Chapter Text
To be entirely fair, the weather was beautiful. A warm breeze filtered through the grass around Dazai’s resting form, tickling his cheeks and shifting his hair. It was a lovely day for a picnic, and he’d brought all the right supplies— an intricately woven wicker basket Kunikida had gifted him a few years ago on his birthday, a spread of fresh artisan cheeses, spiced crackers and, of course, a bottle of Silver Oak vintage. He propped himself up on one arm and took a long sip directly from the bottle.
“I still don’t understand why you drink this stuff,” Dazai said, the shadow of a familiar whine in his voice. He wrinkled his nose and pursed his lips as the sour bite of the wine settled in the back of his throat, before pouring the rest of the bottle out over the dirt beside him. It sunk and disappeared almost instantly. “Chuuya is very thirsty today, I see.”
He set the empty bottle on the grass next to him, paying no mind as it fell over and rolled off, then reclined back with his arms crossed beneath his head. He looked up at the sky, practically cloudless and objectively pleasant. A beautiful day, truly.
His gaze shifted to etch the carvings on Chuuya’s tombstone even further into his memory.
There wasn’t a body beneath the grave—Corruption had swallowed up what was left of Chuuya’s body right after it took his life. Or at least, that was what Dazai had been told, because he hadn’t been there.
They buried an empty casket. The mafia and others Dazai had questioned following the ceremony said as much and many other entirely unhelpful things. Chuuya’s body was ‘with the gods of the world now,’ he had been ‘elevated’ into something more than human at the moment of his death— but Chuuya had always lived as a man— a boy, even, in Dazai’s mind. And Dazai knew him best.
Chuuya managed to die just like any other human, if maybe a bit more theatrically. Dazai wondered if he was pleased, to have been unmade finally by the limits of his own humanity, to have done something Dazai hadn’t planned for.
Something he never dared to plan for.
He closed his eyes, letting the bitter wind wash over his face like lake water on the crest of spring. “I’m sorry Chuuya, I don’t think I can go in today, either,” he sighed, blowing air out of his mouth and angling it towards his bangs. “It’s so charming outside, you know… I’d like to stay and rest with you a little longer.” Chuuya’s hearty protests sang in his mind. “Go to work, shitty Dazai, be useful.” “Come back later.” “That stupid fucking agency will collapse without you.”
Wrong.
Dazai had learned, sometime in the last eight months, that the agency didn’t actually need him as much as he originally assumed. Kunikida barely even called to ask him to come to work anymore, and Yosano had taken to simply dropping off packages of groceries at his door every few weeks. They hardly asked him to do much of anything.
He wasn’t needed. But, he had been loved— which was honestly a great deal more than a creature like himself would ever deserve, and he’d melted into it like a lost child. The danger was he no longer had the strength to live without it. Being cared for so wholly had left him newly unvarnished against the many aches and slices this world pressed into his skin and shoulders.
He was alone. Friendless. Loveless. Utterly unnecessary.
He reached for the wine bottle again, briefly forgetting he’d given the rest to Chuuya and let it roll off, before packing the picnic basket up along with the untouched food. He gathered himself up from the grass, slowly brushing the broken blades from his overcoat and tilting his head to the sky. “Chuuya, I think it’s time for me to come join you.” He twisted his torso left and right, rolling his arms and hearing the aches and cracks of his body protesting the stretch. “It’s been long enough.”
A sudden, harsh screech from about fifty meters to Dazai’s left broke his thoughts apart, turning his attention to the edge of the burial grounds, where Atsushi was running along the treeline, furiously checking what looked like a small pocket watch and shouting.
“I’m late… late! I can’t be late today, I can’t!” Dazai hadn’t seen the boy in two weeks. He looked terrible.
Dazai stumbled towards him, empty shell swiftly filling up with guilt and obligation. He hit the forest only a few minutes after Atsushi had disappeared into the trees. He called out awkwardly, creeping forward into the semidarkness, blinking as his eyes adjusted from the brightness of the unfiltered sun. “Atsushi-kun?”
Dazai couldn’t see where Atsushi had gone off to. It was getting hard to see anything in front of him, rather unnaturally so, which sang a hundred dark possibilities in his overactive mind. He slowed his pursuit.
Well, he meant to slow his pursuit. What actually happened was that Dazai took two gentle steps forward before tripping face first into a giant sinkhole, knocking his head on the edge of the soil, and passing out directly.
***
He woke up an undetermined amount of time later to a man who looked startlingly like Ranpo frowning down at him— apart from two large, russet-colored cat ears peaking out from atop his head. Dazai was certain Ranpo did not generally sport cat ears.
He lifted his head and shoulders up, resting heavily on the backs of his elbows and waiting for the sting in his bones to subside. This was the first time his body had ached more than his soul in months.
“Who are you?” Not-Ranpo asked, poking harshly at the side of Dazai’s cheek with a stick. He was standing on what looked like a university lecturer’s podium littered with cartoonish stickers of several different kinds of mushrooms, and an incredibly long flower stem hung out from the side of his mouth.
“Ranpo-san?” Dazai asked. It didn’t make sense for Ranpo to be here, he should be at the agency. It was possible that he’d been assigned fieldwork with Atsushi today, but Dazai immediately dismissed that probability as quite low, given the circumstance.
“That’s my name, idiot. Who are you?” Cat-ears-Ranpo slapped his cheek with the stick in time with the emphasis on his words. A small thorn broke off and nestled itself into the skin over Dazai’s cheekbone— he raised a hand to his face to pull it out, blinking.
There shouldn’t be pain, if this were a dream… but then, Dazai’s dreams were full of pain, of late.
“Dazai,” he answered cautiously, dragging himself off the ground and taking quick stock of his surroundings. Dark forest, heavy underbrush, strange foliage. Escape routes technically available in all directions; however, there was no clear way to tell if an escape into any one direction would not present with some other, more urgent, danger.
“No.” Weird-Ranpo made to smack him with what Dazai was coming to realize was the stem of a rosebush again before he ducked out of range.
“Excuse me?”
“I said no, that name is already taken.” He shook his head, opening a large book and placing it atop the ridiculous podium in front of him.
“That’s my name, though, Dazai Osamu.” Dazai leaned forward over the book, which looked like an incredibly long school roster.
“And it’s still taken! Try again before I get bored and kick you out of my forest.” The meaner Ranpo pointed to a spot near the middle of the page, where the name Dazai Osamu was stricken through with red ink and a few other notations that made Dazai’s breath shudder in his chest.
Dazai Osamu— Unavailable. Custodian; Nakahara Chuuya.
He took a moment to bottle the wild desperation that swelled up inside his soul. “So… if I give you a different name now, would I be able to see the person who has mine?” He held his breath, looking directly at this peculiar forest-dwelling Ranpo, noticing for the first time that he also appeared to have vertical slits for pupils. Cat's eyes.
“If that’s what you want.” His gaze narrowed at Dazai disapprovingly. “And stop calling me stupid things in your head.”
“Should I make one up, then?” Dazai raised one eyebrow, expecting some form of backlash.
“I certainly don’t care.” Ranpo uncapped his pen.
“Tsushima Shuuji.” As soon as the words left Dazai’s mouth Ranpo scribbled them into the large book on his podium and a very strange, slippery feeling passed through Dazai’s chest.
“There, that wasn’t so hard, was it?” Ranpo asked, and Dazai stared straight ahead, past his shoulders and into the trees, where it looked like something had just moved. “Alright, now that the name debacle has been settled, where’s your fare?”
“What?” Dazai blinked again.
“Your fare, Tsushima Shuuji. The price one pays to enter Wonderland.” Ranpo had closed the book now and was stepping off the podium, losing about thirty centimeters of height in the process.
“Wonderland?” Dazai repeated the word uselessly.
“You’re quite slow. Yes, Wonderland, the country you are entering right now.”
Huh.
Ranpo turned his attention towards a giant sequoia tree to his left, which seemed itself to tremble in the face of him. “Atsushi! Come out from behind there, give me double your usual fee, and then take this clueless beanpole to the Hatter’s house.”
After a few moments, a very put-upon looking Atsushi stepped out from behind the tree, and Dazai immediately noticed something he hadn’t back at the memorial grounds— Atsushi had large, white, fluffy bunny ears shooting out from the top of either side of his head.
“Ranpo-san, I don’t really have the time to—”
“Get him out of my sight and where he needs to be going to immediately, before I void your inter-universal travel pass!” Ranpo cut him off with a statement that had the gears in Dazai’s head turning at full speed and Atsushi fumbling in his pockets and muttering to himself about undue responsibility always being forced onto his shoulders— which was pretty par for the course for Atsushi's role in any universe, Dazai had to admit.
Thus, having calmed down considerably now that he’d decided to believe this was either genuinely an alternate universe, or just a very intense alcoholic coma— Dazai followed the strange, floppy-eared Atsushi as he sped through the forest and out into an incredibly fantastical looking garden.
The garden spanned about two hundred meters, lined neatly with trees bearing some indigo-colored fruit Dazai could not identify, with several winding cobblestone paths that lead up to an enormous, chaotically designed mansion.
There were clusters of flowers spread all across the field, gathered like social circles— iris, buttercup, orchids, yarrow. Several of the clusters seemed to giggle as he walked by, and Dazai was mostly certain a few of the red snapdragons had actually bitten at his clothes when he brushed past them.
“Stay on the stones, Dazai-san, the flowers here are absolutely uncivilized,” Atsushi commented.
“Right,” he answered, feeling a little curious— and a little out of place— but determined that after all the wildness of what he’d just experienced in the forest with the odd, incredibly argumentative Ranpo, he was rather prepared for any additional strangeness. Of course, following the manner life in general had been going for Dazai lately, he was entirely incorrect.
There came a sudden crash and a shout from above, the splintering sound of glass breaking, and Dazai looked up just in time to see a giant, ornately upholstered sofa sail swiftly over his head and crash into the garden. Atsushi shuddered beside him. Several flowers screamed.
“I wholeheartedly hate this place,” Atsushi muttered under his breath.
Dazai watched as a tall woman with grey hair and matching fox ears burst from the frontmost-facing door of the mansion. “I can’t work like this anymore, you insufferable mad hatter!”
The door swung open again and a sharp, playfully wild laugh Dazai had heard at his right hand a thousand times as a teenager spilled out from the threshold.
“I make garments now, actually.”
***
Dazai woke up on his back in a strange place for the second time that day, uncertain about how he’d wound up in this situation again and choosing to ignore the most likely possibility. He could hear Chuuya’s booming voice above him.
“This one’s fucking gorgeous, Usagi-kun! So good of you to bring him to me, he’ll make a fine replacement. What’s your name, pretty thing?” Chuuya asked, hair sliding from his shoulders in waves as he leaned down to hover over Dazai’s face. A few buttons and bits of thread fell into the grass around them.
He was wearing green.
“Chuuya?” Dazai could hardly believe his eyes, which he felt was mostly sensible because it wasn’t as though they’d never lied to him before. His fingers clenched at his sides, aching to run through that unkempt, fiery hair.
“Yes, yes. Lovely to meet you, how do you do, etcetera. And you?” Chuuya held out his hand, and some observational piece of Dazai’s mind behind the shaking, screaming need to reach back noticed there were several misshapen, peculiar-looking rings that wound around the joints of each of his fingers.
“What?” he asked.
“Your name, darling, I can’t draw up a contract without a fucking name.” Chuuya pulled his hand away and crossed his arms over his chest.
“Dazai.”
The flowers stopped giggling. Chuuya stopped smiling. Dazai remembered his fake name.
“Did you fucking hear that?” Chuuya turned aside to call out to Atsushi, tone grown suddenly confrontational.
“Hatter-san, I really have to go…” Atsushi bowed slightly, backing himself awkwardly off the property at a speed that could hardly be considered polite.
“He says his name’s Dazai!” Chuuya threw his head back and laughed, a large, pine-colored hat sliding off his body and into the grass. “But that’s impossible! No one has that name anymore. I own it.”
“Well, about that—” Dazai attempted to interrupt, but Chuuya pressed his palm over Dazai’s mouth so quickly and firmly it might have been called a slap, if Dazai knew how to parse the difference between those sort of things.
“Be quiet!” Chuuya growled and Dazai’s jaw snapped itself shut beneath his palm.
“Dazai-san! I’m late for a meeting, but will you please tell Akutagawa I’ll be back on Sunday to take him to the seaside?” Atsushi shouted, somehow already at the very edge of the property and looking like he was itching to leave as fast as he was able.
“Sure,” Dazai answered, having processed exactly none of what Atsushi had requested at all. He turned back to Chuuya, watching the anger rise inside him and spill over into fits of dark laughter and clenched fists.
His profile was striking, utterly lovely, and Dazai had somehow forgotten how divine the shape of Chuuya’s silhouette was since he’d seen it last. He looked entirely, magnificently wild; eyes wide, hair spilling past his shoulders as he cackled into the open sky.
It was acutely terrible to behold, and Dazai found that he could not stop looking, so he did what he always did when Chuuya laughed like that— he reached out, brushing his fingers deftly under Chuuya’s sleeve and against his naked wrist, holding on until the laughter stopped.
“What the fuck are you doing?” Chuuya stared up at him sharply. His pulse rippled, warm and erratic beneath his skin before Dazai drew back his hand. He hadn’t seen that slant of anger on Chuuya’s features in years.
It felt like choking.
“Chuuya—” There came a sudden, overwhelming clamor of bells. He looked over Chuuya’s shoulder and towards the strange outdoor dining hall table behind him, where several wind-up style clocks had gone off all at once.
“Shit. It’s time!” Chuuya clapped his hands together and ran towards the table like a madman, uncapping various pots and pans, turning a few alarms off carefully and shattering others violently to pieces with a swift fist. He looked back at Dazai, no trace of the previous moment’s anger, waving at him in welcome. “Come sit down, dear, you’re late for tea!”
Dazai definitely wasn’t late for tea with Chuuya, because he’d never once scheduled tea with Chuuya, or with anyone— but Chuuya was somehow here, laughing and breathing and telling Dazai to come sit and so he decided there was nothing else to do but listen.
He took a seat at the edge of the table, watching as Chuuya fluttered around the space, muttering nonsensically to himself. He poured several cups of tea and set three of them down in front of Dazai, frowning at each in turn before his expression finally lit up and he pushed a violet cup with a crack down the middle forwards, nodding encouragingly.
Dazai reached out to grab the handle and Chuuya suddenly smacked his hand away. “Wait! It’s not right!”
“Uh,” He drew back, inspecting the beginnings of the large welt already forming on the back of his palm. There was a rush of air against his face.
“What are you thinking, would you like to be my model? I’ll put you in all the best,” Chuuya asked, suddenly hovering right beside him. His expression was wild again, over-wide eyes and crooked half smile distorting his attractive features, and yet Dazai found him nothing less than painfully beautiful.
“I am thinking that this is a very strange dream,” he replied, staring into Chuuya’s eyes as they filled with a dark, mad delight.
“Oh, definitely.”