Chapter Text
Entry no. 1
To living memory, the monster sprung up from the streets.
hidden by nothing, disguised in leather
crafted by a mother who shouldn’t have birthed it
A butterfly floats by
Children are learned that curiosity kills the cat
That would have been merciful,
compared to what lied in wait for me.
It is too late now.
—
They called him a parasite. A leech on orphanage resources. He ate and drank and subsumed the place of other kids dying because he had to be fed. He learned his name was Fyodor —not parasite or leech or some other junk— when he was… how old?
He didn’t know that either. They didn’t exactly stock the cell he’d spent most of his life confined to with a calendar, but he digressed. At least as of today, he knew he was eighteen.
He knew because they said he was being kicked out because of it. Finally, they said, they were legal obligation to keep him alive. They were kicking him from the nest and all they taught him how to do was starve.
Well, and read. At least he could give him credit for that. By some miracle of god and will, he was literate.
He liked to think he’d read enough to understand what the outside world was like, but then he stepped out and he saw the sunset and realized he did not truly know anything.
He’d seen the sun before, yes. And he’d seen the color of sunset through the windows at the top of his cell. But he’d never seen the two in conjunction; the brightness of the star bleeding into dawn, scattering across the waters of the channel below him.
And he stared and stared at it until sunspots took over half his vision, and irritated tears pooled in his eyes.
Then he was rammed through the back with a knife beneath the ribs.
A white flash of pain blinded him and he fell forward against the ground. Blood spilled into his clothes, splashed over his back. He palmed for the wound and felt it slide between his fingers.
Hands burrowed into his hair and cracked his head against the pavement before they invaded his pockets. He had nothing. He didn’t get why they expected to, either.
No, really, what about the pathetic orphan look and standard issue uniform screamed that he had anything in him but his life? No, really, why?
Why him?
Through one half-lidded eye, he saw the crash of a boot. A bystander. What words did he know?
“Hospital.” His mouth was so dry. “Please.”
He wanted to finishing watching the dawn.
—
He woke up.
So it was a nightmare. That was… fortunate?
He rubbed his head, felt for his hair. The only issue was that when he looked down he found he was no longer in the same clothes.
His first thought was that perhaps the mugging did happen, and the disgruntled robber took his clothes for a lack of his cash. Then someone gave him back new clothes.
That idea was violating, and quickly proven wrong, however, by the fact that Fyodor’s body was clearly non-stabbed.
So if he dreamt up the mugging, where did the new clothes come from?
Now freshly contemplating if malnourishment had turned him into an amnesiac, Fyodor pushed himself upright and processed that there was grass beneath his fingers, and the sound of running water was coming from the water channel in front of him.
So, somehow, he’d fallen asleep, had a nightmare about being violently murdered, and woken up at the bottom of a water channel he’d been previously admiring from a nearby bridge.
Wasn’t this condition in a book somewhere? Some… dissociative amnesia? Maybe it was closer to delusions. Something like the narrators in E. A. Poe’s books—like the one from The Tell Tale Heart. No, no scratch that. How could a crazy person diagnose themselves?
The sun was still setting, at least. God was good for that. He would get to finish watching.
“What’re you looking at?”
Fyodor’s head swiveled.
Behind him, a young man was skipping down the canal.
Fyodor forced himself to his feet and backed away.
The man wasn’t dressed like anything Fyodor had ever seen before, not on the prospective adopters that occasionally passed through the building nor on the few citizens he passed by on the way. His brown vest was properly fitted and matched his hat but that coat swallowed his shoulders whole and draped down like a funeral shroud (and yes, he’s seen them).
“Hello? Anyone in there?”
Ah, right, responding.
“The sunset. That’s all.”
“Never seen a sunset before?”
The man tilted his head and Fyodor cursed his thoughtless honesty.
“I was feeling,” dictionary, help him, “sentimental.”
“Huh. What a coincidence. Me too.”
Did he salvage it?
Fyodor got another proper look at the man and took note of his shut eyes, uneven hair and that… grey-furred creature pacing around his legs.
What was that?
It couldn’t be a cat, or a dog —he’d seen them on covers before— so… a rodent? But rodents didn’t have tails like that, or that face coloring
“I was thinking about dumping something in that river, actually.”
What.
“What?”
“You know, like a heavy metal or something subtle like that? Something that doesn’t mess you up till a little later? But your lack of enthusiasm is really making me reconsider.”
The man’s lips purse in an expression Fyodor could only presume was called a ‘pout’. Then he crossed his arms and kept talking.
“Maybe it is too boring. I gotta be more dramatic. Hey, whaddya say to lighting it on fire? Like with oil or something. And then I’d put something like beryllium in the smoke —now that’s dramatic.”
Fyodor didn’t think it worth the effort to hide his confusion. “I’m…. sorry?”
“What, you never wanted to kill a bunch of people before?”
Oh what a loaded question.
Fyodor opened his mouth, but found no answer. Not an acceptable one. Because his answer was yes. Yes, he wanted to kill, or at least he thought he did. Killing was to remove something, no? Remove life from a body.
Fyodor has prayed night and day for life to be removed from the Director’s body.
“I…” this man had been honest about his violence, so maybe it wasn’t so bad as the books led him to believe. What would he know? “I have. One person.”
The man grinned, and somehow, Fyodor felt victorious. “That’s enough for me! I’m Ranpo, what about you?”
“Fyodor Dostoevsky,” he offered before he could think. But the man held his hand out to shake and swept up by the interaction’s flow Fyodor took it.
His hand was warm. Firm. Harmless.
Then from the other side of the river, some prick hollered, “So this is where you fucked off too after shirking work, huh, Ranpo?!”
There always had to be someone to ruin the peace, huh.
Wait, peace?
Fyodor yanked his hand out of Ranpo’s before he could become entranced any further by… whatever he was doing, and put a healthy distance of several meters between them.
A shorter figure ran down the other side of the canal and skidded at the bottom so sharply it dug up dirt beneath his boots. And his hair—now that was a color—was a bright, orange mess curling about his head and a sharp contrast to the dark, black cut of his jacket.
“Hey wait, is this— oh what the hell. You’re indoctrinating kids into your stupid terrorist dreams now?!”
A feeling of betrayal filled his stomach in place of food. So violence was a bad thing. He shouldn’t have openly agreed with the man. Curse his miscalculation.
“I never agreed to anything,” he cut in sharply, raising his voice just loud enough to carry over the canal.
The man across the water either didn’t care to listen or was much too absorbed in harassing Ranpo to honor him with a response. What he apparently found more pressing was to ramble in Ranpo’s direction. “Quit preaching murder! You’re gonna get the national defense on our asses one of these days!”
“Mm? Wasting their time and resources sounds pretty in line with what I want.”
Then there was screeching and half of it was obscenities and it got so grating Fyodor eventually tuned him out.
Ranpo met his drifting gaze, apparently as uninterested in the other man as Fyodor was, and smiled.
“Say, what do you think of grabbing a bite to eat with me? I really want a co-conspirator in terrorism right now. Chuuya never entertains my chemical warfare ideas like you do.”
Well, if it was for food, Fyodor could figure out how to lie out of treason accusations later.
“I’ll take you up on the meal.”
“Great! Then, follow after me!”
—
“So anyway, Chuuya, I was thinking, that murder, right?” Ranpo had paused just about every other word in order to shovel food into his mouth. “Super freaky. I mean, did you see the mannequin-esque face left behind after it?”
“Yes, I did see because we both passed it, and we were supposed to investigate it instead of,” the red haired man waved at Fyodor’s general existence, “feeding strays.”
That was rude, but oh well. He was eating free, and eating well. Ranpo had bought him an omelette over rice, mashed potatoes, and some sort of fruit bowl. Fyodor himself was trying to pick out additional things from the communal side dishes that wouldn’t make his chronically-underworked stomach forfeit all function.
“A murder?” He asked absentmindedly. He shoved a bite of omelette in his mouth right afterwards and chewed as slowly as he could manage.
Somehow, his stomach didn’t reject it like he expected.
Nakahara—the surname he’d learned during the walk—heaved a sigh and set down his chopsticks. “Yes, a murder. If I had to guess, it was probably a robbery. It happened on the sidewalk near the water channel Ranpo found you at.”
Sounded a lot like his nightmare. Those things could be based on reality. Perhaps he was a witness to the incident, and that nightmare was a product of that.
“The weird part was the way the corpse looked after,” Nakahara continued. “Like it was this… paper mache thing someone taped together. Its skin was mummified, its eyes were blank—I’ve never seen a death like that. It’s not natural.”
Now that just made Fyodor curious.
“Can I see it?”
Nakahara stared.
Ranpo stared.
“…please excuse me.”
Fyodor ducked his head and decided it was better to eat in silence.
“Is there a reason for your interest?” Nakahara’s voice came across as a suspicion-soaked drawl. Again, Fyodor cursed his social ineptitude.
He considered explaining himself, but… no, no, he didn’t need the world knowing he was a problem orphan that needed to spend his days under the highest scrutiny allotted by man. Otherwise, they might treat him the same.
“I might’ve witnessed it in passing,”
That got Nakahara’s attention—and on his story, instead of him. Victory? “Go on.”
“My memory is blurred with a nightmare of it, but to my recollection, it involved a stabbing. Was this the case?”
A nod answered him. Ranpo’s eyes wandered to him as well.
It probably wasn’t right to use a man’s murder to his own benefit like this, but, ah, oh well? He’d have regretted it more if the world had given him a reason to care.
But it hadn’t. Death felt like nothing to him. He’d been dying himself for eighteen years.
“I didn’t get a look at the killer,” he continued, and searched that grisly half-nightmare half-memory for something that might get them to buy him another meal, “but following the stabbing, the victim’s head was hit into the ground, presumably to immobilize them.”
He looked at Nakahara again, hoping for confirmation, but it seemed he was waiting for the full story now.
“After that, he was robbed, and the killer fled from the scene.” He considered tacking on the detail that the victim had nothing on them, but that might have only been true for his nightmare.
Nakahara’s nod only confirmed the accuracy of his dream, and with it the theory Fyodor kept that he had been a witness to it, and the nightmare was how his mind processed it. “That lines up. But, if you saw all that, why not call the ambulance?”
An ambulance was a hospital truck, right? In the dream Fyodor had begged for a hospital, but clearly it hadn’t been heard. “I don’t have a phone myself, you understand. So, I tried to ask others to, but I suppose no one did.”
Nakahara’s expression dimmed. His lips twisted like he was about to curse, but Ranpo spoke first, “they thought he was homeless.” Though a deduction, he phrased it with the confidence of an assertion. “No one ever does help them.”
As the homeless person sitting right next to them, Fyodor wasn’t quite sure how to feel about that.
The atmosphere was awkward now. Fyodor knew this only by the fact that the talkative Nakahara had been stifled into silence and was now shoving his mouth with food instead.
Well, that was fine. Less conversations, less mental gymnastics for Fyodor.
He considered asking for seconds at the end (who knew when his next meal would be, after all), but when he looked up to put forward his request, Ranpo was staring right back.
“How about we revisit the victim to see if you can recognize him? You said you wanted to, right?”
He blinked. “I suppose I did.”
Damn him and his mouth. He should’ve been eating instead of speaking.
“I’ll arrange for a place for you to stay if you do! Compensation for cooperating with the investigation.”
Right, these two were police officers of some sorts, right? That was what he gathered from their mentions of investigations and Nakahara’s firearms. Police were police vests, right? Was Ranpo’s armored too?
“Of course. You two are police officers, right?”
“Detectives,” Nakahara cut in, then immediately began to defend himself from accusations Fyodor was not lobbying, “and before you start judging, know that it’s more than just finding lost cats, alright? We investigate a very specific type of crime. The unusual sort. Like the one you witnessed.”
“I understand. As long as you are licensed law enforcement, I’ll cooperate.”
That was a joke, but Nakahara plucked his wallet from his pocket anyway and showed him his ID.
Nakahara Chuuya. Twenty-two years old. A detective at the Armed Detective Agency. —and that was all he got to read before the detective snapped his badge away.
“And that wasteful brat next to you is my partner: Ranpo.”
So I’ve heard. What he had yet to hear was the other half of the name. “Right.”
“Anyhow, Chuuya, I’m gonna take Fyodor, and while I do that, you’re going to go fetch the President for me.”
“The president?!” Nakahara really did show everything he felt on his face. It was sort of annoying. “What‘s so important about this case you need him for it?”
“Bleh. Can’t you just trust me on this?” Ranpo pouted. And slipped a piece of bread to his pet beneath the table. “Has my direction ever led you astray?”
“No, but it’s left me blindsided. I’d kind of like for you to explain these things to me.”
Ranpo’s smile did not meet his shut eyes. “Afterwards!”
Nakahara slumped.
“Anyway, Fyodor, come with me?”
He pushed himself to his feet, and prayed this was part of God’s plan.
—
He had his ear open to nearby conversation during the walk, and tried to commit as much of it to memory as he could. The more examples of conversation he had in the back of his mind, the better, right?
And when he got bored of that, he watched the animal that followed Ranpo.
They weren’t heading to the place Fyodor remembered the stabbing to be, however. When he asked about that, Ranpo simply told him that they’d moved the corpse elsewhere.
“Do you read?” Ranpo had asked along the way.
“Often.”
“Ever read Poe’s works?”
He did. Extensively. He poured over the Cask of Amontillado like it was sacred. Its raw insanity spoke to him, and depending on the day he either saw himself or the orphanage director as the one sealing the other into the wall. But there was no need to elaborate that much, so he merely replied with a ‘yes’ and a soft utterance of interest more personal, about his liking for the poet’s horror stories.
“That’s a good one,” Ranpo agreed. “I’ll lend you some of my copies of his other works.”
They were entertaining ideas of future correspondence now? “I’d like that. You’re a fan too?”
“Yep!” This, the detective was cheerful about, at least in his voice. His expression was turned from him. “I always liked The Tell Tale Heart, but The Raven–ah, well that’s one I’ve been rereading a lot more these days.”
Fyodor had read all of these, and years ago too. “What about his newer ones?”
“He’s dead.”
“Oh.”
Ranpo stopped talking after that. But unlike before at the restaurant, this was one Fyodor felt compelled to break with… something. He couldn’t figure out what. Maybe an apology for his ignorance? But Ranpo didn’t seem mad, least of all violent, so there was no need for that.
The sounds of civilization had disappeared a long time ago, and it made Fyodor wish he’d brought something to defend himself with. He should’ve taken a knife from the restaurant, or even a fork. Anything would’ve done as long as it wasn’t his bare hands.
Ranpo led him under the garage door of a storage building, and asked, “do you recognize him?”
Fyodor followed Ranpo’s gesture to the body lying face-up on a white sheet of plastic. A body with dark, purple-tinted hair, cropped just below the chin.
“That…”
The eyes were all sclera and no iris or pupil, like it had been drained of its very soul. And though he couldn’t see the wound that was likely on its back, he could see the bloodstains creeping around the side of its clothes—uniform clothes—, and blood on the hand where the victim—where Fyodor—had palmed the wound.
What?
“It looks like you, doesn’t it?”
Fyodor stared. “But I’m alive.”
“You are. But isn’t the resemblance uncanny?”
“No, that facial structure is.. wrong.”
Ranpo tilted his head. “Well, that’s true. It’s not yours, but those clothes are, aren’t they?”
“They… are. Were.”
Fyodor examined himself again. He was dressed in jeans, a loose t-shirt, and a plain grey…
He felt for the fabric bunched behind his neck.
…hoodie? Was that the word? Either way, they weren’t the clothes he was supposed to have. “I didn’t steal these, though, and I certainly didn’t redress a dead body afterwards. I believe it’s very obvious that that victim bled in his.”
“Okay, well I’m not stupid. I know that,” Ranpo quipped. “This is definitely the body that died. But the question you should be answering is why the murder weapon is in your pocket.”
Illogically, Fyodor had been induced to shove his hand into his pants pocket (and tried not to wither) where he found his fingers curling around something metallic.
“Looks like you found it.”
He checked his other pocket and withdrew from the other a folded-shut switchblade.
Think of something. “I don’t know how that got there.”
Think of something better.
“I don’t even remember these clothes.”
It was hard to make something sensible about something that made no sense at all. In the other pocket there had been a wallet, with an ID that wasn’t his own.
“I’m not a murderer.”
He admitted, in the back of his mind he was willing to steal. He was willing to lie and con once he figured out how. But murder—
“Relax,” Ranpo cut in. When Fyodor looked up from the murder weapon, the detective was holding his hand up in a placating gesture. “I know what’s going on.”
Right now, the only thing Fyodor thought was plausible to believe was a severe case of delusions.
“Say, Fyodor, do you believe in supernatural abilities?“
Nevermind. Ranpo was the delusional one.
“Don’t look at me like that. Think about it. Is what happened to you possible without some supernatural happening?”
Fyodor felt the wind on his neck, on the exposed parts of flesh, and felt the phantom sting of the stab wound. “You don’t know what happened to me.”
“But I do.” Ranpo gestured at him and Fyodor flinched back. “You avoided eating anything heavy or greasy—stuff that would make you sick, and you seemed surprised that you could eat so much without getting nauseous. You’re used to starving.”
He tipped his chin at the corpse, “that lines up with the fact that those were once your clothes. Starving orphans are a pretty common trope these days—and don’t look at me like that. I was once a starving orphan too.”
He wagged his finger side to side, and Fyodor spent a good while trying to puzzle out what that gesture meant before Ranpo bluntly clarified, “see my point? Isolated orphan. Unused to common social gestures.”
Ranpo gathered his strange animal up into his arms as Fyodor trembled beneath the feeling of being split open and picked apart. “You were that guy about an hour ago. You were the guy that got stabbed.”
“I—“
“You have memory of it.”
Ranpo phrased everything like an assertion. No ‘I think’s or ‘I believe’s and Fyodor would’ve thought it grating to listen to if they weren’t so surgically accurate. “So what? I could’ve just been a witness.”
“Then why did you wake up in your killer’s body?”
What?
He looked himself over again. Indeed, he’d woken up in someone else’s —his killer’s— clothes. The belongings on his person were proof of that. But his hair still ended at the same length it always did, and when Fyodor looked in the restaurant’s bathroom mirror, his eyes were still purple.
“You preserve your appearance but not your body’s state of health when you subsume your killer’s body.” Subsume, infect, parasite. They say he killed a child. “When you’re killed again, the body’s original appearance starts to return.”
Nonsense. But Fyodor examined his hands, and found them devoid of burn scars.
“It’s happened before. It’s why the orphanage thought they couldn’t risk letting you out into the world and letting word get out that there was a kid who was effectively immortal. I’m willing to bet someone even passed through there, looking for you. Who knows what would happen to you then?”
Ranpo’s words practically soared over his head, but in Fyodor’s defense what were you supposed to think when some random man comes and tells you you can dodge death. “I… I’ve given you what I know, can we skip to the part where you find me a place to stay? Please?”
The detective’s expression was hard to place. “Okay. Sure, just come here for a second.”
He gripped the knife, and felt with his fingers for what he thought might be the button to release the blade (just in case, you can never be too safe). And then he took a steady step forward, and another.
Ranpo settled his hands on Fyodor’s shoulders. “Close your eyes.”
A thundering, explosive bang sounded out from his right, he was spun by his shoulders on his heel, and then his head burst white.
–
He woke up with a gun in his hands.
A gun in his hands, aimed through the window of the very building he’d just been in. His feet were planted on the balcony of a neighboring facility, and though the clothes he was dressed in were plain, he could feel the weight of a receiver in his pocket.
It was buzzing. Someone was trying to ‘call’ this body.
“Well?” Ranpo’s voice came hollering from below, “I was right wasn’t I?”
His hands were shaking. The buzzing, and his head was buzzing. Smoke choked his sense of smell and powdered his lungs and there was blood through the window and a body and–
[ “Have you got the target–” ]
He yanked the plastic noise-making pieces out of his ears.
He was shot. No, no he wasn’t. He did the shooting? He was shot and yet he did the shooting; the gun was in his hands to prove it.
“Fyodor?”
He swung the rifle towards the detective, who stood before the full moon.
“It’s me, kid.”
He wasn’t a kid. He never was. A ‘kid’ was something to love and protect and Fyodor hadn’t been that even at birth.
But all of that merely came out as a weak, pathetic, “no.”
Ranpo frowned, and Fyodor’s fingers strangled the firearm like it would protect him from pain. Protect him from the man who just killed him.
“I am me, and you’re a kid, semi-immortal or not.”
There’s a pool of revulsion in his stomach. Immortality was an affront to God. Adults called his existence a blasphemy and he didn’t like to believe it and yet, here lies the proof–death is a gift from God, and to him it has been denied. “No. Please.”
“Emphasis on semi. If nature kills you, you still die.”
But he should’ve been dead twice now. Speaking of– “you threw me in front of that bullet.”
For whatever childish reason, he was searching Ranpo’s face for guilt, and praying on a denial, of which he had neither to offer. “I did.”
Ranpo’s eyes had opened into a stunningly green.
“He was trying to shoot me, and I used you as a meatshield to prove my point ‘cause I knew you wouldn’t die. And if the wrong people find out about what you can do, they’re gonna do the exact same thing.”
Ah… so he was lesser evil. That made sense; good was hard to find. He could understand that, but,
Somehow, that hurt.
A lot, actually.
Maybe dying had just made him sentimental.
“Look, I’m not the one who gave that ability to you. What I am proposing is that I have the means to protect you from people who would treat you way worse than me.”
And what guarantee had he of that? His rifle was pointed towards Ranpo’s head and in the back of his mind he recalled novels and thought, all one has to do is pull the trigger, right? Ranpo’s hands were useless at his sides, and that vest was too thin to be armored. His feet were planted at the top of the staircase and if he shot–
“If you’re going to shoot me, can I take my coat off first?”
Fyodor blinked.
Shoot? No, no he wasn’t a murderer. He wasn’t going to shoot–not even someone who had shot him. He wasn’t. He,
Ranpo had already begun to strip off his coat.
He must not have wanted to soil the item in his death.
Ranpo had been a strange man from the start; praising death but practicing law, speaking of chemical warfare while investigating death. He was enough to have approached him by the riverbank and puzzled out everything about Fyodor’s situation from their first meeting. Like he knew everything, saw everything. And he’d thrown Fyodor straight into the path of a bullet just to save himself.
Fyodor wanted to compare him to the devil.
But Ranpo was folding up the coat like it was all he had. He smiled at it like an old friend. He set it down and brushed off the dust like it was sacred, and then he scooped up his animal and kissed it on its forehead before he put it up on the windowsill and whispered, “it’s okay, Karl. It’s okay.”
Could the devil look as human as Ranpo did when he turned back around, his eyes soft and soulless. They were a vibrant green, and they’d been dead in his skull for years.
His voice asked, placidly, “Do you want to shoot me?”
The firearm clattered to the floor.
Wind brushed Ranpo’s hair aside and the boyish detective was chuckling now. A soft, vulnerable noise that carried along the wind well, like it was floating. “So that’s a no?”
“I don’t want to be a murderer. It’s inconvenient. Legally.”
Ranpo hummed, and then he closed off his vulnerability with the shut of his eyes. “Alright, well, that’s good, because I was going to ask you to be a detective.”
“At your agency?”
The young grin from their first meeting returned to his face to obscure any sentimentality he previously exposed and cheered, “Mhm! It’s an agency with other ability-using people just like you! You’ll fit right in. You don’t have to trust me, but you trust Nakahara, right?”
Did he? Well, to some extent. It was more like he trusted Nakahara’s openness. He brandished his heart on his sleeve and Fyodor didn’t see any malice in him last they spoke.
“There’s way worse groups out there. I might throw you in front of a bullet or two but other people would do that multiple times a day. You can’t survive out here on your own–I think today proved that.”
Were the institutions in this city really that unsavory? His gaze fell to the gun, which effectively gave proof that it was.
“You’re insane.”
Ranpo smiled, “and the intervals of my sanity are horrible.”
Was that some sort of quote? Fyodor glanced to the right at the sound of distant footsteps and found the blaze of Nakahara’s hair, trailed by a swordsman, a little girl, and someone with their eyes screwed shut. “Those are…”
“Your future coworkers!”
He didn’t have anywhere else to go, did he? And Ranpo spoke like it was set in stone, because he knew it was, like he knew everything he asserted in their conversations together.
“Do you have a place for me to stay?” He wound up asking, to which Ranpo beamed and Fyodor loathed himself for taking pride in causing that.
“You bet I do! I promised. Come with me! And just so you know, Jouno can hear you.”
Who?