blood money || YANDERE!Chuuya Nakahara

Thirteen: Stag.

"Boss, are you sure this is a good decision?"

Chuuya Nakahara is standing before Mori Ougai, his hat in his hand as he looks at the piece of paper Mori was signing.

An official document of your sanity. A psych eval.

Forged.

"Are you questioning my motives, Chuuya?"

"Respectfully, I'm questioning your reasoning, Boss," He replies back, respect glinting in his words like light to a diamond. Reflecting and refracting all over, shimmering and blinding, "(First name) is crucial to the movement of the Port Mafia. I wouldn't want her...broken."

"That, she is, already breaking," He finishes the signature and slides the paper to the other end of his desk, "That's why I'm doing all this."

"Why?"

Mori's grin takes on a sadistic turn. In the flickering lights of the shadows that fell dramatically over his desk, frozen in its darkness. His eyes are hollow; so unsettling that the violet colours of his irises seemed like fake colours coming from a fake world; a fanged gaze, teeming with teeth, menacing in nature despite lacking any sort of weight in its veneer as a human being, flashing wildly as he speaks, "Can she do any of what I order her to do without her being broken?"

Chuuya's blood freezes. He finds himself stuttering over his words, before shaking his head violently, "But Boss..."

"I know you have feelings for her," Mori says, oh-so-casually, as if love was nothing but a perverse concept for him that he couldn't understand its intricacies and complexities, like it was a faraway, down deep, drowned corpse, eaten away by crabs to the extent of non-existence, "I know you have since you were a young boy, Chuuya."

He blushes furiously at the admission.

"Feelings are a dangerous territory in the Port Mafia. I'm sure your big sister Kouyou Ozaki understands," Mori continues to say, steepling his fingers together over his mouth, so that his voice comes out filtered and muffled, "I wonder how you'll do."

Chuuya takes a moment to think, before he closes his eyes and takes a knee down onto the floor, "My utmost loyalty belongs to you and the Port Mafia, Boss."

Mori smiles once more, though his eyes are like stone, devoid of blood, slipping the paper into his slim fingers and gesturing to Chuuya to take it, "Excellent decision."

XX

"They charged through the front?" Chuuya exclaims, his grey-blue eyes narrowed in disbelief, "Protect the Boss at all costs! I'll be right there. Damn it!"

"Stop," Your voice cuts through his. Before the two of you are Dazai and another detective, whose eyes are open, and green as the foliage of trees behind him. Dazai has his hands in his pocket, his trench coat swaying gently in the breeze of incoming summer. On his face is a cunning smirk, "Hirotsu has told me to tell you all to retreat."

"What?" He snaps his phone shut, "Why?"

"Boss has vanished. Akutagawa and Weretiger have been dispatched to chase the Fyodor. They've caught on a lead."

He blinks in surprise, watching you grin weakly. There was something clammy about the way you smiled, as if it was cold in the centre and unpleasantly sticky in the way it clung onto your face, "Maybe we should use those detectives over there. I'm kidding, of course."

"Where is Boss going?" He asks. You put your hands up in faux surrender. Chuuya notices they're shaking, almost violently.

"He left on his own accord. Says to meet an old friend," You say, then look at the detective standing at the bottom of the staircase, "Oi, detectives! You can go now, we're retreating!"

"Yah, (last name)!" Dazai waves at you from the bottom of the stairs. Chuuya immediately grits his teeth, the red outline of his ability triggering before you put a hand on his shoulder.

"Calm yourself, Chuuya," You murmur, "We're playing into the mastermind's game if you fight him."

"I can't stand the bastard, that's all," He snarls, his face only contorting into an uncontrollable rage when Dazai smirks at him, "Where would the Boss be if the Agency's out to get him?" Chuuya demands. You watch as the two detectives retreat, talking to each other with the bespectacled male stretching his arms out over his head. He laughs at something Dazai says.

You shrug, "I don't know," Then, you rub your hands over your face, "I have to go."

"Go where?"

"Find the man who's behind all of this virus," Your voice sounds on the verge of breaking, "I'm to be in charge of finding him."

Chuuya's eyes narrow, "Do you at least know who he is?"

"I've received a call from Weretiger," You say. Your voice falls out of your throat like a stone being dropped into a well: heavy, unknowing, and dark. You take a step back when your vision starts to blur at the edges, fading into black. Chuuya takes notice of your sudden retreat for he finds himself gripping onto your wrist, tight enough to cause pain. He says something, but all you can hear is your heart dimly beating in the sheer silence of your head. Pain is good, you think to yourself: reminds that there are no heroes in times of pain. You simply just howl when you're in pain, because that's the only thing that you can process, "Some...Some guy named Pushkin..."

You look at Chuuya and find him with a bullet hole in his forehead. His eyes are dead. Milky and glassy. You try not to flinch at the sight, too reminiscent of what you had seen in your childhood. You see him with rib bones sticking out of his head, just like you had done once: death by a ribcage being ripped out and smashed into the cranium of a skull. He looks like a stag. A stag man. You find yourself stumbling on the stairs.

"Easy, (First name)," Chuuya gently says. His eyes are filled with worry, sympathy for your behaviour. He pulls you back onto your feet, "What do you see?"

"I see you dead," Your voice feels like a whisper, but you're speaking at a normal volume: you're deaf to your own self, "You're dead to me now."

"How?"

"There's a bullet wound on your forehead," You say, and Chuuya thinks your voice resembles too much of that of when you were a child again, fifteen, in perverse clothing that Boss had ordered you to wear, despite its inconveniences in missions, as if he was delivering a present to those who would become victim to your slash of terror, "I can't see anything else."

You blink again and the ribs on his head are gone. Everything is gone. You can now see again.

You are back.

"What was that?" Chuuya asks. The henchmen behind you are observing this interaction with silent curiosity, though they regard you with unsettledness when you turn to look at them with a sweat-beaded forehead. They flinch when you gesture with your head.

"Well? Hirotsu said to retreat. Go!" You order, and they all start to run back into the building. You turn back to Chuuya.

"It's getting worse," You say, putting a hand to your forehead, "I thought that by joining back the hallucinations would stop. They haven't."

He snorts, "Why on earth did you think they'd stop if you rejoined?"

You look at him, with your head tilted to the side, almost as if you were judging him for being stupid; but your eyes are hazy, unfocused, totally unhinged, the door well oiled; loosely swinging and shutting close like a wayward entrance, "Because it would have meant I stopped struggling against myself."