Bandages and Salt (PJO X BSD AU)

(Volume III)...Chapter forty-eight

Dazai POV

The Yokohama salt air bit at my skin as I walked into the main Port Mafia building, my body thrumming with a relentless energy that I'd thought I'd gotten rid of years and years before. Everything felt twisted and wrong, warped now that I was back on mafia soil, though the problem was simple enough to identify.

The problem was that I was feeling anything at all.

Before going back to New York I had been able to look at the world around me with something of a comfortable, if not protective, numbness. Apathy seeping into my bones everywhere that emotion was supposed to lie. But now...

There was a gym in the Port Mafia building, several in fact in each of the five large pillars that stood a stark black among the middle of the city. Each of them were there for the mafiosos to train their skills with one another.

I've always hated using them, opting to avoid the two floors of the tall buildings dedicated to such facilities altogether when I could. There were too many people, too many heavy glances and wandering hands belonging to fools that believed that I would just let them do whatever it was that they wished with me because I was young and they didn't know who I was at the time.

They knew now though.

All those that had tried anything were met with a quickly darkening bruise blooming across their skin into a rich purple and blue at best, dead at my feet at the worst, though that had only happened a time or two. Any time that the worse of the two had occurred the boss hadn't done anything about it, saying that we were all no better than dogs deciding our pack order as if he hadn't done similar only a year and a half before. The others in the mafia knew that there was more to it, but just chose to stay a good distance away from it all instead, valuing their lives over verbalizing anymore of their curiosity.

Not that this stopped any of the wandering gazes.

The only reason that I was even stepping foot into the communal training room, onto the floor at all, was that the person that I had come to meet had insisted upon it, claiming it to be the best environment for what we would be doing. Though I knew that there were ulterior motives there as well, there always were with the mafia after all.

She wants to remind others that I'm dangerous, that I'm not something meant to be touched.

I knew that this feeling of her's came from the knowledge that the woman had become privy to not long after I had officially joined the mafia. Even though she had acted as though she couldn't have cared less about what had happened to me back then, this in itself was proof enough that the executive couldn't stop themself from meddling in matters that I hadn't asked them to.

Kouyou was dressed in her usual etier, as she tended to be when we met to spar like this. She's always held firm to the belief that one should train in what they would be most likely to fight in so that movements don't feel strange, foreign, once you try to execute them wearing something less comfortable than gym clothes. It was a stance that I shared with the older woman as I came to the gym dressed in my mafia attire, sans that jacket that the doctor had given me. The coat was draped over my as I walked inside and was thrown unceremoniously onto a bench when I grabbed one of the katana's lining the wall, finding one as similar in size to that of Riptide as I could. The coat always hung loosely on my shoulders and could be easily casted away should the need arise.

"Evening, Kouyou," I greeted, spinning the blade as I walked to meet her on the mat, reaffirming myself with the distinct difference in weight and length.

Other blades have always felt strange in my hands, ever since I was twelve, as if they weren't meant for me. And in every way that could be counted they weren't. Only Riptide had ever felt at home in my grasp, but it's a blade that doesn't harm mortals. Something useless in the world of monsters masquerading as men. So I tend to use guns instead while I'm here.