Chapter 4: #21 Nightmare
Once again, the prompt is a slight stretch. But I don't really care. Mehe. So, some of you might have seen my message on my profile, but some of you probably didn't. Something happened and it might make me upload less frequently in a period of time. Something happened, as in life-changing, and in a bad way and I need some time to deal with it. This chapter was nearly done, and I felt like writing for a bit, so I finished it...ish. I don't know. Anyway, I know that the next chapter in this will make a lot of progress, so at least you have something to look forward to, even if this chapter might leave you a bit... unfulfilled. Maybe. My head isn't all here. Or there. Or Anywhere.
Small glimpses of a china funnel, attached to a thick yellow tube faded in and out. An arm, clad in paper-thin fabric wearing rubber gloves was holding the funnel hight above him while a thick greenish-yellow goo was poured into it. Dazai vaguely realized that blood was gushing from his nose as the tube was forced further down his throat, while he wheezed like a drowning man. His restrains made a ruckus as he desperately tried to break loose, ignoring the pain in his body for this new unendurable agony.
The tube kept being shoved further and further down. Eventually, he felt the thick sob entering his stomach, and he choked as it urgently tried to get back up. His mouth was clamped shut, and even if his chains wouldn't allow him to move anywhere, several pairs of hands held him down as he faded in and out of awareness until the bag of slush being poured directly into his stomach was empty.
Dazai startled awake, a sharp twinge darting through his abdomen in phantom pains after the unpleasant retraction of the feeding tube. He wasn't sure how long it had been since the force-feeding, but he wasn't able to stay awake for more than minutes at the time. The dizzyness would make the room turn as if he felt the earth rotate, leaving him dry-heaving and hyperventilating.
His dreams were bizarre. Still, they felt more real than the world around him. At the time he had first come through, he was still in an unfamiliar space, making the border between hallucinations and reality impossibly blurred.
The faint memories from the day before were the first thing he recognized once the nearly unendurable pain finally gushed through his feeble form. He tried to take a deep intake of air, which only made his burning chest feel like it was about to explode, leaving him gasping like a fish out of water. The panic kept building up, but he stubbornly quelched it down.
He could still breathe if he only stayed calm. There was still oxygen circulating through his lungs, and as long as he didn't panic, that would be enough, even if it felt a little like breathing through a straw.
Closing his eyes, he hoped it would shut the outside world out enough to focus. Focus on his breaths and his heartbeat. He closed his mouth, humming tiny noises with his lips in a slow, steady beat, hoping his heart would follow the small thuds that vibrated down his chest.
But, before he could find out if it worked, a door opened close-by.
"Ah, so you're awake," the familiar voice with the accented Japanese said before the door closed, locking the new presence inside the room with him.
The only sound Dazai could make was a choked wheeze as the cigarette-stained man approached.
"You really messed up yesterday," he continued, resting a palm on the table Dazai was lying on, close to the raven-haired man's head.
Chills went down Dazai's spine and he closed his eyes again, wishing he had the strength to break out of the bonds that held him down. It used to be his specialty. There wasn't a cuff he couldn't break out of if he wanted. Now, however, that seemed like a lifetime ago. At this point, he was sure he couldn't have held his own weight- even if it hadn't been for his shattered hip.
"I'm starting to give up on you, kid," the middle-aged man said in mock-regret. Dazai frowned and tried to turn his head to face away from his abuser, but his head was too tightly bound to the table.
"I'm also running out of ideas on how to make you talk. Things seemed so easy when you still had all your finger and toenails."
Dazai winched at the memory of the pins being shoved under his nails.
"You are just too fucking stubborn… But," his captor sighed, "I guess we'll start with the regular. Maybe inspiration will strike."
Before Dazai could comprehend what was being said to him, a scab on a bearly healed stab wound along his ribcage was being re-cut, and a hand filled with fine-grained salt quickly rubbed the bleeding surface. The familiar burning gave him a short boost of adrenaline before it dissolved into pure anguish.
The procedure was repeated over every slightly recovered wound on his body until it felt as if his entire form was in flames.
A strangled cry ripped through his body, but as much as he wanted to scream, he couldn't make a sound. Instead, he laid trembling in his restraints on the frigid board.
"Actually," the man mused as he watched over Dazai's writhing figure. "I do have a device that I've been wanting to test out." He leaned over the diverting gaze of his victim, waiting patiently until Dazai's eyes were fixated on him.
"It's not my own invention per-say, but I have never tried it before. I made it with you in mind."
The elderly man disappeared out of the room for several minutes and eventually returned with a simple-looking device made of metal with a handle on top. It had protruding studs on the interior surface with bars lined up with sharp metal points. Dazai recognized it instantly.
He had seen it before, but that one was at a much smaller scale. He realized that this particular device wasn't made for only fingers and toes. This Thumbscrew could crush much, much lager bones.
He mentally braced himself for what could possibly be the worst pain he would have to endure his entire life.
"I've looked everywhere, I can not find a man with that name," Kunikida sighed, slapping the screen of his laptop down with a defeated grunt.
"Are you sure you've got it right?"
Only then did Ranpo honor his younger coworker with his attention. The master detective glowered towards him grimly, protruding his lip as he walked over to the blonde's desk.
"Of course I'm sure," he muttered sourly. Still, he decided to humor his friend and look at Dazai's notes once more, even if it was no possibility of him being wrong about this. After taking a copy of the report, he had drawn circles around letters and words in different colors and translated them into a document for his more simple-minded coworkers to understand.
"Look, he literally spelled out the name, Dan Gavagan right there!" He pointed to the rings he had drawn with a green pen at random block-letters through the report, made to look like poor personalized hand-writing.
"Yes, I can see that. But is there any possibility that it's something else?"
"Like what?" Ranpo retorted in a sharp tone, standing defensively with his hands on his hips and leaning closer towards the bespectacled man.
"How the hell am I supposed to know? You're supposed to be the genius!"
"Yeah? Well, tell me how much you've contributed to this investigation thus far, grouchy-pants!"
Soon, they were both scowling intensely at each other, only a few centimeters apart.
"Cut it out," a stern alto-voice interrupted. Hands suddenly rested on top of both of their heads, bumping them together none too gently.
Small painful yelps escaped the detectives as their foreheads connected, leaving each of them rubbing vigorously at pink, swelling spots slightly beneath their hairlines.
"How is this helping? It's neither doing anything for the case or anyone else who's working on it, so please shut up." Yosano half stood, half sat on Kunikida's desk.
As they started shouting on top of one another and pointing accusing fingers, arguing how the other was at fault, Yosano rolled her eyes wryly. Her palm slammed onto the desk, tea-cups and office supplies jingling in their spots and effectively stopping the two stubborn men.
" Enough!"
Kunikida sighed tiredly while Ranpo crossed his arms, looking away.
"I think," Kunikida started, checking to see if Ranpo was listening. Satisfied that he somewhat reluctantly was, he continued. "I think we should call Hinata and ask her about the name. Maybe she recognizes it."
Yosano directed a pointed stare towards Ranpo. He chewed on his lip, considering it for a few short moments before he tilted his head in a passive-aggressive nod.
Content that the two were finally agreeing on something, Yosano decided that it was her cue to leave. She shot a warning glance towards them as he pranced off towards her infirmary.
"So, I guess I'll call her then," Kunikida mumbled, already reaching for his cellphone.
"Go ahead," Ranpo confirmed, before retreating to his own desk. Instead of getting seated in the office chair, he crawled his way under the desk, pulling out his emergency candy stash and settled in to sulk there for a while.
A red lollipop was quickly undressed from its wrapper and found its way into his mouth. All of this was so stupid. Dazai wouldn't just disappear like that. At least not without him , the greatest detective probably of all time , having any idea of where he could have gone . He was sure he hadn't committed suicide because Dazai could hardly leave for the toilet without announcing it.
Also, he always told them when he was about to… Just so that, maybe, someone could give him a reason not to. At least, that was what Ranpo had gathered. Because Dazai wanted to want to live. He didn't right now- or, well… Not when he disappeared. And through the last couple of years, his ramblings about the perfect methods and, more importantly, his attempts, had become rarer, further apart. That cursed book hadn't been inside the office for a long time either. Nobody pointed it out, but they had all noticed.
...and then, he vanished.
It just seemed so pointless.
A chair was pulled back, creaking loudly on the floor close to his own spot, surprising Ranpo out of his musings.
"Kunikida-san?" Ranpo heard Atsushi's frail voice ask while the steps approached his desk and knocked on the tabletop.
"It's their dad," he announced grimly, voice sounding like ice in the middle of winter and tone as pointed as the tip of a dagger. Ranpo instantly scrambled to his feet with a dubious look, but the glare Kunikida held, erased any doubt in Ranpo's mind.
This was bad.
Dazai had no idea that this man's psyche was as weak as it was. How little it took to push him over the edge from a loving father to murderous father, and from a murderous father to a grieving father and then to a deranged psychopath.
After they had found Niko, it truly did look like an accidental drowning. Everything pointed towards it, but how the child had been a champion swimmer, gone for an entire week before she conveniently was washed up on the shore of Yokohama's biggest river, just didn't sit right with him. The big question mark that still remained in Dazai's mind, was her father.
Never even once during the week that the girl had been missing had he been available to meet up with the Agency. According to the mother and Hinata, he was a huge workaholic, who held his work at a military-ran laboratory at a high priority, and apparently, they were at the brink of a big scientifical breakthrough.
Strictly confidential, of course.
Common decency told him that he shouldn't intrude on the family in their time of grief after Niko had been found by the river, but he still decided to contact them to offer his condolences. It wasn't until he heard that their father had still gone to work that next morning that he decided to show up there unannounced.
Getting clearance wouldn't have been too difficult, but he still decided it would be more fun to try and break into the facility- because once you've been dragged by the neck by barbwire, climbing a fence embroidered with it really felt like a walk in the park.
He was almost disappointed when it hadn't been more difficult to get inside the lab, but once he was in, he quickly realized a huge piece of what must have happened.
The smell of chlorine had been overwhelming the moment he entered, and he had swiftly found the swimming pool in the basement. It seemed fairly new, or at least recently restored. A sinking feeling ran through Dazai with the realization. His mind raced, running through the information he had learned about Niko this previous week.
She was an elite swimmer. She held a record for holding her breath in the county- he couldn't recall the exact time, it didn't seem important at the time and he had really selective hearing- but he remembered that it was longer than he could and that he had been impressed.
Her friends and family had said that she had been distant the past year, starting about the same time as she started working out more seriously.
She had spent more time working out after school than hanging out with her friends. When asking her teammates, they said that she must have been training somewhere else because she only attended the practices with the swimming team, never training with them after school except for the scheduled days while still having remarkable progress. Like for instance setting a new county record on holding her breath.
This must have been where she went. Was there one thing he had learned as a detective, it was that there was no such thing as a coincidence.
Had there been an accident? Someone might have found her and panicked- which could quite easily have been her father.
He took a moment to look around, heading for the small area in the back where a desk with an office set-up was situated, as well as some kind of machine that he didn't recognize- only parts of it; like the oxygen mask, as well as a setup for heart monitors and a device that would monitor the amount of oxygen flowing through your blood.
Reaching out to turn through the pages of the documents at the desk, realization slowly dawned upon him. There were numbers. 1,23, 1,52, 2,00, 2,36, 3:04…
It just ascended from there.
There were several methods for training your lungs to hold your breath that Dazai could think of, but from the dates at the margin of the forms, it seemed unlikely that anyone would be able to have this kind of increase during only a year.
The machines behind him suddenly came to mind, and he wondered if they might have something to do with it. Searching them meticulously, he tried to memorize any details that stood out so he could draw it up once he got back to the agency.
The numbers on the oxygen tanks simply didn't add up, and he noted that lungs exposed to that kind of pressure might possibly…
...they must have pushed her lungs too far.
She was the experiment they were working on in here. The sudden boost in lung capacity… it must have been artificially induced. Dazai stared wide-eyed at the machines, slowly puzzling the pieces together.
The machine. It must have over-exhausted her lungs. They must have stretched her too far, to a point where her small body couldn't take it anymore. If a person could drown on oxygen, that was quite possibly exactly what happened. Her lungs must have simply erupted from the force pushed into them.
Dazai managed to feel slightly nauseous by the thought before something whacked him across the head.