Bandages and Salt (PJO X BSD AU)

Chapter Sixty-seven

I thought for a moment that the executive would refuse, but apparently he saw something in Dazai's expression that no one else could, some look or sign, because the man sighed in what could almost be described as defeat had it come from anyone else.

"I swear," the gravity manipulator all but growled, "if you use this as an excuse to jump into tragic again and I have to save your ass, then I'm going to string you up by your ankles on a tree branch and spin you till you barf, just like when we were sixteen," the man threatened, all of the bounds of fondness from earlier seemingly gone.

Dazai gave Akutagawa and I a little mock salute in lieu of a proper goodbye as he turned to leave with the Port Mafia executive, but I was too dazed to return it. The bandaged man had tried to kill himself a lot of ways while with the Agency - his favorite seemed to be drowning though, something that I never wanted to know, but did after so many times searching rivers for the man - but none of them had ever had such a high chance of fatality.

None of them had ever been so painful either.

"That was one time, Hatrack," I heard the other detective all but whine as the pair moved farther away.

"You could have at least nodded at him, Jinko," Akutagawa grumbled as he watched the pair as I did, seeing something that I didn't. The Port Mafia boss, Executive Nakahara, and now Akutagawa too.

It was driving me a little crazy being unable to see what others seemed to as they looked at the bandaged man.

Akutagawa began to walk away with a tsk, but as he moved to step behind the car, I caught the older man's wrist and held tight to it even as the mafioso tried to jerk it away. My head was down, not wanting to see the undoubtedly murderous look on the other's face and hoping that such a thing would make the other more likely to answer, a manipulation that a younger me never would have used but did now because of a certain detective's influence.

"Dazai... how serious were his attempts when he was with the mafia," I ask quickly, all but spitting the words out, dread pooling my stomach and n what I thought he answer was bound to be for someone as obviously broken as Dazai was, but figuring that it was better to know that to not to.

Akutagawa tore his wrist from my grasp at last, but he didn't make any move to walk away, even as I was sure the other two Agency members must have been becoming impatient by now. It was as close to a win in my book as anything that concerned the other ability user.

"He found me when he was sixteen," the older man says with no emotion in his voice, no anger or desperation, the only true emotions that I had ever seen from the other man, "by that point the boss had already out enough precautions in place that it really wouldn't have mattered what Dazai had tried." I risked a glance at the man, but he wasn't looking at me at all. "Anything," Akutagawa decided, "he would have tried anything."

Anything.

The word echoes in my head like the fire of a gun. I didn't know if it was a testament to the bandaged man's luck - good or bad depending on who was asking - that Dazai was still alive, or if there was another factor altogether that made the other detective not go to such great lengths.

A grave flashes through my mind, words said and thrown away as if in a joke, and not for the first time I wonder just who the grave had belonged to.

I wondered just how much that person must have meant to Dazai that he was still alive even now.

—-

Chuuya POV

I didn't ask why Dazai wanted to ride with me, knowing good and well that the other ability user hated my bike. I didn't have to. I could feel the school teacher's hateful gaze boring into each of us as if we had just done something heinous by existing and now had detention. Normally Dazai wouldn't care about such glares - I didn't know why he did now - and normally I wouldn't care either, but he obviously did and the bastard had let me stay the night before so I went along with it. I liked being in another's debt just about as much as the bandage waste did.