blood money || YANDERE!Chuuya Nakahara

Seven: The Boss.

Port Mafia turf has always been a familiar territory to you. It was as if you were born with it; like embedded muscle memory, like you were born to be part of this damned organisation. You could still find your ways around the labyrinthian hallways like they were the lines on your palm; you could find your ways and expertly navigate the territory they claimed as if you were a dog marking its territory. But it is a horrible feeling: knowing that you know this place, this place of darkness, this place where the stench of death is so prominent it is almost solid in the air, like hail suspended in slow motion.

You sit in the car you had rented, the sheets of rain pouring over the window: heavy rain shower. The sound drowns out any other sound, even your own heartbeat. Pouring rain, you watch the distorted image of mafioso men in business suits, soaked to the bone, guarding the area with sunglasses perched on their noses.

You step outside the vehicle and there is no evidence of the heavy rain you witnessed when you were inside. The loud noise of rain is absent. There had been no rain at all.

"Fuck," You rub your eyes. "Fuckkk."

You lean against your car and wait, a cigarette in hand and occasionally smoking it; most of it burns up on its own. You felt like that cigarette: just simply burning itself to the core after a trigger had been set by the end, like a cartoon gunpowder to a TNT.

You wonder when you'll explode.

"(First name) (Last name)," A languid voice, smooth as a carved, sharpened blade, cuts through the air. You don't have to turn around to know who it is.

"Mori Ougai."

"No Boss title for me now? My feelings are hurt," He says, his voice taking that of faux pain.

"Enough of this bullshit," You turn to him and your eyes must have been blazing with hellfire, for he smirks at the expression on your face, "One of your executives has been fucking with me. Tell him to cease immediately."

"What my executives do in their free time is out of my business, I'm afraid," Mori says, "Especially if they do something that benefits the organisation. As a leader—"

"We know," You cut him off, "The leader of an organisation is at the pinnacle of it, and at the same time, he is its slave. The leader must be more than willing to commit any atrocity in order to ensure the organisation's survival. You've drilled that into my head as a child soldier."

He smirks. There's a look of satisfaction in his gaze that you find unsettling, as if you were—are—his perfect creation, still continuing their bloody legacy until now. You had been a chess piece, and you were moving by your own, all according to plan.

"You know," You speak through your cigarette, "I thought it was raining."

"Oh? But there's no rain."

"I know. I must have been hallucinating," You say. This man has been your surrogate father, your mentor, your abuser, yet there's a comfort in finally being an adult and confronting him, "It's your fault."

"I'm not at fault for how you feel for what you did. That's again, out of my control," He says. He then turns around, "Come, (First name). Let's have a chat indoors. Elise is waiting. Who knows? It could start raining."

You watch him go, before following with resignation drowning out the strong resilience of your heart. You follow him like a child bride to Bluebeard; Bluebeard only kills and dismantles a girl until she is nothing but bones, the brittle bones that break: this is your punishment. He leaves you with no beauty, no love, no self, and therefore no ability to act on your own behalf.

You want to cry.

You had never been given the opportunity to cry as a child; you had no time for such sentimentality.

The HQ is as luxurious as always; Mori had always a strange admiration for Western aesthetics, with European maidens, breasts exposed in their stone cold demeanour, framing a mirror behind his chair. There is a wine blood carpet that floors the ground, as though someone had been dragging a corpse all over headquarters. The walls are of slick mahogany, gleaming and polished to the extent it looked as though they were sweating. A miniature figurine of a caryatid, bearing a brown mantlepiece on their serene foreheads, was sitting by his desk, where they were maintaining a plethora of his scalpels on the flat top of the mantlepiece.

A blond girl sits on the crimson velvet chair, colouring in pictures with crayons.

"Rintarou? You're back—Oh! It's (Last name)!" She cheers, throwing down her crayons and running into you. She clings onto one of your legs. You have half a mind to kick her off, but the other part of your mind wins, "I've missed you sooooo much! It's been so boring without you, especially with only Rintarou!"

"Is that so?" You don't look down at her, instead watching as Mori takes his seat and swipes the drawings to the side. You know that you had been the same as her when she was in the Great War: Cold, immobile, and subservient; but at some point did she grow mischievous, sadistic, and playful, as if his tastes in pubescent girls had changed. Perhaps he liked them with a naughty core: it gave him a reason to punish them, "I'm ashamed of you, Mori. Making a young girl like Elise bore herself to death."

"The Port Mafia has been quiet in its businesses," He says. He stabs a scalpel into his desk. How similar you were to that scalpel, "There have been rumours that we have been distributing and poisoning the population with lethal narcotics to increase membership, but that is simply not true."

"So that was what Dazai wanted to know," You say.

"Perhaps. There is a spot left for both you and Dazai I've kept open, just in case you decide to join back," He smiles, tilting his head to the side. A strand of his black hair falls over his sinister face, "Well? What do you say?"

"Let me say this," You put up your fingers and start counting, "One, my credit card declined and is fucked; two, my rent's gone up; three, I'm dismissed from my job as a librarian, all because one of your executives wanted me back."

"I'm guessing it was Chuuya," Mori says. You blink.

"How'd you know?"

"He's had a penchant for you ever since he was a young boy," The man says. He takes out the scalpel and begins swinging it, as though practising slitting a throat open, "I remember when he first joined the Port Mafia. He met you beforehand, had he not?"

"We first met in an arcade."

"And your relationship with him went on from there when you rescued him after Sheep betrayed him," Mori goes on to say, "He must have grown an attachment to you after that, seeing you as a saviour of some kind."

"He needs no saviour."

"Back then, he certainly did."

"Now is not back then," You spit viciously. Anger bubbles in your chest at the sight of this room: this was the room where you were ordered to kill, ordered to take lives of dozens and hundreds all for this organisation to keep moving at its industrialising pace. You were a carapace of a person back then, orders going in and out of both ears and not quite processing what you were told to do. All you knew was that there was a man telling you to kill, and that was what you were doing, "Why am I here?"

"You're asking me a question you know the answer to," He says, his voice lifting from the usual bass it carries, "Why are you asking me?"

"Because...I need it to be clear," An admission of helplessness, "I need it to be clear as to what I'm doing."

"You're here because you're rejoining the Port Mafia," He smirks, tilting his chin down so that the hoods of his eyes concealed all light from reflecting back to you. They were simply orbs of violet in a sclera of white, and nothing but your own face stared back at you as he spoke without blinking, "Isn't that right?"

"...It is.

Boss."