Death Becomes Us (Dazai x Reader)

Chapter Eleven

Dazai awoke with a start. The sun in his eyes was blinding. He sat up, looking around. The last he could recall, he had been in the tunnel beneath that warehouse. Now? He seemed to be in a small field of sorts, laying by the waters edge. 

He lifted his left wrist into his line of vision. His watch told him it was nearly four thirty. When he'd arrived at the warehouse it had been just after twelve, he must've been out for an hour or two at least. Shakily, he got to his feet.

There was a sharp pain in his chest and he raised a hand to it. Looking down, he found his shirt to be torn to shreds and soaked through with blood. Removing his hand, his eyes were met with the sigh of his own skin: clear and unmarred. Even the scars that had been there before, the once from his years of injury in the Mafia, both self inflicted and not, seemed to have vanished.

"What...?" he began before he remembered his purpose in coming to the warehouse in the first place.

Y/n.

He searched every inch of the field but could find no trace of her, not even a foot print. The field wasn't big, maybe forty square feet. After an hour, he resigned himself to the apparent truth: Y/n was no where to be found.

When Dazai got back to the Agency, he was immediately bombarded with questions.

"Where were you!" Kunikida demanded as Yosano tugged at his arm, examining him for injuries.

"Are you hurt?" she asked, "You're covered in blood!"

"Were you able to find Y/n?" Naomi asked concernedly.

Dazai ignored them all, seeming to look through them. His eyes were wide and empty. Rampo approached.

The young detective let his eyes traverse the entirety of the scene before him, taking in every detail of Dazai's condition. At last, they met Dazai's own. A question he never thought he'd hear from the man fell from his lips.

"What happened?" Rampo asked, his voice small and his eyes full of something close to fear.

"I..." Dazai began, struggling to find the words, "I don't know." he admitted, "I found her but then... I don't know what happened. I don't know where she is."

The next few weeks, few months even, Y/n was their top case. The bulletin board full of all the information they had involving her disappearance stayed front and center in the main office. At first, they added to it nearly every day. As time went on, the new bits of information became fewer and further between.

Dazai had mourned people before. He'd lost people he cared about before, had experienced death, but never like this. There was always certainty in it. He knew they were gone for good because they were dead. There was no other thing they could be, no other place they could be, no other reason for their absence. The Agency had no idea if Y/n was alive or dead, if she was still captured or in hiding. There were no leads, no real ones anyways.

Dazai mourned her loss. It was palpable to them all, the way the atmosphere changed without her presence. It was a business again, they were just coworkers. Coworkers who were friends but coworkers none the less. She was what had made them a family.

The world grew dark for Dazai. His vision was clouded, fogged. Any information gained through his eyes disappeared the moment he tried to grasp at it. He began drinking heavily again, something he hadn't done since he and Y/n had first become friends.

In the beginning, the other members of the Agency had tried to comfort him, tried to do what they could to support him. Anytime someone brought up her name, Dazai became silent, he closed himself off. The bulletin board was moved into the conference room. 

Y/n's name became something forbidden when Dazai was in the room, seeing how he reacted. When he wasn't present, of course the others spoke of her. They would mention how much they missed her or talk about something they had encountered that reminded them of her, they consulted the board trying to further her case. No matter what any of them did, not even Rampo was able to catch a trace of her.

Eventually, the other members had to have an intervention with Dazai about his drinking. He'd been showing up to work hours late on a daily basis, hungover and reeking of alcohol. They threatened to fire him if he didn't get it under control.

Dazai remembered his words to her, what she had said to him. He had promised he was trying to be good for himself, he had sworn it to her. He remembered Oda. He threw himself into his work, asking to be put on case after case after case. The other members noticed his change of direction, his perceived lack of vice. They didn't have the heart to tell him no.

The bulletin board was moved into a storage closet. Y/n's name, mere mention of her being, became less and less frequent. They had tried not to speak about her around Dazai for his own sake, and to save themselves from his wrath. With his newfound obsession in his job, he seemed to always be around. Her name became a curse.

A year passed, then two. A new member joined, a bright sunny boy in a straw hat from a small town. He reminded them of her in some ways, though none of them ever openly admitted to it. Slowly, things became the new normal, grief became the new normal. It would catch them sometimes. They'd turn the wrong corner or hear the wrong voice, catch sight of some object in the window of a store, read some specific passage of a book, and find their eyes filled with tears. It happened to Dazai most of all, they all knew it. No one ever commented when he came into work with deep bags beneath his eyes. Kunikida would chastise him for being late on occasion, but there was always a sort of kindness behind it. Dazai would laugh it off, claiming to not have slept well, claiming to have watched a horror movie that scared him too badly, lying. No one called him out on it.

Things became the new normal. The bulletin board in the closet gathered dust. This was life, for a while anyways.