#bsd mnnk au

[leonawriter]

Home Territory

Read it on AO3

Fandom: Bungo Stray Dogs/Mononoke

Pairings: Dazai/Chuuya

Characters: Kunikida, Dazai, Atsushi, Ranpo, Chuuya, Fukuzawa, Mori.

Summary: Kunikida has concerns over Dazai's living arrangements, and fixes things with paperwork. Chuuya is having a crisis of his own, of a far more benign nature. And both Fukuzawa and Mori are reminded of how difficult being the leader of an organisation is when your subordinates aren't always human.

(Part four in the “Not All Kitsune Have Nine Tails” ‘verse. Follows “Smoke and Fox-Fire.”)

...

Once could be passed off as a fluke. A case gone south didn't always end up with everyone back at the agency, or even back home, so with Dazai having gone missing partway through things taking a turn for the strange, he hadn't even questioned Atsushi on why he hadn't come back with a bandaged nuisance in tow that night.

The next morning he'd been similarly distracted by the fact that despite not having seen or heard him arrive or leave the Agency's dorms, there Dazai had been, in all of his red and fluffy glory on his chair, and making more trouble than usual. And that was saying something, given that what was usual was making Kunikida want to tear his hair out.

He had started to actually notice on the second night, when the dorms - despite it being late enough that Dazai should have been back, in theory - were yet again noticeably quiet.

He must have gone out drinking again, is his first thought on that, although something about it feels off. Possibly because Dazai hadn't on one of his notorious pub crawls that would inevitably end up with the police calling him up in the middle of the night for quite some time now, and- it struck him as he continued that train of thought, why it felt wrong. Dazai had been arrested not all that long ago. Not for something as minor as disorderly behaviour, either, but his actual crimes. The serious ones. Surely he wouldn't put himself in that sort of situation again so soon after such an experience...?

Even so, Dazai never showed up all throughout Kunikida's own nighttime preparations, and he wasn't about to interrupt his own schedule and routine for one man just because that was probably what Dazai wanted. 

So he came into work again the next morning... and there Dazai was. Again. 

Whatever he had been up to, it certainly didn't seem as though he could have been drinking, or at least not to the degree that he had found him in countless times before. There was no lingering smell of alcohol on his clothes, or smoke, that would follow him around the room if that were the case, as had happened before. If anything, there was a sort of musk that followed him now that hadn't before, which confused him until he realised that it was the scent of fur.

None of which explained where Dazai had been the past few nights.

All he was left with was the vague idea that he couldn't have been roughing it in a park - and why do such a thing anyway, when he had a perfectly warm and dry bed to go back to? - or drinking until he rotted away in a cell, and he was clearly going somewhere.

Somewhere that both Ranpo and Atsushi, it seemed, were aware of. Which... while reassuring, and made him at least feel that wherever Dazai had been it couldn't have been anything that would put him in any sort of danger, or anything would be a cause for concern, was still frustrating. 

Somewhere that made him at least several minutes to an hour later to work each day, he noted, a glance at the clock telling him that it was closer to the latter this time than the former.

The door to the office opening inward disrupted his thoughts as he prepared for either a client having come on foot, or Dazai, and at this point either was a distinct possibility - only for the first thing to come through the doorway to be an impossibility he had somehow grown used to over the past several days.

A single red ear made way for brown hair and then a second red ear, and then the rest of Dazai followed suit, attempting to saunter into the office and take to his place without being noticed, by the seems of it.

"Dazai."

Dazai froze, and then turned- no, first he flicked an ear in his direction, and then he turned to face him properly. Which was still going to take some getting used to. Ears - anatomy in general - wasn't supposed to work like that. It just wasn't. Not on human beings-

And there it is again, he thinks, catching himself for not the first or last time. Because Dazai, not that it should have even come as a surprise given how inhumanly irritating he could be, wasn't a human being. At least not entirely.

"Eh?" Another ear flick. "Did Kunikida-kun want something or did he just want to make sure I hadn't forgotten my name?"

Breathe, he reminded himself. Do not twist the damn fox's ears just because he's trying to deflect on purpose.

Because, he had to be. Dazai hadn't said a word about this to anyone in the past several days, and... even if no one else was bothered, even if no one else was wondering what was going on or felt concerned at all, Kunikida wasn't anyone else, and the entire situation was starting to grate on him.

"I don't suppose you could explain to me exactly where you've been for the past several nights?"

And there was the up side to the strange new body language. It was harder for Dazai to completely mask his reactions to things unless he used what he had somehow figured out the previous day about his newfound ability to use illusions - not that Dazai had ever needed illusions to make trouble in the first place - and hide his non-human features entirely. In which case it would go without saying that there was something he didn't want to to share.

"I could," Dazai said slowly. "But I don't see why I should have to. I'm not in any danger anyone needs to rescue me from, and I'm coming to work each day-"

"Not that you actually do anything that could be called 'work'," Kunikida couldn't stop himself from correcting.

"-so it isn't as if there's a problem, if-"

"You're late every single day, and we don't know where you are! I fail to see how there isn't a problem with this!" He cuts across Dazai's excuses and the next thing he knows, he's leaving a report half-written to stand up at his desk. "Do I really need to point out that there have been several times in the past few months when you would vanish, and you'd turn up some time later - hours, days, weeks - only for us to find out that actually, what we," and he was perfectly well aware that when it come to some cases, the earlier ones especially, "we" was mostly "him", "had assumed was just more of your slacking off was actually a serious incident that we should have been made aware of!"

The incident with Dazai getting captured and imprisoned by the Port Mafia back before the alliance - before, not that he had been aware at the time, Dazai had been in more danger than any other Agency member due to being seen by the mafia as a traitor. With that in mind, even with it being Dazai who was as slippery as the kitsune trickster he apparently was, it was nothing short of a miracle he had made it out alive.

The serial apple suicides. Getting shot right before the Agency and the mafia went into disarray. 

No one had even known where he had been or what had happened to him to even know that he had been arrested until much later, an entire period of time spent not knowing what his status was, whether he was alive or dead, to say nothing of if he had a plan.

At some point, Dazai's ears had flattened back onto his head, staring at him. 

"But I'm... I'm fine," Dazai was saying now. Weakly, as if he really didn't see what the issue was. Looking around, only to realise that the office had quieted down to the barest hush of voices, and only then in the direction of the clerks who had come back in spite of everything.

"Even if that's the case, it's still not something that I can stand to let lie, when I'm fine doesn't tell us where you've been."

Dazai has his mouth half open to say something else, whatever it is, but he doesn't get the chance.

"Kunikida has a point, you know." Ranpo, it seemed, was finding the conversation topic serious enough to put down the pastry he'd been eating, even if there were still crumbs on his mouth and fingers. "We're not asking you to come back, if that's what you're worried about."

"We aren't-? I for one would much prefer it if he did come back! At least then-"

"No, we're not. He's a fox, Kunikida. You can't make foxes go where they don't want to go. If Dazai's fine where he is, then he's fine where he is - but at the same time, like I said. You've got a point, because we don't know where he's been."

The last was aimed directly at Dazai himself, with all the authority of Ranpo's extra years and - apparently - extra experience in terms of other matters, that Kunikida had learned during the latter part of the previous day.

"And what if I don't want to tell anyone where I'm staying?"

"Then I'd say you're being a selfish brat," Kunikida ground out, taking only some small amount of satisfaction in the way that Dazai's eyes widened, and he backed away a step, seeming for all the world as though he was just giving them all the same bratty attitude as always - if it weren't for how his ears and tail were quivering like a cornered dog. Which Dazai himself didn't seem to even be aware of.

He sighed, hand pinching the bridge of his nose and then re-adjusting his glasses.

It takes only a few paces to get around his desk - leaving the half-finished report still staring back at him from his computer screen, and wasn't that just like Dazai to interrupt his work even when it wasn't on purpose - and find the filing cabinet with the forms that he knows have rarely had any use, and perhaps that should be fixed, and for more than just Dazai, but with the way everyone in the Agency is... they'd simply never gotten around to it, and for one good reason.

"Kunikida-kun, what are you...?"

"Most of the agents tend not to bother with these, but that's usually because it's seen as unnecessary. The Director doesn't enforce it for the same reason. Would you care to guess what that is?"

"Because it's boring?"

"Because everyone else lives in the same place. The Agency's dorms mean that it's harder for something to just plain happen when no one is watching or aware. And if something happens, we all know- and because we all know, there's no need to contact anyone else." He pulled out the form that he'd been searching for. "If you really aren't coming back, you could at least fill that in."

"...you want to put my new address on the system," Dazai said after a full minute of reading the thing. "I can't do that."

"Dazai-!"

It confirmed his rising suspicions that there was a new address involved, that Dazai hadn't simply not been returning back to the dorms for any other reason, but the outright refusal-

"He's gonna need the next one, Kunikida," he heard, Ranpo's voice pulling him back from the brink of outright throttling his infuriating partner. The next one. Of course he had thought of that, but who could possibly...? And yet, Ranpo seemed certain.

So, out came the "next" form. The one that usually went with the first one. The one that he hadn't even thought Dazai would be able to have filled out, if he had just found somewhere else to stay, somehow. 

Something shifts.

Atsushi, who had been looking between the two of them with some level of anxiety, attempted - and succeeded - to get behind Dazai to look past him at what Kunikida had given him. When he saw, the kid's eyes widened, brows rose, and then he looked first at Dazai and then at Ranpo.

"Oh," the kid said, "I get it. I never needed one of those because... but... d'you really think that person will..?"

Which outright confirmed that Atsushi knew who Dazai was staying with, that he was staying with someone, and hadn't told anyone else. Ranpo he could understand, because he was Ranpo - he'd probably been able to take one good look at Dazai over the past several days and could have figured how exactly what was going on without any help at all.

Dazai, meanwhile, just shrugged and folded up both forms, putting them in an inner pocket of his coat and leaving Kunikida to wonder if they'd simply disappear over the course of the day, or turn up with immature doodles all over them.

...

Dazai wasn't sure when the words come love, sleep had somehow turned into the sound of Chuuya closing the door behind him and kicking off his shoes, or hearing him call out I'm home just like he had ever since his third night staying over. Because the first night had just been the two of them collapsing into bed together and not being sure who would still be there come morning, and the second hadn't really been expected-

But somehow, somewhere along the way, Chuuya has been letting him make himself at home.

There's his own sleeping yukata waiting on the bed, since it's more comfortable now than pyjamas, and his toothbrush is in Chuuya's bathroom. Chuuya has started to buy canned crab (again; he remembers when they were partners and Chuuya would just shove it in his face when he hadn't been eating at all, because he hadn't seen the point, and looking back it was probably the fact that Chuuya had wrestled him into it and remembering that there was worth being there for and paying attention to, rather than the crab itself).

The previous night, they'd somehow wound up with Chuuya sitting normally - more or less - on his sofa, while Dazai's head rested in his lap, half of Chuuya's attention on the reports he'd brought home and had brought out despite Dazai's protests, and half on Dazai's head, including his ears, which he knew were soft and, when he was in his more human form, by far more accessible than the only other fluffy part of him.

Especially with the fact that being a hanyou apparently came with sharp bits - claws, and teeth, and sometimes he could control them, but he couldn't always, and sometimes... sometimes Chuuya's furniture suffered the consequences. 

He kept expecting harsh admonishments, because he'd often caused less harm when he'd done things on purpose - maybe Chuuya didn't see it that way, but at least shifting all of his belongings an inch to the left just to see him come to work the next day covered in bruises had been harmless, as had been covering everything Chuuya had owned at the time with (unused) old bandages, just because of some insult he had wanted his partner to regret having made.

But Chuuya... Chuuya noticed, and made strange, odd noises in the back of his throat like he was trying to strangle something back there, and he'd breathe, and just... move on. He had to notice, when there were scratches in the upholstery and the carpets and the woodwork. Dazai had been on the receiving end of more than one headache-inducing tirade on how the chibi wanted him not to touch his things and not to damage any of his things, but now he had been-

Nothing.

The worst he'd had in response had been what he could only assume had been a joking suggestion that maybe we should get you a cat scratching post, which he couldn't imagine being much help if he did go through with it.

There was fur all over the place.

From his tail, but also from the few times so far that he had simply gone around on all fours, the novelty not quite having worn off. He still had a puffy soft coat that had plenty of fluff to spare, so every so often bits would just... snag. He wouldn't even notice most of the time. But it had reached the point in even just this long, less than a week, and no matter any of the other things-

Chuuya's home smelled of Dazai.

When he'd first arrived earlier in the week, it had been full of the scent of smoke and wine and freshly laundered clothes, as well as the barely hidden tang of old, dried blood and steel that came from his knives and that lingered in the doorway, and all the places that Chuuya would linger after a mission.

Now, the scent of kitsune followed into every room. The scent was still light, hadn't settled into the pores of the house, could still be exorcised with time and deodoriser, but there was something heady and frankly terrifying to the idea that this was happening, that he could tell that it was happening when previously he'd repressed everything so far that he'd barely noticed that his senses were any more sensitive than those of a human being who tended to notice a little more than most.

The entire house felt like potential, and two pieces of paper burned holes in his coat pocket. Despite the well-meaning intentions of his co-workers, they felt more like a threat than anything nearly as encouraging as they must have intended.

Except-

Ranpo had been the one to suggest the second form. Ranpo, who knew youkai better than Dazai, and who had a good nose like the cat he was, and who had meet Chuuya before. 

And Dazai... trusted Ranpo.

He just wished that he trusted himself - trusted whatever this was that he and Chuuya were starting together - even half as much.

...

The first thing Chuuya thinks when he calls out and doesn't get a response is that Dazai must have been out late on a case, or that he'd stayed at the dorms again, or... any number of things he hadn't felt the need to tell Chuuya about, never mind the fact that apparently they live together now-

But then he sees the shoes in the genkan, and that means that Dazai had to be in here somewhere. 

He thought, at least, given how quiet it was. Weirdly quiet, for a place that should have a Dazai in it. After all, Dazai didn't even have to have his shoes on to go out, and for all he knew, he might wind up halfway through the night and hearing scratching at his door-

He goes through the motions of putting his coat up, but he's still wearing his knife when he walks into the living room and the first thing he sees is that there's something on the coffee table, and he's already picked it up by the time he realises that Dazai's not just still here, but still in the room - not that he'd have noticed if he hadn't caught the smallest movements out of the corner of his eye.

Just a week ago, and a fox in my living room hiding under the sofa would be cause to grab the thing and throw it out as far as I could so it didn't come back, and now...  what?

He blinked. 

The words on the page he'd picked up without thinking didn't change, or rearrange themselves. And after yesterday, he half expected they would. That this would be some sort of new prank, and Dazai was on all fours just to make sure he could run off faster than Chuuya could catch him.

As far as he could see, it was just a normal form. The words were printed in black and white, on normal print paper. Hell, it was the sort of generic thing that he'd had to fill out just working for the mafia a few times, because no matter that they were a criminal organisation, gods forbid they didn't have their internal paperwork and filing systems in order.

So he knew what it was. He wasn't an idiot. It was just the context that was... 

Unable to finish that thought, he reached out mechanically to the next sheet of paper that'd been hidden under the first, and nearly drops them both.

Notification of Change of Address was the first one.

Emergency Contact Details was the second.

Both of them had the Armed Detective Agency's header on them, just in case he wasn't sure where they'd come from.

"Dazai?"

He's not sure what, exactly, his voice is doing, but it feels like he must have gone through several different emotions in the space of saying that one word.

Dazai whining normally is just something to roll his eyes at, because whatever he's going on about and making eyes at him for, is probably just something he could have handled himself if he'd only been bothered to deal with whatever it was earlier, or that's not actually a big deal at all but he's just being an attention-seeking brat about things.

Dazai whining as a fox is just a pitiful sound that he really... doesn't know how to deal with.

"Whether either of us like it or not, I can't speak fox, Dazai. You're gonna have to work with me here." He glanced back at the forms. They still said the same things. "I don't get... this."

He stared, mind blanking out the longer he stood there, hoping that if he just waited long enough Dazai would give in and explain what was going on. It was more than a relief when red fur wriggled out from its hiding place and jumped up onto the sofa only to be Dazai-shaped - or rather, mostly human Dazai-shaped - before he hit the cushions.

"Kunikida-kun got mad at me," Dazai said, and maybe if someone didn't know him as well as Chuuya did they'd think he was relaxed, but Chuuya could see the tension in his body and in all the ways he did and didn't know he was showing it. The way he wouldn't meet Chuuya's eyes, instead concentrating on something on the ceiling. "I haven't been sleeping at the dorms since..." he trailed off, and didn't have to finish that, since Chuuya already knew what he was talking about. "It's only been a few days, but given it's Kunikida-kun I shouldn't really be that surprised."

Which explained just about as much as it didn't - not enough.

"What... exactly, did you tell them, then?" No, that wasn't- "Why did you wind up with these?"

Dazai blinked up at him, and for a moment he was afraid he'd just wind up with a sorry-looking fox again.

"Because," Dazai half-mumbled quietly enough Chuuya almost couldn't hear the words, "I sort of let slip that I wouldn't be going back to the dorms." A blink, as they both stared at each other, and a widening of Dazai's eyes. "I mean - that I didn't want to- I..." He deflated somewhat, and brought his knees up, tail curling around himself and making him look far younger and more innocent than Dazai had any right to be, after all he'd done. "I didn't tell them where, or that it was you, though."

"Dazai..."

The name came out more as a slow exhale, a sigh than anything, full of emotions he couldn't quite put names on. At least, not yet.

Brown eyes narrowed, and then the next thing he knew Dazai was on his front, face in a cushion.

"If Chuuya wanted to say something all he needed was to say it."

The words that's rich, coming from you gathered at the top of his tongue, but he bit them off with as much patience as he could muster up.

A dozen different things he could say all went the same way. 

Usually, people don't move so fast. 

Most people don't move in so quickly.

We don't even know what we're doing half the time.

Or what we are to each other other outside of-

Come, love. Sleep.

"I thought... I guess I just thought that when you'd figured out who you were again, you'd just... I dunno. Go back."

"I thought Chuuya didn't want me to go back, or go anywhere. I thought Chuuya just wanted me to come back to him."

There was something about the words that was dizzying. Dazai was a fickle, changeable bastard fox who just left, who left and didn't care and who was... saying that he wanted... that he thought...

Chuuya sat down. Still holding the two forms in his hand.

Dazai lifted his head up, squishing one ear against the cushion in an odd way that didn't seem comfortable, but that Dazai didn't seem to notice.

"What... is this what you want?"

Dazai doesn't just stay. Dazai doesn't do anything without some sort of backup plan, or motive. 

He only came with me because I asked first, if the weretiger had asked first, that'd be where he'd be staying. Not here.

Just because I "called dibs."

"Chuuya's being particularly stupid right now." Maybe he was. But it wasn't like Dazai was being much better, and that made him feel more okay about the whole ordeal. "I want to stay here. Didn't I just say that?"

Oh.

In some dim corner of his mind, he realised that this would take a fair bit more than just this one form - not that Dazai would likely be all that bothered, because as long as his letters could be passed along through his coworkers, he'd just be lazy and not bother with it - but that... that could be later. 

He wondered, considering it was Dazai, what whoever had given him the second form had been thinking, when they'd thought of that.

"How much do they know?" he asked with a slight frown. 

There were some things that'd happened that night that... were the entire reason he'd half dragged, half carried Dazai into his home and let him get away with so much in the first place.

"Hm? Ah. Oh... that. I... haven't really told them," Dazai said, now picking at a loose thread on the sofa that wouldn't have been there if it weren't for Dazai's claws picking at it in the first place. It was almost funny. As a kid, he'd never even dreamed of having upholstery that wasn't at least a bit ratty. Even the best the Sheep had been able to get their hands on had holes in places, because the adults had taken the good stuff first. And then when he'd been half-dragged into the mafia, he'd gained an appreciation for how he'd been able to afford furniture that didn't even have a nick or scratch. Now here he was, and Dazai was tearing holes and scratches in everything- something he wasn't about to stop doing, either. The future seemed full of imperfect furniture, and the more he thought about that, the less awful it became. "Atsushi knows," Dazai was saying, pulling Chuuya out of his own thoughts. "Because he was there. And he knows enough to notice things. He's a good kid." Chuuya nodded along, because from what little he'd seen, he'd agree with that. "Ranpo probably does, too."

Chuuya scowled and shuddered at that name - that detective. Just because they were back on the same side again didn't mean that hearing the name and knowing that the detective knew - or even just suspected - that one sore spot of Dazai's right now wasn't rubbing salt into the wound.

"And you trust them?"

The more they talked, the more Dazai relaxed, his tail and ears twitching from time to time, and this time he even grabbed at the extra limb he'd gained in the past week, losing his hands in the fur.

"Neither of them have told anyone else," he said. "I might tell the others. Sooner or later. Maybe. Or I might just leave it and see who notices first."

"Whatever you want to do, really," Chuuya found himself saying. "They're your people."

People who Chuuya would end up interacting with a lot more than he'd ever planned on, the moment he's finished signing his life and what little remained of his peace and quiet away. But if Dazai didn't want to say anything just yet, then neither would he.

"Mm," Dazai hummed out. "They are." Dazai tilted his head. Chuuya wasn't even sure if Dazai really understood what he'd just said, how differently youkai saw their connections with people compared to normal human friendships. Then again, Dazai barely understood that sort of thing anyway. "So... you agree to both?"

"I didn't just let you into my home for shits and giggles, Dazai. Or to just kick you out the moment I felt like it." Dazai was still watching him. Waiting. "That's a yes."

He just hoped this wasn't going to come back to bite him in the ass in the middle of the day and a call from some poor Agency soul who'd drawn the short straw to contact him when Dazai starts acting like the brat he is just for the attention. It'd hardly be the first time he'd have done a thing like that.

"....Chuuya?"

So there was something else.

"What?"

"Talking of telling." Dazai was now wearing his serious face, although the effect was marred somewhat by the fluffy ears, and the fact that he was still holding onto his own tail on Chuuya's sofa. "About that. If there are going to be records, I want you to tell Mori what's going on before he has a chance to find out for himself."

"I thought you didn't want me to tell the Boss."

"And now I do. I just told you why. Are you going to do it or not?"

"You say that as if it'd ever be easier to not tell him something. Of course I will. Though if it weren't for the what I'd be making you tell him yourself - and you're still going to owe me for this."

Dazai had the gall to stick his tongue out, which just emphasised the effect of making him look ridiculous. 

"What's mine is yours, Chuuya."

"We're basically housesharing, Dazai. We're not married or anything."

He stood up abruptly, taking the two forms with him and neatly avoiding the - thankfully socked - foot that Dazai tried sending at him, and doing his best to look straight ahead at the kitchen instead of looking back. And wishing he hadn't just said that, or that he could just put his hat back on and hide his face without getting called out for it.

You've told him you love him already days ago, he thought to himself, inner voice calling him an idiot as he heated up the water for tea, and started the food prep because gods knew Dazai wasn't going to. Most people who share their house with someone don't sleep in the same bed as that person, either.

At this point, he didn't think he could tell Dazai to sleep in another room. And not just because it'd feel like a betrayal.

Dazai, who he knew damn well was a chronic insomniac... had been sleeping. Dazai had been sleeping, and he'd been doing so in Chuuya's arms, for the past couple of nights.

Not to mention, he... could hardly say he hadn't been feeling better for being able to wake up to fluff and fur and bandages and noodle limbs and the ever-present cool sensation of Dazai's ability nullifying his own.

...

Fukuzawa Yukichi took one look at the two forms that Dazai had handed him, from which could be gathered the exact home address and contact details of someone he knew to be a mafia executive, and then looked back at Dazai himself.

Dazai, who was standing there, waiting patiently with a purposefully neutral expression on his face.

For a moment, for all their differences, he couldn't help but be reminded of Yosano, and wondered how many times Dazai had stood in just that sort of way in front of Mori Ougai, to ask something of the man that in all likelihood should have been given freely, and without such worry or concern.

An ear flicked, and then went back to its alert position.

Only kids do that sort of thing, Ranpo had said to him just the other night about the way Dazai wore his fur, distressed but quiet. Kids and hanyou! I should've known before. But because it was Dazai I just didn't- but I should've known.

It wasn't often that Ranpo came to him with frustrations about not knowing something, and even less frequently about those things that concerned the non-human side of things. And now that he did, it was about a coworker. One of Yukichi's own subordinates, even.

He sighed.

"By the way that this is coming to my attention, it seems that this is more to inform me of something that has already been decided, rather than to seek my approval." The changes - the minute shifting of Dazai's posture, the twitches of his features - might have remained invisible to most, but to Yukichi, who had experience with reading far more subtle signs than this, the nervous tension was as clear as day. "Dazai."

"Director, I-"

"There is no need to apologise for doing what you felt that you must after what was clearly a stressful situation," although simply describing it as stressful felt like he was understating things, here, given what he understood had happened. "Or putting your trust in someone. I merely wish to know that the two of you have thought this through. Although the Agency and the Port Mafia are currently at peace, we are both well aware of how easily such a truce could be affected by events outside of our control."

If anything, discomfort he could see and sense in Dazai rose, but that was hardly outside of expectations given the subject and situation.

"You can trust that I wouldn't allow my living conditions to affect my loyalties, or to become a danger," Dazai said. In just as much of a carefully neutral tone as he had made sure to put on his features.

"Dazai, it isn't your loyalty that I am concerned about," he said, eyes shutting for a moment as he thought about all of the potential repercussions of this. In the past two years since his entrance exam, Yukichi had never once, not even since he had first been made aware of the boy's previous occupation, questioned that loyalty - never had he been given any reason to.

"In which case," as if that had been something they had needed to have made clear at all, "I can only say that should anything come up... Chuuya and I will need to deal with such things as they do."

"Then it seems that you have thought of everything already, and the Agency can merely do the best we can with regards to keeping the information that the two of us have trusted us with as safe as possible."

From Dazai's expression, that wasn't what he had hesitantly knocked on his Director's door and expected to come away with. That, along with the sharp but uncertain way that Dazai bowed his thanks and left, made him relieved at the quiet and privacy that enabled him to rub at his forehead, at the premonition of a headache as well as hoping that Dazai's situation turned out to help him – and that whatever came their way that threatened such stability that he had managed to find for himself didn't break him.

Then again, that was the reason he had built the Armed Detective Agency up around Ranpo in the first place, was it not? Not simply just to ease the burden on one boy and ensure that he was safe, but for them to support each other.

...

Mori Ougai watched Chuuya leave with most of his expression covered up by his hands still steepled in front of his face. He closed his eyes the moment the door closed, allowing himself to let out the breath that he had been holding in, which wasn't - quite - a sigh.

"I've started compiling an offline database of people in the communities who'd be good to have on side. Not even necessarily outright working for the mafia, just good to have owe us a favour or two."

That was what he had started with. And if Ougai were to be honest, he hadn't expected anything of the sort in such a short period of time. Granted, the list of names on the handwritten sheet of notes was small, and with the way things Chuuya had explained to him, no matter what he said or how he spun things, it would be more Chuuya that any of these people would be answering to, than him.

A minor note, and one that he was more than willing to let slide for one reason - that Chuuya himself was still loyal to him. Just as importantly, loyal to the mafia as an organisation. As long as that were the case, then there was nothing for him to be concerned about either way.

And then the bombshells had fallen - two connected pieces of information that he had known he would have to tread carefully with the moment he heard them, because of how he knew he could so easily break the two involved with one wrong move.

"There's a name that isn't on the list, Boss," Chuuya had said. "Dazai's got kitsune in him." Strong enough to be affected by the rules of these communities, evidently. And interesting though it may have been to have pressed on the matter and find out just how much, how strongly, and when either of them had found out this fascinating new development... said rules had confined him into a mere nod and a gesture to continue when he could see that Chuuya wasn't finished. "He's also moved in with me."

On the one hand, it would have been appreciated if he had been given some fair advanced warning to such a development; Dazai being able to potentially see whatever work Chuuya brought home with him was not a thought he liked to dwell on, considering his former executive's current mode of employment.

But on the other hand - it was hardly as though he could have stopped them, and nor could he now, if he wanted to.

It was as he had told Kouyou in reference to the incident in which she had been captured by the Agency; just like her, if Chuuya wished at any time to leave, then there would be very little that either he or the entire mafia behind him would be able to do to stop him. And with Dazai at his back... Double Black had been feared for a reason. From the picture he was beginning to paint of the youkai culture and mindset, the very action of opposing them only could end in a bloodbath.

Perhaps Chuuya liked to tell himself that he was as human as the friends he enjoyed socialising with, or even the body that he owed half of his very existence to. But the more Chuuya told Ougai of what to expect, the more his mind drifted back to innumerable instances that now made more sense, just as he was sure that the same could be said for Dazai's own behaviours. Even the very loyalty that made him so invaluable was merely a symptom of the whole, and now left him wondering just how much of Arahabaki was subsumed into being Chuuya's ability, and how much had survived in other means.

Questions, perhaps, for another time. Or at least to ponder privately.

In some situations, the most optimal solution was a swift strike, to act first before the opponent could so much as formulate a plan; in others, the only thing to do was to accept the way that the board had presented itself, and trust that things would sort themselves out in the most beneficial manner for all involved. In this case, the latter.

A downpayment in trust indeed, he thought to himself.

...

AN: If there are things that don't make sense in the Dazai-Chuuya section, there's a reason for that. You don't have the (full) context yet. 

(That’ll be shown in “Fox-Faced,” so please read that too. Although I’d love to know what you think it is with only this and the previous fics to go by~)

#bungo stray dogs #bsd #bsd stuff #kitsune dazai #Leona fic #bsd mnnk au

[leonawriter]

Fox-Faced

Read it on AO3

Fandom: Bungo Stray Dogs/Mononoke

Characters: Dazai, the Medicine Seller. Others mentioned. SKK implied.

Summary: Dazai is taking the time to contemplate how much has changed in so short a time, and his bench gets a visitor.

Notes: Dazai-typical suicide references.

(Part five of the “Not All Kitsune Have Nine Tails” ‘verse. Follows “Home Territory.” Contains important context for the previous stories.)

...

The brisk sea air is as familiar and as comforting as it always had been, even if it is deeper, more rich, and full of scents that Dazai had never known to be able to sort through or notice before. It isn't, at least, overwhelming - the city with its streets and cars and hundreds of people and all of its food and perfumes was harder for him to handle on that first night and the following day than this, which is, comparatively, peaceful and calming.

He can hear shouting in the distance, children playing with their parents and tourists from both further inland and far abroad talking about the sights in adequately amazed tones, because it is Yokohama after all, and no matter what else happened, it was still his city. Their city. The city that he and Chuuya and Atsushi had fought to protect, that he had protected even when he'd been in the mafia, that he was proud of.

He closes his eyes to focus on the sound of the waves and the cries of the seagulls, and he loses track of time. Perhaps he'd even started to doze off in the warmth of a bright, sunny day with clear skies. Normally, by this time Kunikida would be wondering where he was. Now that everyone at the Agency knew he was living with Chuuya, he won't have to worry about that... at least for a while yet.

Tap.

Tap, tap, tap.

A breath of air comes out of him in a sigh, and he neither move to create space, nor turns his head to watch, when he hears someone coming close to his bench. Heavy steps, wooden sandals. 

Ah, he thinks instead. You.

There are sounds as if something heavy is being shifted, and then let to drop onto the ground. Then, the rustling of clothes. Only after that, Dazai feels the weight of the bench shift, and a presence actually sat beside him.

If this had been an enemy, they would have had ample time to draw a gun or a knife, and his life would have been over as easily as that. In broad daylight, no less.

But it isn't, and instead of tensing - or relaxing - into the potential threats, he lets his arms drop from behind his head, and opens his eyes to acknowledge the not-quite-stranger.

Dressed in brightly-coloured traditional clothes from head to foot, with a bandana holding back pale hair that didn't - always - quite hide the earrings he wore, and only brought out the likewise pale colour of his face, the bold markings around his eyes, his nose... the man who had introduced himself as only a mere lowly medicine seller looked straight ahead, toward the Yokohama bay.

If the world made any sense, they both would have attracted a lot more attention than the few looks that were aimed their way - Dazai's illusion still held, suggesting to anyone looking their way who didn't know any better to see him as completely human and disregard the ears, the tail, the numerous other small details that marked him out as not human, but the medicine seller next to him simply... was what he was.

In a way, he was entirely on display. There wasn't a single thing about him that wasn't completely true, nothing that was hidden if someone wanted to look and actually see. 

In another sense... Dazai could still remember the other, and looking at him now felt odd, as if everything was still there, but dimmed, somehow.

He wondered, in some distant part of him, if that was how he had seemed to anyone who had seen through him and known.

"So." The world carries on around them, and if Dazai hadn't known that the word had been aimed at him, it could have been aimed at anything. The wind. The sea. Some invisible thing that a form and a reason and a truth, but no unnatural twist to its nature. But he heard it clearly enough, and there is a tilt to the medicine seller's lips. "How is life, Dazai-kun?"

All of his years, and he still doesn't know the answer to that question. He doesn't know how a normal human being should answer something like that-

He stops that train of thought in its tracks. Laughs, and if it comes out sounding odd and a little bit harsh, then it isn't as though anyone else is paying attention to them, is it?

"I woke up to a dog drooling all over me again," he says airily. "There's fur all over the house, and I need to cat-sit again later on."

"And what of Nakajima-dono?" The way that the man says Atsushi's name makes Dazai stop and blink, because he's not used to such a level of respect to his younger protege. "And Nakahara-dono?"

Hearing Chuuya referred to in such a way is only slightly less odd. Executives took respect the way most people expected to be able to breathe, after all. He knew that from personal experience, although it had never been something he had worn with comfort, much the same as the coat he had preferred to shrug off, eventually.

"Atsushi-kun is doing well enough, I think. Sometimes I find myself myself worrying, but..." I think that by this point, he can make up for his mentor's failings. Atsushi isn't so dependant on me that he needs my example, or my praise. He'll do just fine. "Chuuya is - well. We're adjusting."

"Adjustment is only natural. One hardly expects treatment to cure ailments instantly. Just as the body has its own way of healing itself when given a little help, the spirit isn't truly all that much different."

"You think living with Chuuya is like that?" Dazai tilted his head, and made a face. "I'll have to tell him when I get back. He isn't even a dog any more. He's just a medicine that I've been prescribed. One course of Chuuya per day. See how he likes that."

"What it is or it isn't is something only you can decide for yourself, Dazai-kun. Although you do look a lot better than the last time I saw you," the medicine seller added, a certain glint of amusement in his eyes. "And I would almost like to be there when you do tell him that."

No, not just amusement -  spark of mischief. Dazai went back over his own words, and found himself blushing, hard, and looked away.

For someone who seemed to spend most of his time chasing down and exorcising mononoke looking the way he did, the man next to him was far more down to earth and crude at times than he had any right to be. Perhaps this was what most people felt when they were around him too long.

Not that Dazai was going to change, not at all.

"And there I thought you respected Chuuya," he says, letting a little bit of grumble out.

Not that he minded people making fun of Chuuya. That was Chuuya, and this was- well. If any of their sleeping together had gone further than sleeping then it might not feel as self-conscious of the unspoken potential getting brought up by someone who wasn't, well, him.

The laugh he gets in response is almost startling in its honesty, ringing barks of laughter that remind him of kon kon kon, painfully familiar.

"Too much respect is just as unhealthy as too little," the man says only moments later. There's still a smile lingering on his face.

Dazai thinks of Akutagawa, whose deep respect had never grown into anything capable of seeing his mentor as a fallible person and he's glad, knowing that he hadn't been present or involved in anything to do with either of the mononoke. The first one, or him.

He thinks of Atsushi, who he sometimes worried looked to him with those same eyes, but in the next breath the weretiger would berate him for not working, or fuss over him for not eating.

Atsushi, who had once sat in this exact spot, looking out at this exact view.

"When you look out at them... what do you feel?"

For a moment, Dazai almost feels that those must have been his own words, his own question, thoughts he had wondered about and circled around for so long yet had needed to recontextualise along with so much of his life in the past week.

"Humans..." he leaned back, and thought of his conversations with Fyodor, with Shibusawa. The things that he had lived through, remembered, forgotten. "They are truly destructive, and cruel, and thoughtless creatures. I do not think that I will ever truly understand them, either." He sighed. "And yet..." He thought of Chuuya, who despite his circumstances was so very, very human. Of Atsushi, who'd had his true nature as a tiger hidden from him for so long, and Kunikida. Of others that he had met. Odasaku, even Ango. "The same can be said for even the very best of them... searching for their reason to live, like stray dogs. It is at the same time terrifying, yet awe-inspiring, the feats that they can accomplish." He smiled, wryly. Neither bitter nor sweet. "And I live balanced in the middle. But - I think I'll be able to manage."

In the distance, a child screamed as they ran. Conversations carried on.

"Oh...? I see."

A fog horn blared out at sea, coming into port. A couple not far away shared food over by the railing, with guitars on their backs. A teenager passes them by wearing headphones, and Dazai's newly sensitive ears pick up on the beats of the music.

Human, youkai, hanyou... no matter what any of them were, it was still Yokohama. It was still his city.

"It... truly is a beautiful city. More than anything else... that's what I feel." He closed his eyes, and leaned forward into the breeze coming in from the sea. "Does that answer your questions?"

"You're the one who thought that was what I must have been saying. Do you feel better for having said it?"

I hate them - I hate them, and more than that, I want - I don't understand - why wasn't I-  wasn't I... worth...

Those feelings. He remembered them, and they had been his. 

First, destroy everything that comes close, before it can touch me. Then... destroy me, for having done so.

He had felt the culmination of twenty-two years' worth of an inability to understand, which had its source in something that he had not been able to affect.

You have a choice, Dazai-kun. 

If you wish to die, then it is only a simple matter of choosing to stay. The Mononoke will be slain, and so will you. But-

But, if for any reason you should wish to hold on to even one thing...

It is impossible to both slay the monster and to take it with you.

(Kitsune, Chuuya had said, accepting him even as he stared in shock. Come, love, sleep, Chuuya had said, and his heart had wavered. They had called, and he had answered, because there was too much- he had too much- that he couldn't let go of.)

"I suppose... I simply find it hard to find the words to..."

He feels his heart beat. And another. He breathes in the salty air, and it still feels terrifyingly new. 

And yet, the idea of not being here to experience it, the idea of having vanished without a trace somewhat over a week ago - no trace of fur in Chuuya's house, not having the honour of knowing Ranpo's own secret, or of having felt how relaxing it was to have his own fur stroked as he curled up on the sofa whether he was at home or at the office...

He thinks, perhaps, it might have been a beautiful death.

But at the same time... there is only one thing he can think of, the words catching every time he tries to put them on his tongue, for what he feels about still being alive.

"Me?" He hears and feels more than sees the fact that the man next to him is shaking his head. "There is nothing to thank me for. As a mere medicine seller, there was honestly very little I could do. At the end, I was powerless. You were the one who did all of the work. All I did was give you the ability, and the means." He stood, and Dazai could see the slight smile on his face even before he turned. "If anything," he added, bowing at the waist, "I should be the one owing a debt of gratitude to you. From the moment I understood your Katachi..." The medicine seller turned his face up, eyes closed into the upturned slits of a true smile. "Come now. Kits who are blessed with so many who care for them shouldn't need to make those sorts of faces."

...

AN: There's a stealth crossover (crossover-ception? triple crossover?) near the end. I'm just gonna hope someone catches on to what and where the reference is, haha...

If by the end of reading this it isn't clear - in order for Dazai to still be alive in these stories, he had to make the active choice to live and stay alive in the moments before the Medicine Seller's sword cut. This was inspired by several of the endings of the actual Mononoke storylines, although there are elements that appeared in none of those stories that I had to work out for myself.

What this means for Dazai is not that his suicidal ideation is 'magically cured', but that he is less likely to actively seek out death. It also isn't 'knowing his past' that enables him to move on, but understanding *what* he is, and that his feelings of 'not fitting in as a human being' don't just come from nowhere. In short - he was validated.Does anyone know that one poster with the owls on it, about "I just need a stick"? That's what the Medicine Seller's getting at there.

And do I mean to imply that I see the Medicine Seller himself as a kitsune...? Well if you read it with that in mind, just... imagine being him coming to that moment of realisation of just 'what' he's up against. As said and implied in the previous fics, due to the nature and longevity of kitsune, Dazai's still considered a child at twenty-two by other youkai, more than just being seen as "barely out of his teens", so... have that for a bit of adult fear, and why the Medicine Seller is saying what he does here.

All that said, this [was] my first time writing the Medicine Seller, and I'm still nervous over whether I've got his voice down properly or not. (And given how important he is to it, you see why the previous events aren't written yet.)

#bungo stray dogs #bsd #bsd stuff #Leona fic #kitsune dazai #bsd mnnk au #mononoke ayakashi

[leonawriter]

Smoke and Fox-Fire

Read it on AO3

Fandom: Bungo Stray Dogs/Mononoke

Characters: Dazai, Tanizaki, Ranpo, others mentioned/minor appearances. Background skk.

Summary: Dazai comes to a decision, Tanizaki is enlisted and then mildly traumatised, and Ranpo realises that he had made an error of judgement.

Notes: References to less than ideal childhood situations, and potential BSD manga spoilers.

(Part three of the “Not All Kitsune Have Nine Tails” ‘verse. Follows Denning Down.)

...

It was mid-afternoon, so far nothing interesting or dangerous had happened yet, and for the most part, it had been a day of normal work activity- with the only very recent addition of Dazai's more sensitive hearing picking up on more than he would have normally, and the way his tail moving around without him able to actually control it to the fine degree that he sometimes wished he could meaning that things would sometimes... wind up falling off tables. 

Things like pens, and pencils, and Kunikida's paperwork...

Anyway, Dazai was bored, and a bored Dazai was never good for the office, far more than a Dazai who simply didn't want to do his work, and part of the reason why he was bored was... it had a lot to do with how much he'd hated pushing all of the things that had made him feel less like he was trying to fit into some role he wasn't suited to play for the past- it hadn't quite been twenty years. A fair bit less. But it was long enough.

Long enough he couldn't really remember that memory he knew that both Atsushi and Chuuya had 'seen' somehow, of him as a small child. Toddling toward his mother, an indistinct person his younger self had only referred to as Mofa-Mofa, something that had had a somewhat less indistinct man laugh and try to correct him to "Mama."

"He knows what he's saying. Don't you, Osamu? Because you like soft things. And Mama is soft."

Reaching out and up to her hair, to clamber into her lap, and getting visibly annoyed when the only thing he touched was hair, and as nice as his seat was, there was no soft thing to grab at or hold onto. 

"Not as soft as he thinks, it seems. Maybe he just got attached to that ratty old sweater you were wearing for a while?"

She'd laughed, barking - a little too slow, and he'd somehow been able to hear that even then - and just said, "Maybe."

It'd been a lie, of course. He knew that now. More than that, Atsushi and Chuuya both knew all of the sordid details of childhood - had discovered them with him, all of the repressed memories of how his father had grown colder and had taken his mother for granted, of how she had left-

Too much time meant too much time to think. 

It wasn't that the memories themselves hurt, exactly. They were so old, and he could barely remember any of the people in them, even thinking of himself as that small, soft person with no hard edges and no bandages wrapped around his small limbs was an almost alien thought.

Thinking about them for too long meant thinking about what they meant, though, and although there were many thing he had let go of, that he'd had to let go of, in order to stop and break away from everything and let himself start anew, even though he knew the truth... it was one thing to know, to come to a decision and move on. Another to know what to do after that.

Perhaps, he wondered, he still held more than a little resentment. Not directed at anyone in particular, anymore. But just in general.

The Agency's clock ticked another half hour gone. 

Dazai blinked up at the ceiling from the sofa, and reassured himself with the familiar buzz of office noise and voices.

The point was - the point of it all was, that he didn't exactly enjoy going out and having to hide the fur under his skin in such a way, when it didn't want to stay under like that. It made him itch all over, like he'd wrapped his bandages on too tight, or too roughly, something catching at him all the time whenever he paid it too much mind.

The thought kept striking him, as he went to and from Chuuya's to the Agency and out again for other reasons, that even with everything hidden, someone would see him, and it wouldn't matter to them that they shouldn't be able to - someone from outside of the Agency or even the mafia who wasn't a spirit or demon themself would see, they would notice something off. He'd say something wrong. A stumble on the pavement. His heart would hammer in his chest.

He'd never felt so uneasy with the thought of being seen before, and he wasn't so bothered about it when he was in the Agency or Chuuya's place, so what was it that was so different? Other than the sheer amount of people, of course. And people he didn't know. People who would just look at him, and judge him.

It felt like having a loose bandage somewhere on his arm, or his neck, which he hadn't been able to fix and that at any moment, might unravel further than he could handle, but he was always a little too far from somewhere private enough to fix it.

...

"Ta-ni-za-ki-kun...."

He jumps maybe a foot in the air from where he'd been sitting at his desk, or it feels that way, and it shows by the amount of strange, unrelated letters and words that had just appeared on the report he'd been working on for the simple recon mission he'd been sent on yesterday. 

It wasn't unsalvageable. At least he hadn't already pressed send.

"Uh... Dazai-san?" 

It wasn't as if he's not used to Dazai's antics. He is. He's just not so used to them being aimed at him - Kunikida, yes, and Atsushi now too, but up until now he'd somehow managed to not get hit with the worst of it.

Perhaps this was only happening because Kunikida and Atsushi were outside, and from the sounds of things working on Atsushi's training.

And now his ex-mafia coworker is staring at him with wide eyes and a too-wide smile on his face for it to mean anything good, and those new ears of his are pointed upright at attention on the top of his head. Which would be more unnerving if it wasn't the second day of it, and he hadn't already seen Atsushi transform often enough to almost become used to human beings with animal features.

...Well. Mostly human, in Dazai's case. Which was also going to take some getting used to.

"You see Tanizaki-kun, I have a problem and I was starting to realise that you might be the only one I can go to who might be able to help me with this problem. You will help me, won't you?"

He found himself staring. Dazai didn't move. He only blinked.

"I, uh... are you sure I'm the only who can help you? I mean, there's everyone else, and-"

"Nooo.... no, see, it absolutely has to be you. I mean, as far as I'm aware, you're the only one I know who uses illusions. So it has to be you."

"Uh-" For a moment, his mind blanks out. But that's when one of Dazai's new ears twitches, and he starts to get a sinking feeling. "No... no. No, I'm not just following you around all the time so you can go out like that in public. It'd fail the moment I bumped into you anyway, so it'd definitely not work at all."

He gets the feeling that he's either said the wrong thing or there's something he hadn't thought of, because Dazai isn't smiling as much anymore, but hopefully if he's realised how this won't work he'll leave him alone and then he can just get on with his work.

"You misunderstand," Dazai says, sounding far too serious for someone several years older than him who's still crouching on the floor so that his head's just barely looking over the top of his desk. "I wasn't asking for you to use your ability. What I was after was a... second opinion, of sorts. I wanted to know how you use it."

"You- okay?"

"I need to know. Because of reasons."

"Don't you already know how my ability works, though...?"

And now he didn't just look serious, or frowning, he looks downright frustrated, and he doesn't even know what he's said wrong.

"If you want to say something, just come out and say it, Dazai."

Ranpo's voice comes loud and clear over the noise and distance of the office between them.

Ranpo, who doesn't seem all that surprised, or at all bothered, by what was going on. Which at least eased up the pressure of the idea that whatever was going on, it was another imminent disaster or emergency.

Dazai hesitated, and then stood up, which now meant that instead of looking across his desk to meet his eyes, Junichiro needed to look up given he was still sitting down. His hands were in his coat's pockets and his expression wasn't really giving all that much away, but something about the tail and ears moving - even if he didn't know all that much about animal body language, or fox behaviour for that matter - suggested that he was agitated. Which wasn't saying much, but when it was Dazai, and he wouldn't have known that if he couldn't see the fur move...

"What I've been trying to say is, I'm not asking for the sake of learning about your ability. I already know as much as I need to know about that. What I'm asking for is... I need to be able to learn more about how to control my own illusions. I thought that asking you would help."

For a moment, he didn't say anything, because he didn't know what to say-

"But you don't have an illusion-based ability?"

"Do the changes to my body look like the result of an ability to you, Tanizaki-kun?"

"W-well, when you say it like that- not... not really... no? I just. It's strange to think of you having that kind of ability- uh... is that even the right kind of term for something like this?" He sighed, and saved his work. Kunikida was going to be annoyed about the drop in productivity but... "Hang on, I'm guessing if this isn't an ability, that means the Director's doesn't work on it, right?"

"Nope." It was kind of unnerving, the way that while he glanced over to see Ranpo looking in their direction, Dazai didn't move at all. Actually, no, that wasn't true - a part of him did move. A single ear. "Youkai magic doesn't run on the same rules. Because of that, Dazai might be hit by magic that he'd have automatically nullified if it was an ability." Which wasn't worrying or anything at all, clearly. And reminds him of what they'd been told about Lovecraft. Which made remembering what he'd managed to do feel like some sort of small miracle. "Which is both good and bad. But right now, the important thing is that no, the Director's ability doesn't work on it, so if Dazai wants to take control back..."

...He'll have to learn it the same way everyone else does, if they aren't in the Agency, Tanizaki finished. 

"I guess that does make sense," he admits. 

"So... how did you first get Light Snow under control? Unless-"

A sudden warmth from behind is all of the warning he gets before he feels familiar arms wrap around his front, and Naomi's speaking from right beside his ear.

"No, nii-sama did have some control back then, didn't you~?"

His mind goes blank against his will as the memories come to him, and it's only partly because he still really wishes that she'd stop acting like that and making a scene in public-

It's like how when Atsushi had brought up their entrance exams. He could still barely remember his other than the sheer terror and adrenaline that had kept him going. He'd prefer not to remember, if that was an option. He'd really like not to.

"I, uh," his brain stutters back to being able to function, which is harder than it should be with Naomi still clinging onto him. "That's- how about, we just go with, um- something simple. Like, what your upper and lower limits are."

Dazai blinks at him.

He gets the unnerving feeling that he's just broadcast everything he'd just been thinking about and not meant to outright say without having needed to say anything. For once, he doesn't mind Naomi's public clinging, because it gives him that slight feeling of support that he really needed. Even if he did wish she wouldn't-

"Okay. I think that I can safely say that I know what my upper limits are... but I really need to figure out how to do anything smaller than that."

"I... okay? Okay. So. What... is that, exactly?" What's making this awkward is that he's really starting to wish that Dazai had been able to go to, say, Kunikida about this. At least he had experience knowing how to teach people! Meanwhile, he just had experience being anxious and not knowing what to do, unless it meant infiltration and covert ops, which was exactly why the Port Mafia's boss had singled him out from everyone at the Agency to do some sort of exchange program thing at some unspecified time- he had no idea what he was doing, or where to start. "I mean, are those upper limits big, or is it, something we're going to need to work on later as well?"

"My upper limits get people hurt, they don't need improving-"

"Kitsune illusions aren't hard light, Dazai," Ranpo says, cutting across the conversation and whatever Junichiro himself might have been about to say, and he sounds annoyed, frustrated. It's his 'people are being stupid' voice. "They just show people things that aren't there! Don't talk tough when all you can do is-"

"Allow me to correct myself, then," Dazai says, and all of a sudden Junichiro is wishing he was somewhere else, anywhere else. And, mostly, that Dazai wasn't using that tone of voice on another member of the Agency like that. "My upper limits have hurt people. Is that enough?"

"But it's impossible."

Dazai seems to just... stare, unreadable, while their best detective calms down. What was strange was that he knew perfectly well how destructive illusions could be - he'd done things he wouldn't normally even consider, when people had threatened Naomi, endangering lives easily, even. But Ranpo and Dazai were talking about kitsune illusions like they were something entirely different.

"...I'm sure that if you asked," Dazai said, the words sounding heavy and weighted, "about what happened the other day... then Kunikida-kun would say otherwise."

Junichiro had seen and heard things the other day that had told him as much, but if he hadn't believed it then, the odd noise that somehow came out of Ranpo when Dazai said that confirmed that there was definitely something up with him as well. He had to wonder if maybe he was showing it more because now it wasn't just him, but Dazai, and everyone else, so he felt more comfortable about it.

Part of him hoped that was the case, at least.

He feels Naomi hold him tighter, and the fact that her hands had stopped wandering a while back says a lot about how she just wants to have someone to hold onto as well, right now.

"...Inari bless you," he hears Ranpo say, quietly enough that if he hadn't been straining his ears to hear it, he thinks he probably wouldn't have. "That was you. You were- I mean, of course it was you, but I just- thought that-"

"Does any of that even matter? All that matters right now is me figuring out how to get a hold of and control what I can do now."

"From... scratch."

I was wrong, Junichiro admits to himself in the privacy of his own mind, watching the exchange in front of him, Dazai slipping back into his mafia game face isn't the scariest thing in the world. 

The scariest thing in the world is Ranpo looking like he hasn't got a clue what's going on anymore.

...

Inari bless you is what keeps circling around in Ranpo's head, even through the rest of what he's saying, the rest of what Dazai's saying, even though he knows the others are watching.

Somehow, the fact that it had been Dazai who'd been the second mononoke, who'd come into work the next day small and red and fluffy and acting like everything was new, had caught him off guard. Because it was Dazai, who was one of his few equals in terms of intellect and smarts in not just the Agency, but anywhere. 

Because it was Dazai, he'd just assumed without even thinking, that he'd just... forgotten everything, somehow. 

With a mononoke that strong, it would have made sense if Dazai were older. And if he was just as young as he said he was, then to have become as powerful that quickly made sense too, because it was Dazai.

But there were two different ways a mononoke could be created.

One was the most common way - a spirit got mixed up with a human, or human emotions, and when everything got intense enough, usually because of grief or anger or confusion or hate or just needing things to be sorted out right, a mononoke would be born. Drawing people in and destroying them. Things that weren't supposed to exist, and that had to be exorcised.

The other way... was by the spirit and human sides of the equation being mixed up right from the start. Both more stable, but also a potential ticking time bomb if things really went wrong-

Hanyou. Half-human kids. 

They weren't exactly unheard of, they weren't discriminated against or anything. They were just... rare. Because things went wrong. Because humans could be cruel, and petty, and just as fickle with their attentions as they thought cats were. People got hurt, and... the kids usually got caught in the crossfire.

Usually it wasn't too bad. Usually they could handle things, found their own place in the world, settled down either on one side or the other, or found a decent middle ground.

Dazai, though - if this was true, then Dazai was the worst case scenario, where none of that happened and they never did, and it- explained too much. About everything.

Dazai wasn't just young, he was practically a kit still, by normal adult kitsune standards, but by human standards he was already an adult. Not one thing or the other. Having somehow never learned anything.

"All right," Ranpo said, "how about we start off slow, then? Basics. I'm nekomata, not kitsune, but I'm not stupid, I do know some things you should be capable of. Other than the shapeshifting."

"But I want control," Dazai said, somehow sounding like he was whining even when he was almost completely blank-faced. "Not to learn how to do more."

"This is control. Most of what you should be able to do is going to come naturally to you at some point, so it's better you learn now, rather than have it all blow up in your face."

Again, he holds back from saying.

He knows he isn't good at reading when things are rude or not when talking with people, but Dazai's like an adult cat who's forgotten how to use his claws. Or what his whiskers do.

Which isn't even exactly right, because as a hanyou, Dazai probably hadn't ever even learned in the first place to be able to forget.

He sighed, when Dazai still wasn't doing anything.

"Hey, Tanizaki - you don't think about using your ability, right? Like, it's got to be activated on purpose, but it's like Kunikida's, you just do it."

"Uh- yeah, I... I think that's pretty much how it works? I just-"

"Right," he continued, now that the important things had all been said, "so just - stop thinking about how and starting thinking of... I don't know, what's the smallest and most simple thing you can think of, Dazai?"

For a moment, no response. Which was starting to get more than a bit frustrating, because it wasn't like he was asking much-

And now Dazai was probably thinking he was being subtle, which he wasn't. 

As subtle as a kit with a crush pulling that person's tail, Ranpo thinks snidely, but doesn't say. Then again, Poe was an adult human and he was just as clueless about how these things went. Not to mention how long Yosano had been trying to drag Kunikida into loosening up, and... well. It wasn't like it was anything out of the ordinary, he supposed, but what it was, was frustrating to watch. Even Poe's cluelessness got frustrating at times, as cute as it was.

"Come on, Dazai, you can think of something, we haven't got all day, you know..."

He just hoped that mentioning something small didn't get them a miniature - if illusionary - mafia executive in the offices.

"Uh, Ranpo-san, do you really think it's a good idea to push him like that, I mean- if-"

"Psh- Dazai only knows what he can do under pressure." He rolled his eyes, and then looked back at Dazai. "You're not going to get anything done if you think it's a great idea to put a mental block on things just because you think you're suddenly dangerous just because you blew up one time. So stop making a firestorm of a little fox-fire."

He stares for a moment longer, just long enough to smugly catch the slight expression of shock on the former mafioso's face, and turned away again, reaching back into the open bag of sweets he'd mixed up earlier.

He's already started to lose track of how many he's chewed on by the time he hears footsteps outside near the door - that could only be Kunikida and an exhausted and frustrated Atsushi, back from their training session - and already starting to wonder how long it's going to be before he gets any more good cases, his hand reaching back for another one, when-

"Dazai." Kunikida's voice was level and quiet, which on anyone else was probably supposed to be giving the impression they were keeping their cool, but on Kunikida... "Why is there fire floating over your paperwork?"

He blinked.

The snack still in his hand, he twisted so that he could turn to see, and there Dazai was, staring at the pile, which certainly looked like it was only a moment away from being set on fire.

"I can't touch it," Dazai was saying, dramatically serious. "If I touch it, then it's going to turn real, and then it really will burn all my paperwork. And my desk. Which would be awful. Wouldn't you agree, Kunikida-kun? So as you can see, there's absolutely no way I can do any of it."

Kunikida stared at the fox-fire with the intensity of someone who really didn't know what was going on, whose brain had already come close to breaking just the previous day. 

Slowly, he turned away from Dazai's desk, eyes wide like he was questioning all of his life choices at once.

"Is... is that true?"

Tanizaki just shrugged awkwardly. Kenji was staring, but seemed more entranced with the idea that it was possible than anything. Atsushi seemed like he was the only one who wasn't really sure what to believe, which made sense, given he was one of the only other youkai in the office.

Ranpo just grinned, and purposefully put the snack into his mouth.

"How should I know? It's Dazai, isn't it?"

Of course he knew the fire was just fake. It was the same stuff foxes in the forests used to both mess around with humans and to lead them back on track. But he couldn't just lead everyone around by the hand. For one thing, they had to figure things out for themselves, there had to be at least some things they could do without him - and for another thing, things would just be boring if he did.

...

AN: "Mama" is a common way for young children to call their mother, as much as "Haha-ue" and "Kaa-san". 

"Mofu-mofu", meanwhile, is the Japanese onomatopoeia for "soft", and "fluffy". 

Baby Dazai was basically mixing the two up and calling her "Muffy" or something like that - because his mama was fluffy, of course.

My first experience with hanyou was Inuyasha, but the way it was handled (only human on a new moon) annoyed me a lot, and I feel wasn't a good portrayal of a half-human character, so... this is more a mix of other things I've seen since then.

#bsd #bungo stray dogs #bsd stuff #kitsune dazai #Leona fic #bsd mnnk au

[leonawriter]

Denning Down

Read it on AO3

Fandom: Bungo Stray Dogs/Mononoke

Pairings: Dazai/Chuuya

Characters: Dazai, Chuuya, Mori, Atsushi, others mentioned

Summary: For Dazai, adjusting to the fact that he isn't as human as he always assumed he was - and at the same time, just as human as he had figured he'd have to be, with how badly he fitted in with the rest of humanity - is going to be a slow process.

So is adjusting to the fact that his home isn't quite where he'd left it.

Chuuya, meanwhile, has all of Dazai's problems and more to deal with.

(Part of the “Not All Kitsune Have Nine Tails” ‘verse. Follows “Foxes and Spirits and Office Chairs.”)

...

"Chuuya."

It was annoying, it was frustrating, but he had to admit that he'd effectively signed himself up for this, so he couldn't even complain that much. Even so, he wished...

"Chuuyaaa...."

He wished that Dazai would shut the hell up and let him sleep. But it felt like they'd been like this for over half the night now, and he hadn't been able to rest at all. Which was going to be bad in the morning when he had to get up and out to work to report on everything to the boss. He'd only managed to send out a quick text to say that the threats had both been neutralised - not eliminated, no, because a confused ten year old kid and an exhausted Dazai who didn't even know what he was doing didn't deserve to be taken out - before collapsing into bed.

And yet, Dazai hadn't stopped pestering him. Every single time he thought he was nearly asleep, Dazai would start calling his name again. Only to stare at him when Chuuya's eyes stayed open.

He glared this time, too. Hoping that Dazai would get the message and get the fuck to sleep already.

Dazai doesn't close his eyes again, and not for the first time Chuuya thinks he sees something in those brown eyes of his, wide and hesitating, but he's getting too tired to do more than wish his bedmate would give up and leave whatever it was to the morning. 

"Chuuya...?"

He sighs, heavily. 

"What? What is it? For fuck's sake, Dazai, and you'd better actually say what it is this time instead of just assuming I can read your mind or whatever the shit you think I can do."

He more than half expects to be given the silent treatment again, just like every other fucking time, and at this point he'll take it so long as he gets even five more minutes of sleep-

"...Did Chuuya mean it?"

The words come out so quietly, so mumbled into the covers, that he almost doesn't hear them.

He blinks.

"Hah?" It takes him a moment to even think of what Dazai could be talking about, before hitting on the obvious. The entire reason why they're like this in the first place. Of course. Typical Dazai. "Why?"

"Because it's important."

He can hear the pout and the whine. There's an extra something in that whine now, though, that puts him on edge and that he knows he's going to have to get used to.

"Nothing's all that important at..." He squints around the covers, lumps and all, at his alarm clock. "It's nearly half two in the morning, Dazai. I'm tired. You're tired. Go to sleep."

He reaches over to try and force Dazai to at least lie still, but winds up clutching at empty covers and just groans.

"It's important," Dazai repeats, sounding for all the world like the petulant kid Elise should be, if she weren't... well, what she was. "I wanna know if you meant it."

And now Dazai's sitting on the edge of Chuuya's bed as if he's going to walk out at this hour in the morning, just because he's being a brat.

Which... now that he thinks about it, maybe isn't the best or most charitable way to think of things. Dazai had just had things about his past thrown in his face that he was still having to come to terms with, which Chuuya of all people should be able to sympathise with. And...

He sighed.

He knew exactly what he was being asked, and it was because he knew, that he'd wanted to put off answering. 

Did you mean it.

Those four words made his heart pound in his chest.

"I..." He closed his eyes and breathed, thinking back, remembering. Opened them, to see Dazai's back, his silhouette marked by those two new additions, which were lying flat on his head. He didn't know much about fox behaviours and body language, but he didn't have to just to know Dazai, and Dazai was still just as vulnerable as he had been several hours ago. In so many ways, it was as if he'd just started undoing all of his bandages in front of an audience. Which he hadn't, but he might as well have. "What would you do, if I said I didn't even know what it meant to you, the first time I said it?"

For a moment, Dazai didn't move, and he didn't breathe.

"If that was what you said... I'd wait. Because you said it again. Did you mean it, Chuuya?"

He could remember feeling nervous, knowing that it wasn't just Dazai there, that they had people watching, and it wasn't as if he'd admitted any of this even to ane-san before any of this. 

"What would you do if I said I didn't know, that second time? If... I hadn't been sure, because that's a huge responsibility to put on someone, and- what would you do if that was how it was?"

Hypotheticals. Maybes. Treading carefully. He wasn't used to any of these things, and normally he'd have just reached over, grabbed, and yanked Dazai back into bed and threatened him into rest, which was what he'd done plenty of times when they'd still been partners. When they'd lived in the mafia buildings more than not, because they'd been underage and even outside of how the authorities would take an interest in two teens their age living without parents or relatives, Mori had wanted to keep a closer eye on them than not, and there'd be times when he'd see the darkness under Dazai's eyes and drag him to rest, because even pretending was better than nothing.

Now, he had seen what had happened the last time someone had screwed up with this, and he wasn't about to make the same mistakes.

"If that was how you felt... I might want to walk away, because I don't want to just be your burden. But I'm going to wait, because Chuuya said it a third time. And I want to know if Chuuya meant it."

Chuuya swallows, and he wishes he felt certain that if Dazai tried to leave, he'd be able to stop him. Wishes, because he isn't sure he could.

Just like a few hours ago, trapped in the heart of the illusions, he doesn't want Dazai to go. Doesn't want to let go. To lose him like that.

"Then... I'd have to say that the third time I said it," he says, well aware that he's still half asleep and that his words aren't anywhere near as good as Dazai's even when he's wide awake, "all I wanted was for you to come back to me," he finally admits. Dazai stills, ears pricking upward, and a part of him wonders if he's said the wrong thing. But he can't stop now, he can't chicken out. "You were right in front of me, but you weren't there, and I wanted you back." Just like right now. "I didn't care what I had to do or what I had to say, so just - come back to bed and sleep, you stupid fox."

Dazai still doesn't move, and Chuuya starts to feel a coolness to his bed that had never been there before. He isn't often scared, when it doesn't involve Corruption, but this - he thinks this comes close.

Dazai's mother had never been seen again if everything could be believed. And now he was going to-

"You do realise that's a very dangerous thing to say, Chuuya. You can't take something like that back."

"Then why are you acting like I was ever going to, idiot," he mumbles into some other direction.

Come, love, he'd said all that time ago. Sleep. 

Come back to me.

He'd dealt with situations where Dazai had gone missing before - captured, kidnapped, undercover, voluntary or not. But Dazai had always been pulling the strings somehow, and Chuuya had always known that all he'd had to do was follow the plan, whatever that was, which was sometimes even just to be himself and do what he would have done anyway, and they'd get out just fine, just as Dazai had expected.

Always.

But not... not that time. 

He'd known, somehow, that seeing Dazai like that had been more dangerous in a way than seeing Dazai floating in the space where a dragon had been, only just recovering from near death. He hadn't had to feel the way Dazai had been shaking in his arms to know that, either.

He'd thought that saying those things would have been enough - saying those words - but if Dazai has somehow recovered enough to have second thoughts... there isn't anything he can do about it.

"Come back," he says, quietly this time, "you can leave again in the morning if that's what you want, you can pretend we're just... too tired to care that we're supposed to hate each other if that makes you feel better. But just... sleep, okay?"

Dazai doesn't answer back like he had before, but he doesn't leave, either. He just wordlessly gets back under the covers, shuffling himself so that his head - ears and all, which Chuuya just hoped weren't going to tickle him awake all night long - rested somewhat against Chuuya's chest, the (soft, and fluffy) tail curling around around them both, even when Dazai didn't do anything of the sort with any of his other limbs.

Chuuya doesn't mind too much, and while he'd normally be annoyed with the walking waste of a first aid kit taking up space in his home at all, let alone his bed, he falls asleep with his hand slightly outstretched but not quite touching, not quite sure, but grateful just to have the proof that Dazai was still there.

...

Dazai wakes up in an unfamiliar bed that's too soft, and too warm, compared to the futon that he's become used to over the past years away from the mafia and its money. A moment of bleary confusion causes him to wonder why that could be, and how he was asleep at all, and if perhaps Mori had decided to bring him in via force - when he catches a hint of smoke and the fading scent of wine, along with something else-

Something that could only mean Chuuya, and honestly, he isn't sure if that's better, or worse.

Better, because he feels safe, and worse, because the realisation means that the memories of the previous night - and the past few days - start settling into him again, the weight of them sinking to his stomach and making him disoriented.

He wonders if this is how Atsushi felt, when he had woken up after learning that he himself had been the tiger he had thought had been hunting him down. And again, months later, when the ramifications of that would continue to change the context of countless numbers of things he had experienced as a child.

Dazai hadn't even been able to remember most of that before - just disjointed memories of an unpleasant childhood he would have happily traded for a quick and easy way to die, and the knowledge that he had been left - twice over, at that - because he hadn't known how to act human enough, hadn't been able to fit in, had been such a failure before he had even turned ten years old, that life... life itself had ceased to have any meaning.

In the here and now he can only let his legs swing over the bed, feet finding the floor, and find himself wondering where he was supposed to go from here as he put his clothes on - the way he had to feel his ears go flat against his head as he put his shirt on, the way his tail rested awkwardly above the line of his pants, forcing him to leave part of his shirt untucked.

It was frustrating - he knew so little.

Both about who he was, even with everything he had learned. About what he could do-

He had never had active power before. He had always left that to Chuuya, to Akutagawa, to Kunikida, Atsushi... it wasn't as though he'd had a choice. His ability was to nullify an to take away, not to do, not to affect things.

His illusions had hurt people. He remembered that - remembered not caring about anything, other than the fact that he couldn't stand to have them come so close, and pushing them away because they were only going to leave as soon as they realised what he was, what he was capable of, that he couldn't be what they wanted him to be...

He thinks he remembers hurting Kunikida, even if it wasn't serious, even if Kunikida didn't even know that it was him, and that's enough to make him swallow hard and grab his coat, because the only things that memory made him want couldn't be done in Chuuya's home.

Odasaku had told him that nothing would fill the void inside of him, and it turned out that he was still right, even after years and supernatural revelations. Just knowing where he had come from and why he was the way he was didn't help where he was now.

But Odasaku had also told him to save people, and no matter what else he wanted, he couldn't go ahead with any of it without knowing that at least his coworkers had come out the other end of the entire disaster in one piece.

...

"...all of which is fascinating to be sure," the boss was saying in a bored tone that Chuuya was all too familiar with and that skirted the edges of something less pleasant, "but tells me very little of use." He stayed carefully still, even with the nervous way his heart was pounding in his chest from uncertainty. Mori sighed, sounding tired and resigned. It changed nothing. "Chuuya-kun, as one of my most valuable subordinates I would like to think that you at least have a good reason for keeping things from me."

Chuuya was, despite what Dazai would say about how he "only knew how to use his strength and not his head", smart enough to know what was being meant.

I want to trust you, the boss was saying, and I don't believe that you would endanger the organisation. But you have to give me something to work with.

The thing was, he understood that well enough.

It was just trying to figure out what he could use, some piece of information or aspect, that he could use without losing everything.

Then again-

He took a deep breath, and closed his eyes.

"From everything I gathered and experienced," he said, words as measured and full of respect as he could, "the events of the last several days weren't actually all that much to do with ability users at all. I realised that about halfway through the first investigation. There was a mononoke. And after that, something... else happened." He swallowed - that was more than he had explained before, and already it felt like he was stepping too close to the truth. "It was dealt with. No one involved is what I'd classify a threat to the city or the organisation," he added, unable to not think of the pile of fur and bandages he'd left sleeping in his own bed. "If they were, I'd be bringing it up as a matter of urgency. As it is, I can't say anything else."

"You can't, or you choose not to?"

His eyes opened again at the question, but aside from a glance - that he purposefully tried not to think too hard on - he settled his gaze somewhere in the safe middle distance.

"...Both, sir."

"And why is that?"

"There are things everyone keeps secret, boss. These people more than most. I'm sure if I went looking, I'd find more than a few in our own ranks, and all of them would say they were more loyal because they don't have to worry about being outed. I..." he looked to one side, eyes tracking the distance and vector of Suribachi from where he was standing. "You know how few people know about Arahabaki. It doesn't have to be on that level for people to feel the same."

And Arahabaki being an aspect of Chuuya's own identity was executive-level stuff; even Chuuya himself hadn't had full access until he'd turned sixteen, until after the Dragon's Head Rush, and after he'd become an executive himself. Even now, there were things he didn't know about himself, and not because of any restrictions.

He let his eyes track back to Mori, whose fingers were now steepled in front of his face, deep in thought.

"I see," the man said. "In which case it is fortunate for us that I have access to someone with such a high clearance level in such affairs. You said that you aren't aware of any such being is a threat to the organisation?"

"None," he said, acutely aware of how Dazai might speak unfavourably of Mori to say the least, but he hadn't made any overt or actual threats once in the time since they'd first met again after those four years. "Not unless we make them a threat," he added.

"Which I'm sure would be a bad idea," the boss said mildly.

Chuuya didn't reply to that. He didn't have to. A bad idea was pretty much the understatement of the century. Dazai on his own had caused chaos, and that was when he wasn't even trying. A city full of pissed of kami and youkai and who knew what else, and even the mafia wouldn't survive.

"Very well."

"Boss?"

"If the situation changes, you'll tell me. If it becomes possible to inform me of anything new, you will. If you need to act on anything, you tell me what you can. Other than that, I don't see what else we can do here."

...

He's hesitating outside of the dorms.

It feels trivial, really. He shouldn't have to hesitate outside of his own home, to call it home, and yet there he was. Shifting occasionally from foot to foot.

It wasn't as though some youkai magic had bound him to Chuuya's house so that nowhere else would be home or safe; he was the one who could leave whenever he wanted, or stay away as long as he liked. In fact, he'd only stayed with Chuuya because he'd wanted to.

Which still didn't explain why he was staring at the Agency's dorm building like it was somewhere he didn't want to go into.

At least no one could be staring at him for his odd features after he'd figured out how to put everything away again earlier, how to make it seem almost as though he was human.

Not "again." He couldn't say "again" when he'd never been human in the first place.

Nor was he doing anything other than hide the most obvious of surface signs of his inhumanity. It didn't change anything, just as learning what he was hadn't changed him. It had simply allowed him to see himself as he truly was. Stripped the self-imposed illusions away.

The sensation of the wind blowing in his hair and touching his ears in the wrong places and not feeling the fur of his tail brushing against his coat at all was stranger than it had any right to be, after less than a full day of knowing what it was like, and he couldn't wait to be back inside and relax again - or better yet, learn how to use his illusions to be able to go out in public and not worry - but that only brought him back to his original problem.

"Dazai-san...?"

And now Atsushi had noticed. He smiled and waved over at the boy, trying his best to look nothing more than simply passing the time, but the concerned frown on Atsushi's face didn't fade at all.

He wished that having gained a non-ability related knack for illusions could have meant being able to fool people into not taking notice when he wanted just to pretend he was fine.

"Did you know that Kunikida-kun kept staring at my ears or tail so often earlier that I had to remind him where my eyes were? I would have told him that he'd get carried away by spirits and we'd never get him back if he kept asking questions and looking everywhere and squinting at everyone, but I wasn't sure if it'd possibly come true. After all, what if it did, and then who'd do my paperwork?"

"Well, everyone else would be hoping that maybe you'd learn how to do it yourself," Atsushi grumbled, treacherously siding with Kunikida for nowhere near even the first time today. "So... no one, probably." And then, he sighed. Dazai wanted to hope that maybe it wasn't what he thought it was going to be, but, well. He was so rarely wrong. "If it's about... I don't think anyone would mind."

"Kunikida-kun would," Dazai mused to himself aloud. "And Chuuya barely tolerated me last night."

He hates the way that Atsushi looks at him, as if he knows more than he should, as if-

"Kunikida-san was worried yesterday," the boy says, and when did Atsushi grow up to the point where he was the one acting like Dazai's senior, in situations like this? "I told him you were fine, but the last times you've disappeared in the middle of our investigations, things went bad, like the time with the dragon, or when you got shot, or when..." Atsushi looked away, and Dazai did, too, staring up at the sky, which was a beautiful shade of fading blue. With the setting sun in the west, there were places that could almost look like Atsushi's eyes. Which was fitting, for an incarnation of the great Byakko itself. "And Chuuya-san- you should give him a little more credit, Dazai-san."

As much as he felt grateful for Atsushi stopping short of bringing up the incidents surrounding his arrest when things were still only just settling back down to some vague sense of normal, the last thing he'd said brought a tightening to his chest.

But what if I don't know what I want? What if I pick the wrong choice? 

Is going back to Chuuya like this wrong, if it means I'm not living with the Agency?

He didn't even realise that he'd been making a sound until halfway through the whine he let out, which was embarrassing.

"Dazai-san... can I say something?" He nodded, not trusting himself to speak without making things worse for himself. "I feel so at home here in the dorms because you gave me a home here... because of everyone else who's living here too, everyone who helps make it feel like a home for me, more than the orphanage ever was." The smile Atsushi gave him only made him feel worse. He had helped that happen, and now here he was, potentially abandoning it all. "Home isn't just a place, Dazai-san. For me, it's where all of the rest of the Agency are. No matter where that is. And if Chuuya-san is that for you, then... isn't that all that matters?"

"I'm not quitting the Agency, Atsushi-kun," he said, somehow feeling the need to clarify that. And he wasn't. No matter where he wound up sleeping.

"Good!" There was that smile again, even brighter than before. He didn't deserve it. He still felt like he was running away, somehow. "I could help you move your things if you needed me to?"

That brought out a laugh, a real one, light and a little breathless instead of the barking laugh he'd had for Kunikida earlier.

"And show you right to the door of an unsuspecting mafia executive?" he said, not ungently. "I'm sure I'll be able to manage, Atsushi-kun."

It's only when he's said that and he's picking through his things that he realises that he's already made his choice.

For tonight he has, at least. And he can only hope it was the right one.

...

Chuuya finds himself staring at the beanpole on his sofa, and the thing that strikes him as the strangest part of it all wasn't even the dark orange ears, or the tail that was hanging off the side, twitching from time to time with its owner's thoughts. The weirdest part was the fact that he's just... staring, and not ordering his uninvited guest out of the door. That he's actually letting out a breath of relief that he hadn't realised he'd been holding in all day, ever since he'd left Dazai in his bed.

"It's rude to stare, you know."

"Tch. Like you're not the one taking up all the space in someone else's place-" he looked away, still caught on the way he'd seen Dazai's coat hung up and his shoes put away in the hall, as if he actually belonged there. "What're you even doing here still?"

He can feel the atmosphere of the room shift the moment the words left his mouth, and part of him wishes he hadn't said anything at all. Which just makes him hate the entire situation he's found himself in, and resent everything that Dazai had found out about himself for a moment, because wasn't this going just the way it always had, between them? Dazai making him do all the hard work, while he just lies there and takes it easy.

But allowing himself to resent Dazai is just the easy way out. Kicking Dazai out either with words or force and going back on his own word just because he didn't know how to handle that, because he couldn't take being the one in control even just once, was no different from chickening out.

"I thought you were the one who'd invited me in. You did want me here, didn't you?"

The tail's twitching makes Chuuya wonder just how much of a kitsune was actual fox, and how much was cat. That, and the catty way Dazai was behaving.

"Invites are for vampires," he says without thinking. "But- yeah, I..." He sighs. "Expected you'd just leave and go back to your precious Agency, or wherever it is you hole up, the moment you didn't need to be here anymore." Part of him is convinced that he's not anywhere near drunk enough for this conversation. Another part - that sounds way too much like the bandaged fur-brain on his sofa - says that if he had anything alcoholic, he wouldn't be anywhere near sober enough. "That's what you've done before, right? Just done a shitty vanishing trick right when you don't need me anymore."

He can't help the bitterness from creeping into his voice, even as he pads over in just his socks, putting his hat down safely before he goes to kick Dazai's feet off the sofa, pushing the tail aside somewhat more gently.

Dazai's eyes don't leave him at all the entire time.

"I did leave," Dazai says, and Chuuya would like to say that the way his heart jumps into his mouth is only because of the sudden and unexpected words. "I went to work," he continues. "I turned into a fox and couldn't figure out how to turn for several hours, and for a short while, I was able to put myself back the way I... was. Before." It's more the way the ears press against his head than his words, still even in tone, that tells Chuuya that the experience hadn't been one he'd enjoyed. "I could have gone back to the dorms. But I chose not to."

There were any number of things he could have picked up on from that - you left, for one, you turned into a fox, for another, as well as then how did you turn back, and how did you figure out how to look human again, and he'd definitely be coming back to why did you choose to come back here, then? but...

"I guess that means everyone else at that Agency of yours knows what you are now, huh."

Dazai inclines his head, but doesn't fully close his eyes even with a slow blink.

"That's pretty much how it happened," he admits. "I have to admit, it was fun harassing them all before Atsushi-kun showed up. But it would have come up sooner or later, so in the end, it was the best possible outcome." Dazai tiling his head has a somewhat different effect to it when he's now got two pointed ears moving almost on their own - one flicks right when Chuuya hears some distant sound from outside. "Why, does that mean you're trying to say you told people what happened yourself? It's hardly as if the Port Mafia wouldn't have been expecting some sort of report from someone who was right in the middle of everything, which you, as a trusted and loyal dog-"

"Didn't tell them shit about you, or the first kid that weirdo guy went after, so you can shut your damn mouth already before you say something we both regret."

The way Dazai's eyes widen at that, the way he freezes, makes Chuuya wish he'd been able to move fast enough to take a photo, memorialise the moment. But then he might have missed the moment the tension just seemed to... drain out of Dazai and turn him into some sort of limp noodle. 

"You... didn't tell Mori."

He shrugged, awkwardly. It wasn't as if he didn't know how much Dazai'd grown to hate his boss - Dazai's former boss - and it wasn't as though Chuuya was fully unaware of everything that'd happened. It was just that Chuuya himself just couldn't feel the same way. Sympathise, sure. Empathise, yeah. He'd lost more than his fair share of friends. 

But Chuuya was still in the mafia, and not because Dazai had dragged him in, or because of the information that'd been held over his head for so long. By this point it was just because this was the place he'd found for himself, and he couldn't imagine trying to live any other way.

"I told him the basics. I told him about the mononoke, and how there's people out there who're keeping secrets, but I didn't say who. I said if anyone becomes a threat to the city or the mafia, that's a different matter, but..." Another shrug. "It's not the sort of thing anyone just goes blabbing about."

It was something he knew in the core of his being. He'd always thought you didn't have to be told to know that. Apparently that didn't apply to Dazai, though.

Dazai, whose eyes were slowly starting to close - not narrow tight and still able to watch him, but closed shut.

And then, they snapped back open, full of mischief even if he wasn't moving.

"I hope you really meant it - what you said last night. Because I packed a carry-all bag with my things and dumped it in your room before I came here to wait for you~"

Chuuya groans. The urge to just give in and bury his head in his hands is too strong, and he succumbs, hearing the sound of Dazai's laughter ringing in his ears. 

He was well and truly stuck, now.

Then why are you acting like I was ever going to, idiot.

But it wasn't as if he hadn't asked for it, was it? So that meant that he could hardly argue-

Which was when he felt the other end of the sofa lighten up, as if a weight had been lifted from it, and at first he assumes Dazai had stood up to go find something, but then he feels something small and hard and slightly sharp on his legs, and when he opens his eyes, there's a red fox with distinctive brown eyes looking up at him and making his way onto Chuuya's lap. An angular face that tilted, and then head butted his hands, and knowing Dazai he knew exactly what the bastard was after.

Perhaps it wouldn't be so bad just to give in this once, though, he thinks to himself as he hesitates before taking his gloves off, putting them safely on the arm of the sofa next to him, and places one hand onto Dazai's soft fur, accepting the unspoken request.

..

AN: Chuuya's nerves while talking to Mori are primarily due to how he wants to be able to be open and honest with his boss, but at the same time, his loyalty to not just Dazai but pretty much the entire idea of non-humans existing both in and out of the mafia is... of equal weight. 

Partially this is due to him having made himself into basically the mafia's foremost expert on anything to do with Japanese mythology that's actually real; partially it's because I've got a strong headcanon of Arahabaki having been a forgotten guardian deity, and that sort of stuff is resurfacing in Chuuya.

#bungo stray dogs #bsd #bsd stuff #kitsune dazai #Leona fic #bsd mnnk au

[leonawriter]

@rainixdra so far the series has five works-

Foxes and Spirits and Office Chairs,

Denning Down

Smoke and Fox-Fire

Home Territory

and finally (for now) Fox-Faced.

You do kind of have to read them in that order, and there is in fact an entire backstory I allude to having happened previous to the first fic I’ve written, but you should be able to understand what’s going on, and as said, it’s a crossover with Mononoke, so that’s going to come up a fair amount.

Despite it being a Mononoke crossover, there’s... actually no real trigger warnings to speak of? It’s like I said, pretty damn fluffy.

#bsd #bsd stuff #Leona fic #kitsune dazai #bsd mnnk au