Bandages and Salt (PJO X BSD AU)

Chapter fifty-six

A/N: Time skips! Lots of them as we're finishing off the build up to Dark Era.

Dazai POV

The Dragon Head Conflict had begun to heat more in the weeks following Odsaku's joining of the mafia, growing to the point where there were mafia casualties even as we didn't actively attempt to get involved and take over the fight. It was around day forty or so when Odasaku and I were sent out to the Yokohama Settlement's waste - disposal site to gather and clean up the fallen bodies of the Port Mafia members that had been sent to join in the gunfights. We didn't have to bury the bodies (there were too many of them for only two people to do that) but we did have to photograph the deceased so that the boss would know who was dead and who was a deserter, and we had to gather their possessions. Mori didn't want the cops taking in anything that could curb the organized crime.

Though Odasaku was sent because he is the lowest level member of the Port Mafia, a man that refuses to kill despite his proficiency with doing so, and this kept him far away from the current gunfire, for me this was just another punishment for bringing the older man. Sometimes it felt like a punishment for bothering to exist at all.

Odasaku and I walked into the mafia affiliated accounting firm with outright pockets heavy with bags of IDs, keys, phones, knives, guns, and bloodied pictures that would never again be claimed by those that truly had any right to them. There was a secret door in the firm that a desk clerk only pointed to as he watched us walk in, not so much as saying a word or even breathing at all as we walked in, the stench of rotting corpses and waste clinging desperately to us. Odasaku, ever the more polite of the pair of us, nodded his thanks to the man as I walked over to the false wall and found the hidden door.

"Could you please not get any closer? You smell," were the first words that we were met with as Odasaku and I stood just inside of the room. The disgust was evident in the stranger's voice as the older man didn't even so much as glance to see who had graced his doorway.

The man had business like brown hair, pulled back neatly so that it wouldn't get in the stranger's face as he poured over the documents before him. He was dressed in a monotone suit of dark brown, and had round glasses that looked as if they had stepped straight out of an American children's novel. He didn't look like anything special, but I knew that Mori wouldn't have engineered such a meeting if he didn't want me to do something. To learn something.

Life was always about lessons when it came to the doctor.

Just not always good ones.

Ango Sakaguchi, just what lesson are you here to teach?

Sakaguchi glanced up at the pair of us briefly before speaking with more bluntness than I heard in years from anyone inside of the mafia. "Put their belongings on my desk, then stand back. Don't open your mouths unless I ask you something," the man said harshly.

The pair of us did as we were told, but I couldn't help but wonder if the newcomer even understood who it was that he was speaking to. A glance at Odasaku told me that the older man was wondering something similar as well.

"You're the new guy right?" I asked, breaking one of the only two rules that we had been given. A part of me couldn't help but wonder just what kind of idiot joins the mafia in the middle of an active war, or if the stranger was an idiot at all for doing so. It would be so easy to slip through the cracks when so many other things are happening at such speed and with such insurmountable violence and brutality around you. "Sorry, but can I use your shower? As you said so... politely, we smell-"

"I told you to keep quiet."

My mouth fell open in surprise as I was cut off by the older man. By someone that spoke with too much authority and annoyance at being disregarded for some low ranking new hire.