#multiimuse

It’s been maybe a month or so since Dante (and Vergil, thank god) had gotten out of the Underworld. Not that Dante was ever going to admit to any of them that the only reason that they’d taken that long at all (about a month or two down there) is because both of them had been too busy fighting to remember Yamato could just open a rift and they could go home that easily. Nah, better to just pretend it really had taken them that long. They’d both already been shouted at enough by anyone with lungs to shout, they didn’t need more of that.

Besides, it was...nice. This new normal everyone was adjusting to was nice. The others could probably all tell as much. Dante’s personally not at all sure he’s smiled this much or this widely in decades. Vergil’s here. Vergil’s home. He’s not ashamed to admit the two of them had spent the first few nights tangled up with each other, unwilling to go far from their twin’s side. And even if he knows Vergil is antsy, wanting to get out of this mundane quiet, his brother has stayed. It does help that they’d managed to actually talk like adults once or twice, and--- and begun to work out their shit. His brother finally knowing Mom had looked, Mom had loved him...it was going a long way to repair the thirty years of damage their relationship had taken. Well, okay, so they were never gonna stop harassing each other or trying to kick the crap out of each other, but that was just a brothers thing. And it was fun. Dante wasn’t gonna complain about that. But there was a softness to it now, an edge that was absent, a...fondness even to the insults that hadn’t been there before. They were healing, finally, after so long broken. Almost kind of a family again, him and his brother and the girls and Nero and Kyrie. 

It’s another day, no jobs, and Dante is napping on the couch --- he thinks Vergil is upstairs trying to make a dent in cleaning or just trying to avoid any potential company --- when there is a very loud thud against the door. Nothing that breaks it, really, just some kind of solid, fleshy noise, and Dante blinks. He rolls off the couch and pads over, almost glad that his sword is part of him now since his coat and guns are on the hook by his desk, and opens the door to....blink again. “What?” He asks no one in particular, realizing to his shock that it’s...a bird. A black owl, he notes, and he picks it up. It’s warm, he notes, and its eyes are closed, and--- he makes a noise, then, recognizing it like a bolt of lightning from the blue. “Howly?!” He remembers it, the stuffed owl he’d all but clung to constantly as a little kid, obsessed with the thing for years until it disappeared around the same time Dad had left. He wouldn’t...it’s the same damn thing, he knows it, he recognizes the white marks on its face, and--- it’s alive. No, it’s more than that--- he’s old enough now, powerful enough, to sense what he never could as a child. This is a demon. No, it’s...it’s an Arm. He recognizes....oh.

Oh.

Corbeau excused himself early on, yawning and claiming he was bound for bed. Mana waited until halfway through, when her phone vibrates with a [planned] call from Ni.

"Sorry guys, I gotta take this. You keep enjoying." She slipped out, Maigo watching before giggling again.

"And they keep saying I'm obvious."

Kaida blinked, then giggled softly. She saw what he did there. “Well enough. I’m currently making sure my companion doesn’t tear open all his wounds again while traveling.” Odval made noise of protest.

“I am mostly healed. You needn’t...” He sighed, then looked to the man on the bench. He held himself oddly...”You’re a friend of the Lady’s?” The small woman puffed a bit at that.

Two months and six days after Mundus fell, after they lost Vergil. That’s how long it took before he showed up again. Dante’s brother. The boy she’d loved, maybe still did, she wasn’t sure--- she remembered, now, what they’d very nearly had, what he’d run away from (remembered her fire; she doesn’t think he intended to take that much away but he had, and she’s really glad it’s back), and she’s smart enough to know that the Vergil she’d known was broken too. Oh, she couldn’t guess at how, but she could guess that he was a wreck. After all, why run so hard from your own emotions? Why keep everyone else at arms’ length, even your own brother? Why...why do what he did, in the end? And why do this now--- god, it hurt to look at him on the astral level, look at his soul. Torn apart like a bird worrying at its feathers to the point where it was small and shredded, holes dotting it like he’d cut things way, clean sharp edges like Yamato’s work...she’d never looked at it like this before; maybe she’d have been able to do something if she had.

Though even now it’s not like she can do much. She’s still learning how to do any sort of magic, control her projections, she doesn’t know how to heal those wounds. She doesn’t even know a way to get them to stop fighting beyond tossing some bottled incendiary spells, and she doesn’t want to do that to either of the boys. She can only watch as they fight, the broken and torn apart Vergil and Dante, poor Dante, bleeding hurt and pain that he’s so good at masking with anger. Though--- if she tries, maybe--- the worlds are merged, now, like they were at Hellfire---! She reaches, reaches frantically, not wanting to send Vergil away but not sure how else to stop, maybe she can just send him a few feet away, startle them? Where, she needs to find a weakness in the world, just a little---

She is really, really not expecting them all to fall through a rift, the only other sign of it Yamato blazing with light as blue surrounds them. 

It was supposed to be a pretty normal job, demons turning up in a little town just outside the city. Supposed to be. Hell, Dante had figured it was gonna be a fun day trip! Bring Vergil and Dad, and they could all stab some demons and have a good time. Family bonding, Sparda-fam style. But noooo. The first red flag was that none of the demons were any sort he recognized, or any Dad recognized, a little similar to some but just left of center. Still easy to kill, though. Demons were demons, no matter what they looked like.

But then they get to the epicenter, and--- there are kids there (okay, 20-somethings, but they’re kids, damn it, if he’s old enough to be their dad, he’s counting it). At first he thinks they’re stuck in the crossfire, but then he realizes a few things: first, there’s something weird about them, something that prickles his skin; second, the two boys are rolling around on the ground in a pure childish sibling fistfight --- he’s done enough of those himself to recognize it immediately --- and third, they both have white hair, and the girl with them is standing a few feet away clutching a pair of swords to her chest. One’s a longsword, with a twisted looking grip, and the other is a katana. He’s about to say something, maybe, but then Dad pushes past both of them, releasing whichever Arm he’s been using, and holy shit he hasn’t seen Dad pull a Dad since they were six and had been caught planning how best to jump into their kiddie pool from the roof. But he feels that, and he stops and watches.

Well, this was certainly not how he expected things to go!

He’d known the others were...upset at him, for some reason, after the trial and Teruteru’s execution, and he was pretty sure they were going to try something, and he’d been up for a while this morning thinking about it, but really, none of his ideas had come close to what actually ended up happening. Sure, he thinks his door is a little lopsided now when Nekomaru and Kazuichi had shouldered their way in after he’d opened it, and sure, he’d expected Kazuichi to be involved, but he really hadn’t expected Nekomaru to get him into a rough headlock and drag him elsewhere, to....Hajime? Who did not look happy? Well, of course he wouldn’t, he hadn’t seemed happy with him either --- which hurt, it did, because he liked Hajime, he thought they understood each other --- but...what was...?

His answer came when Kazuichi produced a pair of handcuffs, told him to shut up and put up with it, it’s for everyone’s own good, and slapped one end on his left wrist, and...the other end on Hajime’s right wrist. Oh. Oh, okay. So that’s what they were doing. If...if he stayed close to someone who would keep an eye on him at all times, then they thought he wouldn’t be able to hurt anyone, or help the killer, or anything like that. Well, that’s all well and good unless Hajime decides to kill him, or kill someone, but for some reason...he doesn’t think that will ever happen. Not Hajime. He’s the least likely person to do anything like that. So...but still, he wonders why the other boy had decided to do this. Though, no, he didn’t look happy, he was probably forced...ah, poor Hajime! Stuck with a worthless waste of air like him.

Granted...he knew how to get out of handcuffs, and these weren’t very high end handcuffs, so it wouldn’t be hard to slip out of them, but...he supposes he can put up with it himself. Kazuichi had told him to anyway, and he wants to show them that really, he’s on their side! He’s on the side of hope, so if their hope is strong, that means obviously he’d be on their side. He just wants to see them shine, to watch despair become stepping stones to their brightest hope, and so, if they want him to let himself be tied to someone and watched over like a misbehaving dog, then...he’ll comply. Because he wants to help. And this is going to be like helping, isn’t it?

The morning’s breakfast is deeply awkward, but Nagito pretends not to notice, happily helping himself to an apple that he nurses while the rest eat. He’s taught himself how to be ambidextrous, so he lets Hajime eat complacently, holding the apple in his right hand and letting the other boy do whatever he needs. The whispers and looks he gets are of no consequence, just the usual white noise of his life, of others around him as it’s always been, and he hums tunelessly to himself while waiting for Hajime to finish up as they head off to the new island. Ah...he’s probably going to make thing difficult for him, isn’t he? No one’s going to want to talk to Hajime if he’s right there...the thought makes him droop slightly. He doesn’t mind being ignored and avoided --- in fact, as lonely as he is, it’s preferable to the alternative --- but he doesn’t want Hajime to share that fate.

She was an idiot. A complete idiot. She’d let Mana talk her into drinking [something that was never happening again], she’s made a fool of herself in front of Vergil, and she had a headache that was still persisting. But with the headache at least being manageable after more sleep, she found herself needing to make a call.

She needed to apologize to Vergil, and pray that he hadn’t put her words together into just why he meant so much to her. Of course, that meant she was calling the office. Which meant she prayed that no one but Vergil answered it because she wasn’t sure she could handle the embarrassment that might ensue.

It’s been two weeks since the incident with Shibusawa. Dazai knows this, because he’s all but counted the minutes. It’s really just another thing to do in the emptiness, since the city is too busy putting itself back together to have anything for the Agency to do. There’s no business, and so everyone has been sitting around doing nothing, wrapping up what little paperwork they needed to finish and cleaning up the office, and then just...filling the silence with their usual antics. Not that Dazai can focus entirely on them, except when he’s getting dragged into them himself or taking the opportunity to distract himself by giving Kunikida a hard time. 

He...he’s trying very hard to do just that, in fact. He doubts anyone else but Ranpo might notice that he’s working a little too hard at and being a little too loud with his shenanigans, but he is --- the other option is to start thinking again, and he doesn’t want to do that. So he tries instead to poke at Atsushi, harass Kunikida, involve himself with the rest of them at the Agency. Throw himself into what his normal now is, into the life he now lives. To an extent, it’s easy, and to an extent, he needs it; spending all that time around Shibusawa and Dostoevsky dragged him too far back down into the path he’d spent four years running away from. He needs to remind himself he lives in the light now, that life has things in it worth getting up and living for, that there is something in tomorrow that he can look forward to seeing. He is still empty, he is still struggling to find his reasons, but they’re so much closer to his grasp here in this new home, and he needs that reminder after his brush too close to his mirror images, the twisted reflections that showed him what he could have become, showed him what he still could be.

And...he needs the distraction from his other thoughts. The ones about Chuuya.

Every time his thoughts turn towards the redhead, one jumps out at him, burning itself like a brand on his heart: Chuuya had come for him. He had let himself go, given himself to Corruption, not knowing if Dazai would wake in time, not knowing if he would get there in time. Chuuya risked death, or worse than that, simply...trusting him. After four years...no, six, after six of barely any contact than no contact at all, he still trusted him. Trusted him that much. His Prince Charming had risked it all for him, like he always did, threw himself into the jaws of danger (the jaws of a dragon, Atsushi had told him) for him. All for him. Oh, for Yokohama, too, he knows Chuuya cares about the city enough to fight for it, but...but he’d gone there for him. 

He remembers clearly, vividly, the feeling of Chuuya’s cheeks beneath his fingers, the weight of Chuuya in his lap as they fell to the ground. Chuuya’s lips on his, the heat between them as --- dizzy with triumph and victory and both of them snatching their very lives back from beyond the edge of death --- the two of them celebrated the only way they knew how. He remembers it all too clearly. It  had been...different, this time. It had been...oh, hell, if he has to admit it to himself, he can. It’s not like he’s saying it aloud, after all. The memory of it, of the two of them together, alone in the fog and the quiet, of--- well. It finally answered a question he’d only distantly realized he had. Something that had kindled in his chest the first time he’d seen Chuuya use Corruption and realized it was for his sake, something that caught fire the foundations built the very first time he laid his eyes on the king of the sheep. Something that had burned low but present there for years, a fire he could not understand or process, a fire that was fed with every moment of understanding, every moment of camaraderie, every smile and every fond insult, every...everything about Chuuya. The fire in his eyes and the sharp edge of his smile, the way he snapped out insults and came alive and burned with every teasing word Dazai would say, burned like the fire in his hair, the way he became a force of nature, a natural disaster, when he let Corruption loose. Something had burned for Chuuya, long before Dazai had been able to understand what it was, that he was capable of it.

And with that moment in the fog, the knowledge of how far Chuuya went for him, the sensation of their bodies touching somehow softer than any time before, it...Dazai could finally put a name to it. And--- it felt like completing a puzzle, one left unsolved for seven years. He had a name for it, knew the shape of it. And it felt right. Like this rotten dream of a world adjusted itself just a little bit in his eyes, righted himself just a fraction more. 

But--- that wasn’t why he was avoiding the thought of it, the thought of Chuuya; oh no, if he let himself he’d be sitting there with his chin in a hand sighing wistfully, picturing the other man in as many different ways as he could. No, he was avoiding the thoughts because he knew they’d only ever be thoughts. No matter that he knew now how he felt for Chuuya, that it explained so much about everything the past seven years, that it made him feel human, knowing he felt this way at all, let alone for the man who was his partner, his fellow monster, the one who understood him, the one who knew him...it didn’t matter. Because Chuuya didn’t feel the same way. Chuuya hated him. Maybe it was...maybe there was a chance, maybe there was hope --- he had come for him, after all --- but everything else that had ever happened since their reunion, hell, everything after Dazai had made executive...it spelled it out clearly. It had been the files, a stupid comment, or...god, he didn’t know. But after that Chuuya had started avoiding him and cut all contact, and, well...he was the furthest thing from stupid. He knew what it meant; what else could it mean? Chuuya hated him; anything he did for him, any warmth there was, was out of obligation. 

So it was pointless to daydream. No matter how wonderful, how bubbly and amazing it was to be able to roll these warm feelings around in his chest and know they were real and they belonged to him, that he could feel, it...just wouldn’t be worth anything in the end. So he put it out of his mind and went about his live, living the best way he knew how, slapdash and a mess, still his usual self, making jokes and rambling about suicide (because those urges have quieted but not vanished, not at all, never at all), giggling as Kunikida tried to throttle him and teasing the Agency children. This was his life, and his home, and he shouldn’t bother dreaming about something that he’d already lost.

It had been two weeks since the Shibusawa incident, and it was approaching evening --- the Agency shut down at five, as most places did, and Dazai had spent the rest of the afternoon-to-evening at one of his usual haunts, one of the many bars he filled the void with (because Lupin was special), and now he was heading back to his apartment at the dorms. He’s not drunk, maybe just a little buzzed, but it’s a nice buzz. Anyway, it’s not hard to go back to the dorms, he knows the way, and he doesn’t even hop in a river on the way home. He gets into his apartment with a sigh, kicking his shoes off and dropping his coat by the door, wandering into the kitchen to dig out a carton of milk and taking a swig, before heading into the bedroom to change into his pajamas (a very old pair of blue plaid sweatpants and an even older, slightly baggy shirt with a cartoon sheep on it he’d stolen from Chuuya a few months after he’d joined the mafia). He hates that part of the night, having to stare at his bandages and remember what lies beneath them, especially when some of them are still fresh and covering the knife wound on his back that’s still finishing up healing, but he has to anyway.