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This brat was dangerous.
Sakunosuke felt that thought vibrate through his body. It was a mix of pleasure and pain, just like when he inhaled a fresh cigarette’s first hit.
Dazai hadn’t noticed that his companion wasn’t paying attention at all to his prattling. It was endearing, really, how much this boy could go on and on about annoying underlings.
“Akutagawa’s ability is sooooo wasted on him,” Dazai groaned in fake annoyance, crossing his arms behind his head, revealing a sliver of a bandage as the sleeve of his coat rode up his wrist. “I don’t get why the boss isn’t culling him on the spot. He’s nothing more than a beast, the way he lets his emotions run rampant all the time. If he were a dog, you’d put him down, too.”
Sakunosuke made sure to avert his eyes. Whenever Dazai noticed him taking note of another nick, another bandage, another hit that the boy supposedly hadn’t been able to prevent – his mood soured.
He would still joke around, but there was an imminent darkness that sometimes took over Dazai’s being, and Sakunosuke …
Well.
He didn’t care. That would be the wrong verb. He hadn’t known the brat long enough to care, really. You only cared about people you shared blood with, and sometimes not even that.
If Sakunosuke was honest with himself for one second, he had to admit that he struggled to find the right word for the emotions Dazai made him feel.
He didn’t care about him. He refused to do so. Caring about a suicidal, chronically depressed and slightly unhinged Port Mafia executive wasn’t a wise life decision. He was too grown-up to let his emotions control his actions.
Sakunosuke exhaled a cloud of cigarette smoke, blowing it straight into Dazai’s face to annoy the brat.
“Don’t do that!”
“Who’s getting all emotional now?” He dragged a chuckle out of his sore throat. He wasn’t thirty yet, but his body already bore the toll of too much alcohol and tobacco. Well. He had always known that he’d cause his own death. With Flawless, people couldn’t get to him after all. This was his way of killing himself, too. Slowly and less dramatically than Dazai did, but maybe more efficiently anyway. Sakunosuke let his eyes wander towards the sliver of bandage. He had disguised it as one of his typical surrounding inspections. You can take an assassin’s weapons, but never his instincts. It was a quirk. Some quacks might call it trauma. Paranoia. Whatever. Sakunosuke simply liked to know who was behind him at all times.
Especially when he was with Dazai.
“One day, you’ll be the death of me,” Dazai muttered, “cancer’s not really how I want to go out.”
The death of me-
Touché.
Sakunosuke knew it was wrong, but he did it anyway. He blew another smoke cloud into Dazai’s face before letting his cigarette fall onto the asphalt of the alley. They had been ordered to inspect a pier. Some thugs had been giving the Port Mafia’s smuggling business some grief. Cargo had gone missing. Yada yada. The boss suspected an insider job. That meant someone would end up with a bullet between their eyes. As both punishment and warning. It was Dazai’s mission. Not his. The boss knew not to give him any responsibility for someone’s death if a death was deemed necessary. He always fuzzed those jobs.
Dazai coughed a bit, complaining even more about Sakunosuke’s cigarettes.
Sometimes, Sakunosuke wanted to put his pistol under Dazai’s pretty little chin and press him against a wall and just ask him straight out. You do know that you're going to get me killed one day, don’t you?
Sakunosuke had known this fact from the moment he had discovered that Flawless did not work around Dazai. So maybe it was him who was suicidal for hanging out with Dazai anyway.
The boy didn’t know.
Sakunosuke was sure of that. Dazai was ruthless and egotistical and self-serving, but despite his overwhelming intellect, the boy could be stupid about things like that. About things he chose to be oblivious about because the truth was too scary for him to contemplate.
Sakunosuke never mentioned the topic. He never avoided Dazai either. He, too, was too scared what kind of truth the wrong question could inspire in his own head.
Why do you risk your life for me, Odasaku?
They were close to the pier. Dazai would investigate and interview the workers, he’d find the thief and … he’d paint the interior of the cargo hold red. Then they’d go home, and Sakunosuke would cook dinner for the two of them. He only visited the kids on the weekend. One day, he’d take them away from Yokohama.
It was just so damn hard to leave Dazai behind.
“Hey, Dazai.” He stopped at the end of the alley, staring at the grey water of the port that was heavily polluted by oil and factory sewage. “Do you still consider double-suicide sometimes?”
It was one of Dazai’s recurring jokes. Yet something in his tone must have told Dazai that Sakunosuke wasn’t in a joking mood.
The Port Mafia executive instantly dropped his carefree stance. His muscles seemed tense, as if an electric shock had jolted through them.
“Why, are you offering?”
Sakunosuke turned around, fully aware of how the evening sun was illuminating his back, casting his entire front in shadow. Dazai’s calculating eyes rested on his face. He wasn’t a genius. He was simply great at figuring out people.
What do you see in me? Sakunosuke withstood the itch to ask Dazai straight out. That would invite a quid pro quo, and he felt utterly incompetent to answer that question himself.
There were seagulls circling above the port, shouting and fighting and doing everything humans did, too. They ate, they bred, they died.
Dazai was merely an arm length away from him. They weren’t touching, but his presence negated abilities in close quarters, too.
Were they too close?
If there were a sniper at the other end of the port, if somehow he had been marked for death and a bullet would be fired at him right now – would the bullet enter his back and burst out in his chest only to kill Dazai, too?
Dazai was bad for him.
Dazai made him vulnerable.
He made him feel closer to death than to life.
“It just occurred to me,” Sakunosuke said, refusing to give in to his paranoia, refusing to turn around to check for that possible assassin at the other end of the pier. There was no building to obscure someone’s sight. That’s where he would have hidden during his days as an assassin. “It occurred to me,” he repeated, “that double suicide is like marriage. You live together until death do us part.”
Dazai’s mouth twitched in disgust. “Are you calling me a romantic?”
“Maybe.”
Dazai scoffed and pushed past Sakunosuke, leaving that radius of doubt and no longer offering anybody a perfect shot where their bodies aligned.
Flawless didn’t activate.
No sniper for them today.
“If I ever left Yokohama,” Sakunosuke called out to Dazai who hadn’t waited for him to catch up, “would you leave with me?”
Dazai didn’t stop. His pace increased, forcing Sakunosuke to follow him towards the pier.
“You aren’t allowed to ask me that,” Dazai hissed. “No one leaves the mafia.” After a second of silence, he demanded, “Don’t ask me that ever again.”
“One day, I’m going to write an epic book about our experiences,” Sakunosuke said. “I hope you have an answer for me by then. Open endings aren’t my thing.”
His legs were longer than Dazai’s and so was his shadow. He strode past his friend, reaching for the gun he kept on his person.
He hadn’t broken his vow not to kill yet, but one day, he was certain, he’d fire that shot. The one bullet that remained in the gun. Just in case.
He threw a glance over his shoulder. “You coming or are you avoiding work now, too?”