Daybreak | F. Dostoyevsky

13 | The Way Back Home

Mayumi woke up on a bench in a deserted subway station. It was all very strange. The lights seemed too bright, the place too empty, everything too much like a ghost town.

Her head hurted too much for it to simply have been a lack of sleep, and it took her a few moments before she fully remembered what had happened. The festival. The bomb. The torture that was trying to stay awake with a concussion at a house she broke into, and—Fyodor. Where the hell was Fyodor?

Mayumi looked around. There was no one. But when she checked her pockets, there was something and she also noticed that she was no longer wearing the lightweight coat she had on when the bomb went off. This was someone's longue jacket, though she had no idea whose, as it couldn't have been Fyodor, who she didn't even know what on earth happened to. Maybe he was dead, and maybe she was dead, and this was the after life.

But then she turned around, and saw a sign that read, in big letters, Kishinekoen Station, and decided that: no, she wasn't dead. This was just not rush hour, and no one liked this station. There were always complaints of power outages and weird security measures and strange sounds. Even she had heard about it. So naturally, people avoided it, thinking they'd be avoiding getting kidnapped by the Port Mafia, or the like.

Mayumi peered her head over into the dark tunnel. She saw nothing, but at least, she knew it wasn't the Port Mafia people ought to be worried about.

Having nothing else to do, she walked out.

She simply walked out of the station, and into the world on the surface. She also checked her phone. It was fully charged, and it told her that the time was 5:01 a.m.—the perfect time for someone to leave her to randomly sleeping on a bench. Because there would be no one there, and she'd be getting out just in time.

Just in time...for work.

Mayumi looked at her phone again.

Three days.

She had been gone for three full days.

Her notifications were like a battlefield. She got twenty-four missed calls from Yosano. Twice that number from Atsushi. A few more from other members, and a whooping one hundred and thirty-two from Kunikida. Some texts from Dazai, a plethora of angry texts from Kunikida, and a worried message from Fukuzawa. She didn't even know he knew how to text.

She didn't reply. Mayumi found some fruit tea from a nearby early-opening teahouse (she almost had to beg to be able to buy a drink), sat down on some steps and drank the tea, and thought about Fyodor. After she was done with the tea and more and more people started to walk past and give her weird looks, she went back to her apartment, took a one-hour bath, changed into dark shirt and chinos to go with the grey suit jacket, which she decided she liked, and it was only then that she thought that, yes, she was going to go to work today after all.

She didn't take the subway either. She decided that, for the time being, she was going to avoid places where she could be most hurt if there was to be a blast of some sort. So she walked, and while she walked Mayumi thought all about what she was going to say to her colleagues at the ADA, and what sorts of excuses she was going to use. She came up with many, in the end, but the moment she opened the door to the Agency's office building, all of that went out of her head, and Mayumi decided that she was not going to tell them anything at all.

The first thing she saw was Kunikida's face, morphing from un-registering to confusion, then very, very quickly to anger.

"Mayumi!" he shouted, and then, when she immediately turned away: "Oh no. Oh no you don't! Come here—" Footsteps on hard floor, running away from him through the building until he caught up and grabbed her in an awkward embrace, still fuming, as she laughed. Soon all the other members were there and he let go, and began his classic lecture of how terrible an employee she was, and how she couldn't do that and how she ought to get fired.

"We were worried," Yosano cut in, her face uncharacteristically grumpy. "Very worried, Yumi-chan. Don't pull that stuff anymore, yeah?"

"What happened?" butted in Atsushi. He looked marginally less angry than everyone else. "Did you go into hiding because someone from your old life was chasing you? Or was there some family emergency that made you have to leave quickly and quietly? Is it someone in Europe? I've always thought you looked a little European."

"No," she said, waving a hand in the air. "No, and no. None of these."

"Then what?" asked Kyouka, rather uninterestedly.

"I won't tell you."

Choruses of "What?" and "You have to!" rang out, but Mayumi had already decided that her lips were sealed, and that was that. It didn't stop them from asking more questions and pestering her through the day, but it didn't stop her from still telling them nothing either.

"Well," said Dazai from behind her desk, "this is a shame. I thought I was going to be able to keep the best desk in the building!"

"I guess you'll have to..." Mayumi started to say, then trailed off, narrowing her eyes, when she saw what was dangling out of Dazai's hands. A black leather-bound notebook and a ring of lockpicks. "Is that my sketchbook, Osamu Dazai?"

"Uh-oh."

Mayumi lunged at him, but before she could grab him Dazai dropped her sketchbook and jumped over her desk, raising his hands in comical defeat.

"Sorry, sorry," he said, pocketing the lockpicks. "I was practicing breaking into your home in case you were dead and we needed to get rid of your stuff!"

Mayumi gave him a very, very, long look, before taking her sketchbook into her hands. Dazai had opened it to a particular page, one she herself hadn't been the one to put the book's ribbon over to mark it.

When she saw what was on the page, everything she was about to say to Dazai left her mind.

On the page was a pair of eyes. That was all there was: a pair of eyes. She wasn't stupid as to draw more than that, but it was undeniable.

They were his eyes

Dazai winked.

Mayumi smiled. Annoyed. Unknowing.

"You cannot just do that!" Kunikida was saying as the world phased back into existence. "President Fukuzawa insisted it was going to be a paid leave for you, but watch it! The moment he retires, I'm going to lay you off so hard that if you're still here, you're going to want to leave Japan!"

"Yeah, yeah," Mayumi waved a hand in the air casually. "I would have had enough of this country by then. Or maybe just this city, but probably this whole damn place."

"No matter what," said Atsushi, pouting, "don't do that again, Shimei-san. It was scary."

"Very," added Kyouka mechanically.

"I won't," said Mayumi lightly. "Of course I won't. Never again."

"Ever."

"Ever," she lied.