!" she yells at the mirror again but has suddenly lost her breath, and instead an incoherent blurb echoes in the bathroom.
Her knuckles still sting as she throws another fist and misses its target to collide with a pillar of wood, splinters falling everywhere except her skin.
The contact brings her tongue further into her mouth as her teeth clench and she throws a kick instead, but it too manages to hit nothing, and the offset makes her lose her hold and trip backward to the ground. The collision of her back to dirt makes her cough, but amidst the noise, she hears a playful sigh more unsettling than the damage being done to her ego.
"Giving up already?" Dazai coos as he tilts his head over her own, standing above her fallen frame with his hands in his pockets. He doesn't look like he's broken a sweat.
"Just a break," Quinn speaks with a wave that calls for a truce, and his exhale is now one of a bored child after being told they cannot leave for ice cream.
"You American's and your breaks," he mutters, taking steps in an unidentifiable direction as she stares up at the sudden passing clouds in the darkened sky through crumbling ceiling tiles.
Quinn didn't think anyone could mentor her on control better than Dazai could.
No, that's not true. Chuuya has an unstable demonic entity living within him and has to manage that on the regular, so let's rephrase.
Quinn didn't think anyone could rigidly mentor her on control without actually lecturing her about it and taking physical steps to prepare herself for any kind of internal threat better than Dazai could.
She still wavered on this, but at this point, she's dedicated too much time to working with Dazai that convincing herself otherwise would prove disastrously counterproductive.
Originally she just wanted some pointers, but that didn't seem to excite him enough to listen to her nor take part in any actual 'help'. "Isn't that just a circumstance of being you?" he threw around a couple of times, and she would normally swat whatever was in his hands at the time to the ground as an attempt to explain how serious she was about this.
"Then you need a routine."
"I already have a routine."
"No, you have a ritual."
Apparently, the difference between a routine and a ritual to Dazai was the physicality of it. Brushing her teeth at night? Ritual. Sparring at the crack of dawn? Routine. Watching the news as she got ready in the mornings? Ritual. Drinking sake until she was just-barely intoxicated? Routine.
If being part of the Port Mafia wasn't going to kill her alone, willing using Dazai as a guide for helpful behavior certainly was.
"Come on, you can't lay on the ground forever."
"We can make a bet."
"Your body, your decision."
"That's so respectful," the words are a bit strained as she stands back up, bones aching in the dullest of ways before she readies herself in another fighting stance. "What are we gonna do if I hit you?" the question comes with a slight rock of her feet observing his lack of preparation as he merely stands in front of her, though the words do put a small smirk on his face as his jacket sways in the wind.
"Hit me and find out."
She has yet to hit him.
She has hit a bunch of other things.
Dazai said that she needed to anchor her head to this world in order to be able to place it in her memories. The sentence seemed convoluted at the time and made no sense considering everything he had her do was something that ruined her headspace, but after a while, she found that that was his point.
They sparred in open fields originally but that would only make her trip onto nothing. When it was the already falling infrastructure of abandoned homes she would hit things, feel a sear of pain despite there being no sign of it on her body. Three days would pass by and she could place each little twitch of her hand to a location remembering the mornings and the evenings that followed in a series of aches throughout her body. When she was half drunk in the floors of his unlived apartment it was like a test of tolerance bringing herself to the verge of a blackout so that she could still remember her sins in the morning.
Adrenaline, alcohol, those were to be her anchors reminding her that she was indeed in control of her vessel.
"Not that I'm in any place to judge, but this is making for an incredibly unhealthy lifestyle." she has still yet to throw a punch unsure if her body could handle the motion, standing in a sway against rotted wood beneath her feet.
"You knew what you were walking into when you gave me your nights."
"Yeah, well, I expected more ramen and not less sleep."
In the slightest of sunlight, she notices a downward curve on Dazai's lips, a frown that seems out of place and disappears into a thin line just as soon as she saw it.
"When was the last time you got sleep?" his concern is odd so she drops her arms while staring at the sky. Aside from oddly placed naps in her day Quinn really couldn't remember the last time she got real sleep in the week she began this strenuous routine. She really did devote her nights to him, and the hours left before the day she ended up back in her own home going about her ritual before heading to work. The last time she got real sleep? That had to be more than a week ago when she fell asleep in her office, right after her meeting with Mori, when she—.
"It's when you blacked out, right?"
Quinn smiles as he speaks, jumping with a small 'whoop' before pointing a finger at Dazai ahead of her.
"Yes!" she cheers "After I was dismissed from the office I was going to balance dry cleaning numbers but then I just got so tired I fell asleep in my chair," the image is hazy but its there, like she's reading a diary that got its pages wet and the ink began to ran making everything nearly illegible except to the owner who knows what they wrote "then I had one of those Juno dreams," she adds, quieter as her excitement dies down and it's her turn to frown
"Can you remember?" Dazai asks standing in front of her, yet with the scenes playing in her head he feels miles away and she nearly doesn't hear him.
"It's kind of… Disorienting…" the word isn't far from the truth; as much as she feels she can see the pieces she was looking for it all felt out of order, random, flashing in her head and leaving as soon as it pops up. Soon she shakes her head as though it would wipe her mind clear. The small memory coming back with what she saw wasn't what concerned her, it was Mori's words said earlier that day suggesting that dreams aren't that far from memory, like he knew just what it was she was falling into whenever she closed her eyes for too long.
"I'm not sure what to make of any of this," the words come out as a mumble from her mouth as she stares nowhere in particular. In the beyond she feels she hears Dazai hum.
"It's not any different from any sort of data," he points out, and the suggestion makes her scrunch her nose with the rest of her face looking back at him ahead of her.
"What do you do with data, Quinn?" she's not sure what he's looking for nor what mindset she's supposed to be in as she mulls the question over.
"Well I… I analyze it?" she feels like a student back in class hoping that there are no wrong answers, and the idea of being a student makes her repeat herself "I analyze it and write a report."
A report just would not do for this kind of information, and with her new knowledge of what this world entails Quinn decides to turn to the one medium that would never defy her: the written word of Fanfiction.
Sitting at her desk she chugs down a glass of water while staring at a blank page on her computer screen preparing herself for the step into hell she's been bound to take from the start. Fanfiction; the world of unnecessary details and documentation for experiences that will either remain unread or become adored. It helps that the Port Mafia already has their own well-endowed library with enough falsities that hers would only fly further under the radar.
Quinn takes a deep breath. She closes her eyes, rests her hands at the base of her keyboard, and waits for the words to hit.
She waits a little bit longer.
She opens one eye and looks at the keyboard to make sure her hands are positioned correctly.
She closes her eyes again with another deep inhale.
Her hands do not more.
"God damn it," the words come with an irritated sigh, leaning back in her chair and folding her hands in her lap. She needed to get into the mindset of a writer.
Where to begin, where to begin. Should she even bother with writing chronologically? What backstory did she even have for Juno to understand her character? Maybe she should write backward from her arrival to the uncovering of Juno's identity.
No, that wouldn't do. This wasn't about Quinn this was about Juno, and Nichi, and their boss-employee relationship that really should've been kept under better wraps instead of kissing in broad daylight on a cargo ship.
"Well that's a start…" the images come back to her with the mutter and soon her hands are back to the keyboard and typing, describing the sepia filter to the leather skirt she oddly wore for her position. Like she was describing a picture book she was able to see the dreams that were so wrapped up in her own daily hypnosis she couldn't understand them amidst her own memories.
Because that's what they were: memories. Bits of Juno's life that still clung to her consciousness, or even her own consciousness clinging to Quinn's own life. The technicalities of it were enough to give her a headache so she focused on the concrete of what she could find brought into the world with every typed word.
Juno worked in shipping. She was a bit of a party girl in her spare time and often hung out in mafia casinos in order to trick wealthy players into buying her a drink. She beat up men that would grab her ass in bars. She could pick up crates nearly a hundred pounds in weight if she bared her feet properly. She kept her apartment messy and her closet untangled. She never threw out her clothes even if there were sudden holes from on the job.
Most of all, Juno was alone, until one day she wasn't.
Nichi showed up in her peripheral after she was thrown out of a casino for disorderly conduct. She was failing many attempts to light a cigarette and ended up throwing the lighter in a wayward direction, but he caught it. They made conversation, but Quinn couldn't hear despite seeing the scene in her head.
Until a phrase sticks out, and even makes Juno stand a bit more straight like he was finally worth her while.
"I noticed you," the words aren't cryptic at all but make Quinn's gut churn the moment she writes them down, hands freezing above the keyboard waiting for the next to come.
Her mind draws a blank, and she quietly curses to herself.
"I only want the name," Quinn speaks into the darkness of her office as if someone could hear her to answer.
The darkness doesn't reply, and gritting her teeth she sends her five thousand plus words into the black hole of the internet, closes the computer, and leaves for her first good night of sleep in a while.