Bandages and Salt (PJO X BSD AU)

Chapter seventy-one

A/N: this chapter is going to seem kinda like an MHA Overhaul arc knock off, but it's a genuine theory of what else Fyodor could have done to try and get rid of abilities if he wasn't so obsessed with The Book.

Dazai POV

With all of the commotion of the night before, the next day at the Agency was relatively calm, more so than it usually was as the office felt the lack of its usual as everyone snuck glances as if I didn't know that they were doing so. For detectives, none of the eccentrics within the office were exactly subtle while doing anything. It seemed that being connected to a terrorist in such a way was a step too far even for them.

And the thing was, I didn't even blame them. I would be distrustful as well of anyone else with a history even shadowing my own. That alone was why I tolerated the assessing gazes, the ones that seemed to seep into the cracks in my mask as if trying to pry it open for all to see.

It felt as if I was just giving pieces of myself away when there was a knock at the Armed Detective Agency's door, something purposefully timid in a way that I knew that it wasn't at all. Timid knocks didn't have little patterns to them, and they certainly didn't have the sort of patterns that I knew by heart after months of them sounding on my cabin door in the dead of night when sleep eluded us both.

Atsushi pushed to his feet quickly and bounded over to the door, the boy being one of the more friendly faces for any prospective clients to meet, typically putting most at ease in a way that Kenji was unable to with his cluelessness to social skills.

Having Atsushi answer the door also allowed for Ranpo and I to watch it and study the clients coming in, something that the other man seemed very interested in doing just about now.

The figure stuck out like a sore thumb as he walked into the office, his skin too pale and clothes too dark and western to be anything but, as anxious fingers twisted a skull ring on his other hand, one that I knew turned into a sword when he willed it to.

I thought that maybe Nico would say something, interrupt the white haired detective's endless ramblings as the teen led him father into the office, but the little shit only smirked as he broke away from Atsushi and sauntered over to my side, sitting down on my desk, much to Kunikida's protest.

"I am going to have to ask you to stand and state your name and purpose in being here," the blond detective all but screamed as he kept a tight grip on his ideal book, clearly waiting for an attack to come in some form. The last person that had sought me out was still fresh in everyone's minds, enough so that Kenji was putting down his chips and Yosano was reaching slowly for a scalpel as if she thought that she would ever be able to land a hit on the kid.

"Osamu," the teen greeted, being one of the only people that I let call me by the name that the doctor had ruined when I was fifteen.

I noted with a hint of surprise as the other demijgod's words came out in a perfect - if a little accented - Japanese, something that the boy hadn't mentioned learning through the letters that we had been exchanging over the past two years. The letters that I had used to explain some of the more fragile things about my life after leaving camp the first time, one of those things being the name that I had taken on as if it were my own while I was here.

The teen's smirk deepened as he reached up to his throat and pointed at a bead that seemed to be made of jade instead of clay as all of the others usually were. There was small writing in gold on the stone as well, but it was too small to read. It didn't take a genius to understand that this was some sort of play on the device that Beckendorf had made for Chuuya back when we were sixteen. A gift from the Hecate cabin to the questors no doubt.

"Nico," I said back, looking up at the boy with a flare gaze and ignoring the stunned gazes of the gathered detectives as they watched the scene unfold, never having seen someone else use my first name before, other than the Port Mafia boss but that bastard hardly counted. There was a slight tension among, but that was to be expected after my last 'guest', "to what do I owe the pleasure, cousin dear?"