Chapter Text
“People are sinfully stupid,” Fyodor Dostoevsky said, the words dripping with disdain.
Above the alley, the words spilled faintly from the earpiece that had been knocked out of its owner’s ear. A hand with long, slender fingers picked it up.
“Even knowing they’re being manipulated, they just can’t stop killing each other.”
Several feet away, Dazai listened patiently and kept his eyes on Dostoevsky. Beside the body of the unconscious sniper, those slim fingers ejected the round in the sniper’s rifle and replaced it with something else.
“That is why I am pursuing the book. Someone must cleanse these sins.”
If either man noticed the sniper rifle protruding through a not-too-distant window, neither gave any sign that they had.
“Like this,” Dostoevsky said with an edge of sharp satisfaction.
The strong, slender finger on the trigger tightened, sending a projectile to pierce the flesh of its intended victim.
In the alleyway, Dazai blinked in surprise as Dostoevsky’s eyes rolled back and he fell over, the glint of a needle rolling away as the impact shook it free. A few seconds later, he got a text.
DON’T TOUCH HIM. I’LL BE RIGHT DOWN.
Less than a minute later, Kunikida jogged up to his partner with the sniper rifle in one hand. Behind him, a slightly-uneasy Atsushi followed with the handcuffed and unconscious sniper over his shoulders.
“Thank you for actually telling me where you’re going this time, and not making me play hide-and-seek with you,” the taller man snapped, not nearly as annoyed as he was pretending to be. “However, if you’d told me in advance that you expected there to be a sniper, I would have arranged adequate transport.” He gestured in Atsushi’s direction with the rifle. “The company sedan is not appropriate for transporting prisoners. I’m sending Atsushi to deliver that one personally, but we’ll need to discuss this one.” He nudged Dostoevsky with one foot.
Dazai smiled like the only thing between his ears was a gentle breeze. “I wasn’t sure there would be a sniper,” he protested lightly. “It’s just that if it were me, I’d have had one in place, so…”
Kneading his temples with one hand, Kunikida sighed and handed the rifle to Atsushi. “Go deliver our friend and his toy,” he told the teen, “and report to Ranpo after that – or shachou, if he’s awake.”
Atsushi nodded and leaped away on tiger legs. Once he was gone, Dazai’s smile faded.
“Tranquilizer dart,” he said, nodding in Fyodor’s direction. “Made with your ability?”
“I wasn’t going to shoot him with an actual bullet,” his partner said dryly. “But I do think he’s too dangerous to let live.”
That earned him a curious look. “That’s unusual for you, Kunikida-kun. What makes you say that?”
“He does the same things you would have done.” Almost defiantly, he crossed his arms and scowled. “I trust you – remember the Azure Apostle? I trust you. I don’t trust him.”
Dazai made a thoughtful sound. “Well, as it turns out, I agree with you. Something…hmm, permanent needs to be done about dear Fyodor, but he’ll wake up the instant I touch him. Hmmm….”
For a long minute, they stood in near-silence while Dazai muttered things like ‘knees will be harder’ and ‘restrain the arms’.
“Well, there’s no helping it,” he announced in a determined tone of voice that fell just short of being cheerful. “Kunikida-kun, I need his clothes off of him.”
The blond stared at him. “You need…”
“I need him naked,” Dazai said with that same grim enthusiasm, “and I can’t touch him, or he’ll wake up.”
Kunikida gave serious thought to either asking questions or arguing, but Dazai was wearing an incredibly aggravating expression that said we both know you’ll be stripping the Russian in the end, so you may as well give in now. With a defeated sigh, he turned to the unconscious man on the ground and began undoing the many buttons on his long-sleeved shirt.
With Dostoevsky laid out on his cape, shirt, boots, socks, and pants were all stripped off and set to the side in a neatly-folded pile while the Russian was left increasingly bare. Then Kunikida rolled him onto his stomach, grimaced, and removed the last piece of clothing while trying to not think about it.
“On his knees, please?” Dazai called from behind him. “Oh, and restrain his arms and legs – he’s liable to panic and try to fight as soon as I touch him.”
With another grimace and an aura of jagged irritation, Kunikida wrestled the unconscious Russian limply to his knees, kneeling on the other man’s legs and holding his torso mostly up by pulling his arms straight out behind him. It almost looked like Dostoevsky was in the middle of a dive.
“That’s perfect, Kunikida-kun!” Dazai crowed from where he was suddenly kneeling in front of Dostoevsky and his neck was…bare?
Kunikida frowned, mouth open to ask his partner what had happened to the bandages around his neck, why his shirt and vest were unbuttoned, and why he’d taken off the bolo tie he was so irrationally fond of, but the suicide-obsessed lunatic lunged and Dostoevsky started thrashing wildly. When Kunikida looked down, he realized that the dark hair he was seeing wasn’t Dostoevsky’s. That Dostoevsky’s head was actually nowhere to be seen, only Dazai’s. As that fact registered, Dazai lunged again and got the Russian’s shoulders…into his mouth? Kunikida scowled absently, trying to make sense of what was going on while keeping his hands like iron vices around Dostoevsky’s wrists.
As Dazai inched the thrashing Russian deeper and deeper with grotesque gulping sounds, Kunikida gave up trying to make sense of anything. His partner would not be able to give any answers while his mouth was full, and he did trust the infuriating ex-Mafia executive. Dazai clearly knew what he was doing, considering the extent of the preparations he’d had his partner perform, so the most efficient course of action would be to just provide whatever assistance he could and minimize how long he would have to wait before he could find out what the hell his partner was doing.
When Dazai had managed to get both arms to just past the elbows and half of Dostoevsky’s torso in, Kunikida shifted his grip from wrists, which could no longer move enough to be a hindrance, to ankles, which were still very much a threat. Dostoevsky had been trying to pull himself out of Dazai’s mouth – fruitlessly, of course, but it was still slowing Dazai’s efforts and delaying the answers Kunikida was impatiently waiting for. The blond man put a stop to that by pulling Dostoevsky’s legs straight and lifting the Russian off the ground by his ankles, denying him anything to brace himself against, which had the added benefit of calling gravity to Dazai’s aid.
The rest of Dostoevsky’s torso slid into Dazai’s mouth more swiftly, with Kunikida firmly looking somewhere in the distance where neither man’s flesh was directly in his line of sight. He lifted his arms and took a few steps forward to increase the angle he was holding Dostoevsky at, then a few more to invert his captive completely, slowly lowering his arms as the Russian slipped further and further in, sneaking glances as hips and thighs made their way past, and then he remembered Dazai muttering about knees.
Kunikida did some rapid anatomical calculations. Dostoevsky’s body hadn’t rotated any since this process had started, which meant that his knees were facing the wrong way to navigate smoothly down Dazai’s throat. They would need to be inside Dazai’s stomach before the legs could be bent and allow the rest of him to be forced inside. He turned his attention to his partner’s progress, immediately regretting this decision as he registered the disconcerting sight of Dazai’s mouth stretched around Dostoevsky’s thighs, throat struggling to pull his hips down into the stomach. There was a brief tug that Kunikida assumed was the throat’s victory over the hips, but then progress slowed just as the knees took their turn in Dazai’s mouth. Dostoevsky’s head and shoulders were resting on the ground, now, and gravity would be no more help. It was just Dazai, on his knees, face turned to the sky with a pair of shins, feet, and frantically wiggling toes sticking up from between his lips.
Gently, Kunikida tried to pull down on the shins, but the angle was awkward and inefficient. It would take a great deal more force to make Dostoevsky fold up inside Dazai’s stomach so that his legs had enough vertical space to account for his knees. He released one ankle and reached around to tap his partner between the eyes, waiting until Dazai had focused on him before saying, “I’m going to push,” in a firm, reassuring voice. Brown eyes went wide with surprise and Kunikida shifted his hands to the heels of Dostoevsky’s feet. “On the count of three,” he said, giving Dazai a moment to time his breaths and prepare himself. “One. Two. Three.”
Kunikida shoved down on Fyodor’s feet with all the strength and leverage he could manage. There was a sudden give – he assumed this was the knees leaving the restriction of Dazai’s throat, causing his partner’s head to jerk backwards sharply as the shins changed angle – and then his lips were closing over Dostoevsky’s toes and Kunikida could see the unnatural bulge move down to join the rest of Dostoevsky somewhere in the distressingly human-shaped boulder Dazai’s stomach had turned into. Eyelids slipped down over brown eyes and for a long moment, Dazai just breathed deeply, recovering from this unusual exertion with both hands on his unnaturally distended stomach. Restrained but frantic movement indicated that Dostoevsky was struggling to escape his prison and Dazai’s hands began moving, pressing and pulling, guiding him into a different position.
The end result was a broad, smooth, curved surface that must have been Dostoevsky’s back, topped as it was by a lump that Kunikida assumed was the Russian’s head. Dazai’s hands came to a stop on two protrusions just below his ribcage – shoulders, probably – and pressed down, holding his captive still. Kunikida considered trying to get answers out of his partner, but the man was entirely focused on what was going on inside his body. To judge by the grimacing he was doing, broken up by the occasional wince, he was clearly not enjoying it. Three minutes and forty-eight seconds later, more than two minutes after any visible movement had stopped, Dazai let out a sigh of relief and opened his eyes.
“Well, that’s the hard part out of the way,” he said brightly, eyes darting around to locate his partner, more than a little apprehensive as to what his reaction would be.
Kunikida was waiting nearby, the pile of Dostoevsky’s clothes and boots having been wrapped in his cape and tucked under one arm. He did not look convinced by his partner’s proclamation. “Can you even stand?” he asked dryly.
“Not easily,” Dazai answered without even a hint of shame.
His long-suffering partner sighed. “How can I provide the best leverage to get you on your feet?”
“If you could…from behind, pull…?” Vague gestures suggested hands on either side of a torso, and a lifting motion like hoisting a ballerina.
Kunikida nodded and set the pile of clothes down, then circled his partner to crouch behind him, hands firmly clamped under Dazai’s armpits. “When you’re ready,” he said softly.
The dark head in front of him nodded. “On three, then? One, two…”
Both men flexed and heaved, struggling to get the unwieldy bulk of Dazai’s body upright, with the end result being that he was practically leaning back against Kunikida, arms around his stomach as if hugging its occupant while the taller man’s arms encircled his chest securely.
“I didn’t know you cared, Kunikida-kun,” he teased.
A dry snort was his response. “Don’t make me drop you.”
Slowly, carefully, Kunikida guided his partner to the closest wall so that he could lean back and brace himself against it. “I’m going to fetch the car,” he said quietly. “I’ll be right back.”
Dazai nodded, both hands under his stomach for support, and watched the taller man scoop up the bundle of clothes before striding off.
“You’re such a pain, Fyodor-kun,” he chided his belly. “Even getting rid of you is a pain. I knew I was going to have to do it sooner or later, but now I’m going to be sidelined while trying to dismantle your war between the Armed Detective Agency and the Port Mafia, and I wish I’d chosen sooner rather than later.”
A quiet gurgle drifted up out of his guts, but there was no other response.
The agency’s sedan pulled to a stop at the mouth of the alley a minute later, Kunikida hurrying around to open the passenger-side door for his partner. The front seat had already been moved as far back as it would go, and the bundle of clothes was in the back seat. Dazai pushed himself off of the wall, but Kunikida was right there offering one arm to clutch for support while the other made sure Dazai did not fall over backwards. Step by step they crept to the car and then eased Dazai’s bulk into the front seat. Kunikida closed the door, circled around to the other side of the car, and settled into the driver’s seat again.
“I won’t bother trying to get the seatbelt buckled around that,” he said dryly. “Where are we taking you?”
Dazai’s expression brightened.
“Don’t even say something like ‘A nice river to throw me in’ or suggest a tall building to drop you from,” Kunikida snapped, leveling a sharp glare at his partner. “You owe me an explanation and a few answers, and I’m going to have to figure out what to tell everyone to explain your absence. You can pretend to be an oblivious idiot later.”
Dazai pouted at the irritated blond, then dropped the expression to stare thoughtfully at the weighty mass of his gut. “You’re right,” he said quietly, hands drifting over his distended belly as if smoothing wrinkles out of it. “This would have gone a lot worse if you hadn’t been there. I have a Western-style bed in my apartment; I can deal with this-” he slapped the human-shaped lump in his stomach with one hand – “there, and you can tell everyone that I twisted my ankle badly enough that I can’t stand without help.”
Kunikida nodded and pulled out into traffic. “That would keep you out of action without being something a doctor would be able to help with.” He stole a glance at his quiet partner without taking his eyes off the road. “Additionally, I will be close enough to provide whatever assistance you may need at odd hours,” he said evenly, his tone conveying that Dazai’s unspoken apology had been accepted.
“Kunikida-kun is the best,” Dazai said, but it was quietly sincere instead of cheerfully oblivious.
Meaning, Kunikida thought with an internal sigh, that Dazai was going to make a request he would otherwise refuse.
Neither of them said anything else until they’d reached the company dorm, and then it was only brief comments relating to wrestling Dazai’s bulk into his apartment and to his bed, which he collapsed onto with a groaning sigh before laboriously scooting back until he could use the wall to prop himself up in a sitting position.
“Fyodor Dostoevsky wanted war between the agency and the Port Mafia.” Dazai blindly searched his pockets before pulling out his phone and starting to type on it. “He wants us to destroy each other, so he had shachou and Mori infected with an ability virus that will kill them both in forty-eight hours unless one of them dies first, which will cure the other one. He had a sniper waiting for me,” he continued absently, “same as I would have done. I wouldn’t trust us to not go looking for the ability user instead of just obediently trying to kill Mori, and I would have falsified about six layers of records and made sure that each dead end was also a trap. But-” Dazai paused to give his awkwardly-hovering partner an intense look. “He wasn’t expecting you. And you,” he said with just a hint of an insincere pout, “went behind my back to get Katai to look into whoever hacked the remote for the Moby Dick – which was Dostoevsky, as it turns out. So that’s what you’re going to follow up on,” he said, once more typing rapidly on his phone, his hands resting on his belly and using Dostoevsky’s unseen head as a table. “Dear Fyodor will have his plague rat in a giant trap of a secure compound, but he’ll be somewhere else.”
Dazai stopped moving as what he’d just said sank in, the reality of the situation interrupting his train of thought and leaving him blinking and staring at nothing.
“He would have been somewhere else,” Kunikida corrected, not showing even a hint of how amused he was by this. “And thus, it doesn’t matter that he’s a in a different ‘somewhere else’ because he wasn’t going to have been there in the first place. So. We find the compound, we find the ability user, we avoid war with the Port Mafia.”
“Exactly.” Unfazed by his brief derailing, Dazai resumed typing what had to be either an entire novel, or a chain of texts. “We might even luck out because he won’t be around to counter our actions; we’ll only be dealing with whatever he set up in advance. But, Dostoevsky will have sent a letter to the Port Mafia explaining what’s going on, and if there’s one thing I can say for certain about the other executives, it’s that none of them want Mori’s job. So they’re going to be ready to obliterate whatever building shachou is in, and they’re not going to want to sit on the sidelines while we track down the source of the virus. But that’s fine, because they have the manpower we don’t. I’m texting Chuuya the plan. I want Akutagawa and Atsushi to work as a team. Have them go into the compound, find the plague rat, and take out any other ability users Dostoevsky has stashed there. If either of them give you any resistance, tell them that I know they can do it, and I’ll be proud of them if they work together. They’re not going to catch the plague rat – Dostoevsky will have prepared an escape route for him – but they will flush him out and I’m texting Ango what’s going on so that we can get the department’s resources to help us, because no one wants Dostoevsky’s war. There,” he said, putting his phone down just as his stomach made a rather alarming noise somewhere between a gurgle and a growl.
Kunikida, who had been taking notes in his notebook, gave him an expectantly skeptical look.
“I know I don’t need to tell you to hurry,” Dazai said, looking rather pained, “but please hurry.”
“Do you need anything before I go?” his partner asked, briskly putting notebook and pen away.
“There’s some water bottles in the fridge…”
Kunikida opened the fridge, took two bottles out of the door, and set them on the table beside the bed with a tight-lipped look of withholding judgmental comments. Then he made the mistake of glancing at his partner and sighed at being hit with the expression of hurt vulnerability that – under most circumstances – was patently false. With it being accompanied by uncomfortable gurgling noises, however, it could actually have been genuine.
“I’m not upset at you,” he snapped, directing his scowl away from Dazai. “I’m just judging your diet after seeing that your refrigerator only contains three things: bottles of water, bottles of beer, and leftovers that should ideally be disposed of with hazmat suits.”
Dazai gave him a sheepish smile. “At least my diet isn’t going to be a concern for the next few days?”
The scowl intensified. “No. The only reason your diet is not my most pressing concern at the moment is that the situation with the virus ability is time-sensitive. Feel free to get started on that explanation while I’m out,” he spat, stalking towards the door. “I’ll be back when it’s over.”
The door slammed shut so hard that it rattled in its frame. Just in time – as if on queue, another alarming gurgle echoed up through his guts. The first phase of digestion had begun, his stomach starting to tighten relentlessly around its occupant. Dazai carefully tipped himself over so that he was laying on his side, arms around his distended belly as if he could keep it from trying so hard to squeeze Dostoevsky into paste. It wouldn’t save him from the wracking pain, of course, but it felt a tiny bit less futile than just laying there.
Despite the world of suffering he was about to be plunged into, Dazai smiled. His partner wouldn’t be so upset if he didn’t care, and right now, he’d take every scrap of comfort he could find.