I decided to have some fun re-writing S1 E9 (The Beauty is Quiet Like a Stone Statue) and S1 E10 (Rashoumon and the Tiger) on the background of chapter one. To be honest, it was this interaction that made me think there was potential for these two so in many ways, so it feels almost inevitable.
I hope you all have as much fun reading it, as much as I had writing it.
Four years later
Chuuya had just walked into headquarters when Akutagawa stormed into the main office, rage billowing off him. Chuuya raised an eyebrow as he strode straight past everyone to the door, slamming it shut behind him.
"What's his problem?" Chuuya asked to no one in particular.
"He couldn't get anything out of the prisoner. You wouldn't have heard, but the defector is in the basement. Apparently, he joined the Armed Detective Agency."
"Defector… Detective Agency?"
"Osamu Dazai."
Time stopped for Chuuya Nakahara. Four years since the last time they spoke. Four years since… that day. He hadn't trusted himself to think about his ex-partner that much- sometimes anxiety drove his train of thought, rage on other occasions. Sadness and disappointment had their turns. In his worst spirals, he wondered whether Dazai was still alive, but he never let himself believe that Dazai still lived in Yokohama.
"I see," was all he managed to say before grabbing his coat that he just slung onto the chair and proceeded to head to the basement.
He knew his shoes echoed down the stone stairway, but he preferred it this way. Tainted could muffle the sound, but he felt there was no need. He wanted Dazai to know he was still here.
"Plotting as usual?" he said, once at the bottom of the stairs, radiating all the confidence. The roles were reversed now. He, Chuuya, was a Port Mafia Executive and Dazai was his prisoner.
"That voice…" he heard Dazai say. Of course, he remembered him but Chuuya still felt a wave of nostalgia from a time when two teenaged boys did everything to annoy each other.
"This is nice. This is a great view. It rivals even a masterpiece with ten billion. Wouldn't you agree, Dazai?"
"Gross. Man, gross."
"I like your reaction. It makes me want to strangle you," Chuuya striding closer towards the man chained to the wall. They were face-to-face now, though annoyingly Chuuya had to look up to meet Dazai's gaze.
Of course, Dazai didn't miss the beat. "You haven't changed at all, Chuuya," Dazai said making a point to look down at him.
"OH?! WHAT'S THAT SUPPOSED TO MEAN?" He wanted him to say it, just to give him a reason to hit him. Not that he needed one.
But the brunet continued, "I've always wondered about this but where do you get your embarrassing hats."
His… embarrassing hats? What. Even. Like he didn't know.
"Say what you want vagabond. I beg you're still going on and on about suicide despite your age, aren't you?"
"Mmm,"
"At least pretend to deny that," he whispered under his breath. Did nothing change at all?
But to the issue at hand.
Chuuya straightened up. "But now you're just a sad little prisoner. It's enough to make you cry, isn't it Dazai?" The brunet just stared at him. "No… it's actually a little too convenient."
He narrowed the gap between them, grabbing the fullest part of Dazai's hair. He was still shorter, but at least the angle would be worse for the brunet.
"You may be able to deceive that apprentice, Akutagawa but not me." He held eye contact, eyes glittering dangerously. "After all, I am your old partner. What's your play?"
Dazai met his gaze with a bored expression. Chuuya knew he wasn't wrong. This was Dazai's plotting face. Chuuya tried not the think about the last time Dazai was this close, looking at him as though he could read every thought in his head.
"My play? It's just what it looks like," he said at last, cocking his head to the side. "Get caught and wait to be executed."
"There's no way the Dazai I know would be caught through bad luck or gross negligence. If you were that foolish," He tossed his head back and turned around, "I would've killed you long ago."
Dazai and his lies. He shouldn't have come. He felt like a teenager again.
"You're overthinking it. Besides… why'd you come here in the first place?"
Why did he come in the first place? He wanted to see whether he was really alive, that he was okay? Of course, he couldn't say that.
"To harass you," he said, with all the bravado as he could muster. "You toyed with me all you wanted back then. But…"
No, he was not going to be that boy who sat in his room and cried with the most expensive wine he could find on the day that Dazai left. He made a name for himself without him.
He swung around with a roundhouse kick, breaking Dazai's chains. "There's usually payback for it ten times over later."
"I don't know what you're planning," he continued, coat on one shoulder, and adopting his battle stance. "But fight me, Dazai. I'll crush you right along with your schemes."
He channelled his feelings into fighting. There was no space for tactical thinking or feeling in a full-on brawl- there was only who was stronger. This was his arena.
"Chuuya…" Dazai practically purred his name. He clicked his fingers and the handcuffs fell away.
"So you could have escaped at any time?" He was not even surprised.
"You, stop my plans?" Dazai said, with the self-assured look that Chuuya found familiarly irritating, He brandished a bobby pin, "You must be joking."
Chuuya could only manage an amused smirk. How was it when everything had changed, so many things felt familiar? He and Dazai were now on opposite sides, and yet they moved the same, argued the same.
He wanted to be truly angry but all he felt was relief.
"I'm liking this turn of events!" he announced before charging towards Osamu Dazai, casting his coat to the floor. He led with two alternate punches, which Dazai easily dodged, leaping backwards to avoid Chuuya's onslaught. The brunet caught his arm on the fourth missed punch and countered with a jab to his stomach.
"You call THAT a PUNCH?!" Chuuya shouted, using the opening to use a similar move on his ex-partner. Dazai slammed against the wall and slumped to the ground.
"It doesn't even count as a massage," Chuuya said, walking towards him, "Your martial arts skills are below average for the Port Mafia. Your ability to neutralise gifts is a nuisance, but I don't even need to use mine at this point."
Dazai stayed on the ground. He wasn't unconscious, but it would be just like him to be thinking about his next move in a fight.
"Get up," Chuuya growled, "The party is just getting started."
"You're not the Port Mafia's top martial artist for nothing," Dazai stated factually, a smirk ghosting his lips. He leapt onto his feet and stretched his arms. "I thought my blocking arm'd get torn off."
He blocked my strike with his arm at the last second? He's predicting my attacks.
Dazai was now standing. "We've known each other a long time. I'm totally familiar with your moves, pacing and habits. I wouldn't have been a proper partner otherwise, right?"
And there it was again, that smug look.
Chuuya launched at him, faster that the eye could follow. "Then I bet you saw this coming too!" he shouted, punching Dazai straight to the face, followed by a quick follow-up to the stomach. "THAT'S how you throw a punch."
He grabbed the brunet by the neck, his back to the wall. "You thought you could beat me just because you can predict my moves?" He drew his blade, pointing it at Dazai's carotid. It would be so easy just to kill him. So easy. And yet.
"Tell me before you die," he said instead, "Why'd you let yourself get caught? What were you waiting for here?"
The taller male just looked at him, surprise in his eyes, but something else too.
"Heh, the silent treatment? Fine. I'll just have more fun torturing you."
"The main reason," Dazai said finally, "is Atsushi-kun."
"Atsushi?" Chuuya repeated. Dazai had… friends?
"The weretiger you're all obsessed with. I wanted to know who put the seven-billion yen price tag on his head."
"You wanted to know badly enough to put your own life on the line? I'd say that's heart-warming but look where you ended up. Guess even geniuses end up less than average, eh? Youngest executive in the mafia's history? Well, you've been deserted by lady luck. After all, you got caught the very day I got back from supressing squabbles in the West. From my perspective, it was incredibly fortuitous."
And it was. There was no other way to describe the coincidence that Chuuya was the one to come downstairs after Akutagawa.
He was goading him now, his heart no longer in actually hurting him. This Dazai was different to the one who left the Port Mafia so many years ago. Just as cunning, but the ruthlessness seemed tempered by something else.
The brunet let out a soft chuckle.
"What's so funny?" Chuuya said, frowning.
"Let me tell you something that's good to know. There will a meeting between the top five executives tomorrow."
"Impossible." Chuuya withdrew his knife. "That's a meeting of critical importance that only occurs once every several years to determine what direction to take as an organisation." He hadn't been to one yet. "If there was going to be one, I would have been notified."
He'd been away, was that why?
"The reason it's happening is a certain letter I sent the other day to the upper echelons of the organisation."
Dazai… sent a letter to Mori-san. And Mori-san sent him away. Again.
"So, I'm going to predict this now," Dazai continued, meeting Chuuya's gaze with an intensity that made his heart erratic, "You're not going to kill me. Moreover, you'll tell me where to find information on who's paying the weretiger bounty before leaving this room. And when you leave, you'll walk and talk like a little rich girl."
Chuuya was not amused. Even with a hand on his throat, he still had the ability to command the authority in the room.
Dazai continued to maintain eye contact. "My predictions always come true. I think you know that."
I know that better than I'd care to.
"What can you even hope for in his situation?" Chuuya asked, keeping all emotion but anger in his tone. Then… "Wait, letter? You mentioned a letter?"
"The letter said this: Should Dazai fall, all of your secrets will come to light."
"You bastard, you didn't…" It was one thing to defect. It was entirely different to be a traitor.
"So now you've caught a former executive turned traitor. But the package included a letter to the upper echelons that if I die, all the organisation's secrets will be disclosed. If the public prosecutor's office gets a hold of those secrets, all the Port Mafia executives can be executed a hundred times over. That's more than enough of a threat to trigger the meeting."
"The Port Mafia aren't so feeble that a threat like that would make them wait and see what happens. You will die! There will be an execution."
Chuuya always said it: Dazai was stupid. They would kill him for this. If that threat remained, the Port Mafia would not let it go.
"Probably. But that'll be the council's decision. If you execute me before that decision without permission, your unsanctioned act will be considered an act of betrayal. You'll be discharged or, at worst, executed."
"And even if I look past of those factors and kill you, you'll just be happy because you managed to die."
Dazai had the most infuriating smile plastered on his face- the look when he knew he had already won.
"So yeah, go ahead if you want." He said cheerfully then dropped his timber, "Come on, hurry," then swapped his tone to the most irritating sing-song version "Come onnnn."
Chuuya adjusted the blade in his hand and stabbed at the wall, barely nicking Dazai's neck. And then proceeded to walk away.
"Oh," Dazai said, feigning disbelief as he tended to do, "You're not going to? 'Chuuya driven out of the organisation because of me' had a nice ring to it."
The orange-head man reached down to get his coat. "Don't tell me… your second reason was to force me to make that impossible choice just now?" He heard the brunet's chuckle from across the room. "In actuality you were waiting to harass me."
Choose between Dazai and the Port Mafia, or perhaps more accurately, choose between his feelings and loyalties? Why did that feel so familiar? But only one of those two options didn't desert him in the first place.
Dazai removed the knife from the wall and walked towards his old partner. "It's a reunion long in the making. A surprise of this calibre is only fair."
Surprise? Chuuya couldn't even look at him anymore.
"I'll have you die. I'll have you die someday, I swear."
"By the way, you're the one who broke my chains and freed me. If I just run away now, you'll be suspected of aiding my escape."
Oh no. "You BASTARD."
"If you do as I say, I could make it look like someone from the Agency came to rescue me."
"Why should I believe you?!"
"I don't lie in these kinds of negotiations. I think you know that." Dazai tossed his knife back to him, a reflex action, an instinctive catch. Dazai had been knownto lie in negotiations. Did he mean when they were bargaining with each other? But that was ages ago.
"… What do you want?"
"I said it earlier."
"If it's about that weretiger, Akutagawa's leading the operation. He should have records in the communications storage room on the second floor."
"I see. Well, I had my guesses about that."
"You…" Chuuya just shook his head, "Just finish what you came here for and get outta here, you arse." He turned around and started to climb the stairs, raising his hand in a mock farewell.
"Well, thank you. But I have one correction. My dream right now is to commit double-suicide with a beautiful woman, so being kicked to death by you wouldn't make me happy in the slightest. Sorry."
Chuuya didn't bother even looking at him, that way he wouldn't see his eye roll. That was part of the promise, wasn't it? It never happened. "Uh-huh. I'll try to find a beautiful woman willing to kill herself next time."
"Chuuya! I had no idea you were a good person!"
"It's my way of saying go to hell, idiot! Let me tell you this, Dazai." Chuuya stopped halfway to the top. "Don't think this is the end of it! There will be no second chance."
"No! Wrong! Don't you think you're forgetting something?" Dazai called out to him. What was it he said earlier? No, God no.
And when you leave, you'll walk and talk like a little rich girl.
Was it sad he just wanted to see the brunet laugh?
Chuuya turned his knees inward and spun around, capturing the coyness of a young girl. He pointed a single finger at Dazai.
"There will be no second chance," in a voice that was too high to recognise as his own. "N… No second chance."
Dazai just stared at him.
"WELL LAUGH YOU IDIOT!" he shouted before storming out.
He was pretty sure he heard Dazai's laughter, the real version, before slamming the door shut. He was glad there was no one around to see the smile on his face.
