Chapter Text
In the middle hours of the day, comfortably sat in the month of October Atsushi Nakajima was called into work on his day off.
It wasn't uncommon to have his paid leaves interrupted by fruitful tasks and small city jobs, if anything, it was more noteworthy to have the full 24 hours of rest inside his apartment. When he first joined the agency, he accepted the calls with an eagerness that ached to think back on. Wide eyes and a chest pushed out in enthusiasm as he pulled on his work trousers, the click of the button, the snap of suspenders.
It's been a year, the air from his chest dissipating with every stab and punch and kick ever aimed at his lungs since. Atsushi is reminded of what he was before as the coldness of autumn milks it's way into the air for the first time since throwing himself onto the bomb, and it hits with a force he's only ever felt in an alley, a flying blimp, a boat.
The coldness of the concrete creeps up his shoes and presses against his back. The vision of desolate alleyways and the shell of bins are all too familiar.
Atsushi sighs out into the autumn air and locks his door behind his heels.
The blue jumper he digs his hands into in a feeble attempt to hide away from the frigid air stands out in contrast to the greys and reds of the usual October province. The blue sky is hidden by murky clouds and orange tints of the sun. The blues of the sea he passes are washed away, and the pond Kyouka always kicked stones into, which she did as they passed, is covered with leaves and twigs.
Blue was Atsushis's favourite colour.
And October was definitely Atsushis's least favourite month.
And yet, when he makes his way into the office, there's the biting feeling of resentment that eats at his stomach. Because he knows, is sure, that the office will be decorated in fashion to the oranges and reds of the outside.
It's a tradition, a bleak endeavour to make the office comfort those inside.
Each celebration came as a parody of itself, garish and hollow, a brittle shell of tradition drilled into the bends and moulds of people, of clients and alike. Christmas, a celebration Atsushi had touched only once, was a fable of reds and greens he could never see—colours described in unreachable mumbles. Valentine's Day, a day of hollow hearts and confetti, clawed and scratched and chewed at his patience, a reminder of all the ways the world pretended to be soft and true. The way the world tried to cling to the concept of love and life.
Atsushi often imagined slamming his head against the desk, hoping the pain might drown out the taste of chocolate and tenderness.
Easter was an absent apparition in his memory, ignored by the orphanage that had long since taught him to find salvation in scraps.
God was a figure painted in someone else's imagination, and Jesus, the sculpture of sacrifice and forgiveness, hung in Atsushi’s mind like an unanswered question. If Atsushi were to kneel and pray to the man who sacrificed everything for everyone, he knows he would look down with compassion, seeing not a sinner seeking salvation, but a boy drowning in his own penance. A boy who's sacrifices were not for humanity’s redemption—but a desperate bid to prove his worth to himself, a failed attempt to barter for forgiveness that would never come. Saint Peter might have held the answers he didn’t want to hear, while Saint Anthony would simply shake his head at the choices of a lost son of God.
Atsushi did not pray, nor did he celebrate easter.
Easter brought yellow and blue streamers strung lazily across windows and desks. Birthdays were explosions of glitter and confetti, a chaotic rain of colours that felt more like mockery than celebration. But nothing compared to Halloween, the season of nonsense. The office became a carnival, plastered with cartoonish blood stickers and crime scene tape stretched across doorways. Plastic skeletons hid in drawers, severed limbs poked from corners, and Atsushi thought it all insultingly inaccurate. The living dead they celebrated were pale imitations of the real horrors he knew—the kind that walked in daylight, their smiles masking decay.
So it was no surprise when he stepped into the office and found it dressed for the season. Yet the sight still punched out a heavy breath out of his chest.
“Atsushi!” Yosano’s voice calls out when he crosses the frame. Kyouka darts forward, her small hands plunging into the bowl of candy Kenji holds against his chest. She plucks a gummy candy and presses it to Kenji’s lips, her cheeks round and full from her own hand. Kenji’s laugh is bright, a burst of naturalness and Atsushi looks away, the sweetness of the scene stinging like a pressed cut.
Yosano is standing on the arm of the couch when Atsuhi makes his way over, holding a strip of yellow police tape above her head and reaching for the edge of the window. Atsushi’s steps toward her, and smiles when their eyes meet, a warmth, a familiarity that he finds bubbling in his chest like a giddy child.
She had been his first understanding of temperate, hands stitching his torn skin and shaping his pain into something survivable. Broken and bruised, she had run her fingers through his hair and told him it was okay to break. She had shown him her own fractures, and it was the only comfort he trusted.
Drawing a parallel between scars, baring broken and bruised and comparing like a matching set was solace.
“Morning, doctor,” Atsushi smiles, his voice low, his gaze steady.
“Atsushi, could you pass me the tape?” Yosano asks, reaching towards the window. Atsushi nods and picks up the roll from the couch. She smiles softly in thanks as he tears off a piece and hands it to her. Without missing a beat, she returns to sticking the tape above the fogged window. Beneath the banner, bright red letters on the glass scream Enter if you dare! in a garish, dripping font—something Atsushi found overly dramatic and laughable.
October was a month of exaggeration, a parody of fear, and Atsushi despised it for its falseness. So much so, so achingly so, that when he hears a scratching voice cutting through the room, he turns and—
“Halloween,” Akutagawa’s dry voice sneers, “is nothing more than a capitalist charade. Candy companies exploiting the gullible masses for profit.”
–agrees.
He agrees with Akutugawa, with evil, with bitter and vicious.
He turns, his hands slipping away from Yosano’s side as his attention shifts. His gaze locks onto the back of Akutagawa’s head, the faint outline of his figure sharp against the chaos of the office. His hair, unruly and curling, grows just slightly too long, an appearance that has no regard for constraints. There’s something almost sobering, about the way it moves, framing his sharpness, with an unintentional refinement that feels foreign and unsightly when fitted in the same category as Akutagawa.
The alliance with the Port Mafia had been Atsushi’s doing—a desperate, begrudging necessity in the face of a greater threat. Back then, the Guild, an enemy too powerful for either side to face alone rattled the foundations of Yokohama and forced everybody, from the depths of Mafia grounds to the panes of Agency buildings by the scruffs of their necks to stand still, to obey and follow. The arrangement had been desperate, forged in urgency rather than the trust Atsushi had moulded himself to in the past year, but it had been enough. Together, through blooded knuckles and gasping chests, they had overpowered the Guild and burned it all up in the damn sky.
Atsushi remembers the moment it all fixed into place– Shin Soukoku standing as the unlikely culmination of the alliance, two forces so desperately opposed, working in perfect sync. Standing underneath the burning sun, settling over the city and announcing that it was all over, Atsushi tastes blood, grime and victory.
He tastes desperation, licks the aftertaste of adrenaline off his lips and scowls at corruption, who heaves in and out, who tries to hide the sweat and blood leaking from his sallow skin.
But even after the Guild fell, after the threat had been eliminated, the alliance itself had never officially been called off. Maybe its because no one had ever said the words to end it formally, or maybe some unspoken understanding had emerged from the ashes of that battlefield. Either way, it stayed, lingered, like the smoke of a distant fire that never fully extinguished.
At first, interactions with Akutagawa had been so irregular Atsushi forgot about it all most days, their worlds only brushing against each other during particularly dangerous missions that ended in a night, through quick punches and fleeting attempts from both sides to smother some equal threat. Those encounters were always tense, fraught with the kind of uneasy truce that could crack at the slightest push. One bad word Atsushi is bearing his claws, one snark comment and his back is pressed against a wall in a bone-breaking shove hes surprised his spine doesn’t pierce his lungs.
But over time, the hostility and bitterness are replaced by something less volatile. What had started as terse, forced contact during missions slowly changed into occasional emails, exchanged only when necessary to coordinate efforts. Then came the dropping off of files—a quick, wordless handoff in some neutral space, where they’d avoid each other’s eyes as if the documents might combust if either lingered too long.
And then, almost unnoticeably, things began to shift. The handoffs became conversations, brief at first, but growing and easing as the months passed. It wasn’t long before working together became a regular occurrence.
Now, it wasn’t unusual to find Akutagawa seated across from Atsushi at the Agency’s office.
It was... nice, Atsushi had to admit. To work without the constant, suffocating weight of worry hanging over his shoulders. Nice to collaborate with someone whose skill could match his own, someone who could handle the challenges that would leave most people reeling. Nice, too, to share a space with someone who understood the sharp edges of the world they lived in, who had faced the same abyss and come out just as scarred.
Akutagawa never said much, his words were measured and sparing, but the silence wasn’t uncomfortable. It was a companionable kind of quiet, filled with the soft rustle of papers and the rhythmic tapping of keys. For all his sharpness, Akutagawa’s presence had become something steady, a fixed point in the chaotic whirl of Atsushi’s life. And though Atsushi would never admit it aloud, there was something comforting about knowing he wasn’t alone in his desperation.
Yes, it was nicer. Unpredictable, maybe. Tentative, definitely. But nice all the same.
In the garish light of Halloween, Atsushi sighs and watches black and white run fingers over knuckles and bite at comments, at questions and looks. Kunikida pushes his feet off the table, Akutagawa stares and moves them back up.
Theres a nauseating feeling in his stomach at the sight of thin, sickly wrists slapping away the incoming shove and Atsushi wants to crack his knuckles, bite the knot out of his shoulder, sit down and run for miles. Never, will seeing it get easier. Seeing mafia black look bright in the surrounding lights of agency white.
Look alive.
“I swear to god if you chew like that one more fucking time I’m gonna make you eat your front teeth instead.”
Chuuya Nakahara, the executive who carried the weight of the Port Mafia with a grace that bordered on arrogance, was nothing short of compelling to Atsushi. And he too, sits in agency white with a heart stained in Mafia black. Enigmatic. Terrifying. Radiant. Chuuya was a symphony of contradictions, each note sharper and more refined than the last.
It isn’t just his ability that leaves Atsushi absorbed, though watching it in action was akin to witnessing the birth of a star—violent, luminous, and undeniably divine. The raw power that coursed through him seemed to bubble beneath the surface, ready to erupt at the slightest push. He’s raw and open, deathly still and closed. He's bitter-tasting when spoken about, and he sits, walks, and talks in the white like he’s seeing black.
When Chuuya moved, it wasn’t simply walking; it was a performance. A low-slung hat, a long coat that swirled behind him, shoes that probably cost more than the agency building, everything from his fabrics to his accessories were a gut-punching reminder of power, of imbalance and forever ongoing performance. Every detail was thought over, a declaration of power in a place that proved to challenge the threat of change.
Atsushi cant help but feel out of place in the face of it. Chuuya’s clothing alone seemed to laugh at him in at least five different languages—tailored to perfection, shoes polished to a gleam that reflected more light than the sun dared to. And then there was his hair, an unruly cascade of auburn curls that somehow managed to appear both wild and intentional, catching the light like strands of molten Carnelian.
Yet Chuuya wasn’t simply beautiful; he was lethal. His reputation spoke louder than any of his tailored silks or measured smirks. Seven hundred and forty-six confirmed kills, though Atsushi suspected the true number was far higher. And still, none of it made him less enthralling. Even in the face of that grim statistic, Atsushi couldn’t summon an ounce of fear or revulsion. Somehow, Chuuya made death itself seem like an art form as if every life taken was a brushstroke in a masterpiece only he could see.
Even Chuuya’s hands, weapons of power, were perfect. Atsushi’s gaze caught on the way they tightened at his sides, the gloves straining against the force of his grip as though they, too, were fighting to contain him. It was clear where that tension was directed—
at Dazai, who stood across from him with that insufferable grin.
For a moment, Atsushi found himself transfixed by the silent, crackling energy between the two. Chuuya’s fingers twitched, and Atsushi half-expected them to fly to Dazai’s neck, to encircle it with the same deadly grace that marked everything Chuuya did. But they didn’t move, at least not yet. Instead, Chuuya tilted his head just slightly, an almost imperceptible gesture that spoke volumes: a warning, a promise, and something more.
“Mr Nakahara, language like that is not tolerated in this agency.”
Kunikida breaks the long look of warning and Dazai snorts through a pressed grin, eyes watching in that way Atsushi has come to understand is a menacing joy that is fueled by annoying the people around him, and he watches Chuuyas face go red with it. Dazai pops another candy in his mouth and slides the rapper into the man's pocket without him noticing and if Atsushi weren’t now turning back to Yosano, who seems to be struggling to pick something up from behind the couch, he would almost be impressed.
The alliance comes from himself and Akutagawa, who fought with hands in hair and teeth on skin, who snapped like rabid dogs and barked like them too. They were the result of an idea, a concept.
It's patchy. Atsushi finds it only works in life or death.
Double black— however, works just sitting. Atsushi has watched Dazai swing on his chair, meet Chuuyas eyes and suddenly understand everything in a report he hadn’t even read. He's watched how they fight, how they move.
It's something he and Akutagawa could only dream of accomplishing.
Extraordinary. That was the word Atsushi would use—had always used—for relationships like theirs.
Dazai and Chuuya’s partnership was nothing short of extraordinary.
It reminded Atsushi, strangely, of the stories he’d been forced to memorise as a child. His parents in their relentless need for perfection had made him exhaust the works of the world—the Latin chef-d'oeuvres, the Greek tragedies, the English classics, and even the labyrinthine complexities of Arabic poetry. Recitation wasn't encouraged but demanded. Stumbling over the words, forgetting a line, failing to grasp what the meaning meant... well, it meant being treated the way he always was.
Broken down, rebuilt in someone else’s image.
And yet, amidst that whirlwind of cruelty, The Iliad stuck with him.
Achilles and Patroclus. Their story of love and war, two boys forged in the crucible of a world intent on breaking them, felt like the ultimate tragedy. They were warriors who had been drawn together by the brutality of life and torn apart by the inevitability of fate—forever entwined, even in death. That kind of connection, that soul-etching bond that intertwined the seams of blood and bone, that reshaped the arches of DNA and marrow– Atsushi sometimes dreams of it at night and wakes up with a hollow chest.
He couldn’t help but think of the stories about Double Black when The Iliad came to mind. Yosano’s teasing remarks, Kyouka’s quiet musings while they prepared dinner, even Akutagawa’s curt admissions during the rare moments they worked in sync—it all painted the same picture.
Dazai Osamu and Nakahara Chuuya. A partnership built on chaos, bound by something deeper than blood or hatred, something neither of them would ever fully admit to. No matter how many blood-stinging attacks they swapped or how heavily they denied it, they moved like two halves of the same.
"Yin and yang," Yosano once said with a laugh, gesturing toward the two, swapping paperwork without a word, but a mutual understanding so raw and real Atsushi is ten years late to understand. "If those two ever got over that petty hatred, they’d be the most unstoppable force of the twenty-first century."
But Atsushi didn’t need to imagine it. He saw it in the stories, in the whispers of awe and fear that clung to their names. He saw it in the way they fought, like fire and water locked in an undying push—burning, colliding, complementing. Achilles and Patroclus were reborn in Double Black, tragedy and triumph wrapped in the bodies of two men who could never escape one another.
It was extraordinary.
And terrifying.
But Atsushi couldn’t argue with Yosano, so he nodded, picked up the rest of his work and went back to his computer.
He could never argue with Yosano, so when she shouts for his help again in present time he’s quick to rush forward and ask what she needs.
“Help me lift these will you, I can’t seem to on my own.” She groans out through pressed teeth before leaning back into the corner of the couch.
“Of course.” He smiles and quickly leans over the side of the couch to pick up, what he quickly understands are two boxes, and laces his fingers underneath the slits of the bottom box and brings them up off the floor. Dust that had collected sways in a circular motion as he lifts them to the cushion of the couch and he coughs hesitantly into his elbow.
“I’m getting weak, my old age is finally catching up to me.”
Atsushi looks up from his elbow. “Oh no, you’re not old.”
She laughs. “I’m joking sweetheart.”
Eyes fall and watch the dust of the stacked boxes settle.
Before Atsushi can ask, which he’s opening his mouth to do, Yosano seems to read his mind and answer. “I’ve never noticed these before. I don’t think they belong to the office.” Her slim middle finger runs over the top, gathering a small pile of grey that twitches in the motion.
“Do they belong to anybody in the office?”
She looks up and squints. Atsushi shrugs, and after a moment she drags her eyes over towards the main desk, where Chuuya has his hands around Dazais throat. Kyouka and Kenji talk with mouths full beside where Akutagawa sits in Atsushis's desk chair, (which he was sure getting a shove for later) with his feet propped up ignoring Kunikida who leans over the sides of the table to ramble about respect for property. Ranpo laughs through the speakers of his phone, a mumble of incoherent demands Atsushi already knows are for Poe.
“Hey!” Yosano shouts and suddenly everything stills. “Do the boxes behind the couch belong to any of you?”
“What’s inside of them?” Kunikida asks after a silence settles over the office, and Yosano looks down.
“I’m not sure.”
The boxes seem old, worn enough to be a few years old, with the sides chipped and dented. The previous logo of the boot company is almost completely gone and if Atsushi hadn’t owned the boxes himself after buying the boots he would’ve been unaware. Even when Yosano finally opens the first box he realises it must be at least three years old with the print of the lettering inside.
What’s unusual about the boot box though, is that inside, it’s not boots.
“It’s videotapes?”
“They’re mine.”
Dazai lounges back in his chair, arms crossed loosely over his chest, his posture casual yet sharp and he has that strange, unnatural smile that curves his lips and presses his eyes—a smile that doesn’t quite reach his eyes and Atsushi knows like the back of his hand. His sleeves are pushed up past his elbows, the white bandage a heavy contrast against the muted grey of his vest and shirt. The long coat that usually covers it is draped over the back of the chair, forgotten. Without it, his figure takes on a different sort of presence, the vest hugging his chest before dipping sharply to frame his waist and shoulders in dark, clean lines. The bandages wrapping his forearms catch Atsushi’s attention next—different from usual, and somehow worse for it. They stop short, leaving his hands bare, unbound. Unprotected. There’s a vulnerability in that detail that feels almost deliberate as if Dazai is exposing something Atsushi isn’t meant to see.
His hair is wilder, dark curls brushing his temples and framing his face with a careless elegance that only makes the scar on his cheekbone more pronounced. Smooth skin marred by that thin, pale line. But it’s his expression that throws Atsushi off balance, that strangeness lurking behind the hollow gaiety of his smile. It feels like a mask, just a little too tight, stretched to its limit. Atsushi’s throat tightens, his pulse quickening, though he can’t explain why.
And yet, in spite of the unease curling in his stomach, Atsushi’s gaze keeps drifting back to him. To Dazai. Always, to Dazai.
He moves with the same quiet intensity he always does, rising from the chair once he notices the shift of the room’s attention. His steps are measured, unhurried, yet somehow predatory, closing the space between them with a kind of ease that makes Atsushi’s stomach lurch. His feet feel like they’re melting into the laminate flooring, becoming part of it, rooted and helpless under Dazai’s gaze. That aura—Atsushi knows it well. It’s heavy, oppressive, a silent force that bends people to their knees without him ever lifting a finger. It’s the same thing that made people in the Port Mafia fear him, bow to him. That unsettling, inescapable reality, like a shadow you can’t run from haunts Dazais bones and speaks when he doesn’t.
It terrifies Atsushi. And yet, there’s no denying its pull.
Dazai is no longer part of the Port Mafia. Atsushi knows this. He’s been given every reason to trust it, to believe in the choices Dazai has made since then. But there are moments—fleeting, rare—where the weight of what Dazai could have been lingers in the air. There a another universe, Atsushi thinks, another timeline where Dazai didn’t walk away. Where he didn’t leave. Where he’s the one who sits on the Port Mafia’s throne now.
Atsushi swallows hard, forcing his voice past the tightness in his throat. “What are they?”
The question barely escapes him when Chuuya speaks, his voice cutting through the tension. It’s familiar, sharp-edged but strangely stedying. “Wait—” Chuuya narrows his eyes, leaning closer, and Atsushi almost shivers. “Are those—”
“Sure thing!”
Ranpo interrupts, his curiosity evidently outweighing any sense of restraint. “So what’s on them?”
“Movies?” Kunikida asks with a push of his glasses.
“Porn?” Kyouka deadpans, and Chuuya lets out a snort so mocking it’s practically a punctuation mark.
Dazai’s laugh follows, warm and unsettling at the same time. He picks up one of the tapes, holding it between his fingers like it’s some kind of artifact . The label reads 14, scrawled in neat handwriting that looks far too foreign for someone like Dazai. “When I was a teenager,” Dazai begins, his grin widening, “I kept a diary like most kids.”
There’s a pause.
“Except mine wasn’t in a book.”
Atsushi feels the room shift.
Dazai twirls the tape lazily between his hands, as if revelling in the way their attention clings to his every word. “It was in a camcorder,” he continues, his voice light, almost sing-song.
“A stupid camcorder that drove me fucking mad.”
“No way!” Yosano’s voice bursts out, her excitement palpable. “Can we watch them?”
“You’d be here for days if you did, Doctor,” Chuuya cuts in, arms crossed. “And trust me, none of it’s worth it.”
“Oh, can we?” Kenji chimes in, his voice muffled slightly by a mouthful of gummy sweets.
“No way he’s letting you all watch them,” Chuuya scoffs. “I wasn’t even allowed to see the one where—”
“Sure!”
Dazai’s grin sharpens, his enthusiasm almost unsettling in its swiftness. Atsushi blinks, thrown completely off balance.
And for the first time in weeks—months, even—Atsushi thinks he might actually like October.
“ Heh? ”
↺↺↺
They decide ( through Chuuyas yelling ) that they would use the main conference room to watch the tapes, because not only did it have a suitable tape player that matched the type in the boxes but because the room was dark, free of Halloween decorations and enough chairs so everybody was comfortably facing the large TV screen.
“Why did you even carry a camcorder around for seven years anyway?” Ranpo pops through a purple lollipop as he takes a seat, watching as Dazai takes charge of setting it all up. Atsushi has no doubt that he already knows, already has watched each tape without ever knowing they were there.
Kunikida sits across from where Dazai will sit, Akutagawa (to Atsushi's demise) is across from himself, Kenji across from Kyouka, and finally Chuuya and Ranpo at the end. Yosano takes Fukuzawa's seat at the very end despite Kunikida's distaste for it.
“Oh please, I’ve asked the same question for almost four years and never once got an answer. But since he seems so keen on sharing with you people, please do answer Dazai.” Chuuya urges on and Dazai only snorts in reply.
“You’ll find out,” there’s a click and it’s the first tape going into the large slot.
The TV clicks on, Dazai takes a seat and around the border of the TV is a familiar old fashion layout of the date, which reads the fourth of June 2010, but in number format, ‘04.07.10’ and the time, ‘ 01:32 AM ’ In the top corner is the words PLAY in bold with the starting timer of 00:00:03
There’s shuffling and a quiet, high-pitched ‘ shit, why won’t this sit ’ which Atsushi immediately recognises as Dazai. The person behind the camera who’s nobody but a younger version of his friend, struggles for a few seconds before finally, five seconds later, manages to sit his camera still and shuffle back on the floor.
“ Oh god you sound and look so young,” Yosano laughs.
She’s right. The boy's hair is a much darker brown, almost black which makes his round face seem paler than it probably is. The glitching and poor camera quality affect the background of the video, and he struggles to make out anything except lines of black. But the loose-fitting shirt over the teenager's frail, pale body can be seen perfectly. His voice sounds the same and you’re able to tell it's Dazai, but something about it seems different, something he can’t place.
Dazai in the room stays quiet but the one on the TV doesn’t.
“My name is Dazai Osamu, I am fifteen years old and by the time you’re seeing this I'll be dead.”