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Oda hadn’t been expecting anyone.
It wasn’t late enough for the neighborhood to be asleep, but it was late enough that the sounds outside his apartment had thinned to something hollow—distant traffic, a boat blaring its horn, the scrape of someone’s shoes on pavement that never quite came close. He was at the small table by the window, dismantling a cheap pen that had stopped writing, when the knock came. A flat, unadorned knock, like someone following instructions they didn’t care about.
Oda didn’t move right away.
He wasn’t weighing whether to answer. That wasn’t what gave him pause. What gave him pause was the mild, unfamiliar dissonance of it—someone at his door, now, unannounced.
His life didn’t usually involve surprises. Even Bar Lupin ran on a kind of schedule, the same faces appearing at roughly the same hours, the same silences filling the same gaps. People like him learned quickly which routines kept the noise down.
He set the pen pieces aside and stood. The floor creaked under his weight as he crossed the room, hand already reaching for the door before he’d fully registered the shape of the moment. When he opened it, he understood why his body had hesitated.
Dazai stood on the stoop like he had misplaced himself. He wasn’t leaning on the railing, though he probably should have been. One foot was set slightly wrong, as if he had stopped halfway through a step and forgotten what came next. His coat hung open despite the chill, one sleeve darkened at the cuff. There was blood on his knuckles—old enough to be tacky, not fresh enough to drip. His face was slack in a way that didn’t belong to sleep or exhaustion, eyes open but unfocused, like the room behind Oda was more interesting than Oda himself.
For a moment, neither of them spoke.
Oda was aware, dimly, of how long it had been since he’d last seen Dazai outside of Bar Lupin. Months, at least. He remembered the first time they had met vividly—blood, a body or a corpse on his doorstep that had no business still breathing. This was different. Worse, in a quieter way Oda couldn’t yet name.
“Odasaku,” Dazai said finally. The name landed oddly, stripped of its usual inflection. No brightness, no mischief.
Oda didn’t ask what happened. He didn’t ask why Dazai was here. Those questions belonged to a different kind of person.
“You’re hurt,” he said instead, because it was true and because it didn’t demand an answer Dazai couldn’t give.
Dazai looked down at himself, as if noticing his own body for the first time. His gaze lingered on the blood, then drifted away. “Mm,” he said. “Seems like it.”
Another pause settled between them. The outdoors felt narrower now, the air stale. Oda became aware of the faint chemical smell clinging to Dazai’s clothes—something medicinal, sweet at the back of the throat. Opioids, if he had to guess. Enough to dull pain without quite granting mercy.
Dazai shifted his weight. The movement was clumsy, uncoordinated, and Oda saw the hitch then—the subtle refusal of one leg to bear him fully.
“You can come in,” Oda said.
Dazai hesitated. He stared at the floor between them, lips parting as if to speak, but whatever thought surfaced didn’t make it all the way out. His shoulders drew in slightly, a protective hunch that didn’t match the childish bravado Oda was used to seeing.
“…Is that okay?” Dazai asked, eventually.
The question surprised Oda more than the blood.
“Yes,” he said. “It’s okay.”
Still, Dazai hesitated. Oda waited.
He understood, suddenly, that this wasn’t a threshold Dazai crossed lightly. Whatever had brought him here had scraped him down to something bare, something unsure. The bravest thing Dazai had done all night might have been knocking.
When he finally stepped forward, it was careful, as if he expected the floor to give way. He limped just enough for Oda to register it clearly this time, a brief tightening around his eye betraying pain he refused to acknowledge. Oda stepped back to give him space, and Dazai passed him without looking up. He didn’t take his coat off. Didn’t sit. He just stood there, just inside the door, like someone waiting to be told where they were allowed to exist. His hands hung uselessly at his sides, fingers stained, trembling faintly.
Oda closed the door behind him. The sound was soft, but it seemed to seal something shut all the same. “You can sit,” Oda said, nodding toward the low table, the couch. “Or—” He paused, recalibrating. “Wherever you want.”
Dazai glanced at the table, then at the wall, then at the narrow strip of floor near the window. None of them seemed right. He swallowed. “I’ll just… stand,” he said.
Oda didn’t correct him. He moved to the sink instead, washed his hands to give himself a moment to think, dried them slowly. He was conscious of Dazai tracking him with his eyes—hazily, but enough to know where he was. A wary animal’s awareness.
When Oda turned back, he held a clean cloth and a small first aid kit he’d procured from under the sink. Dazai stiffened immediately.
“I can help with that,” Oda said as he stopped several steps away, lifting the cloth slightly. “Or I can leave it.”
Dazai’s gaze flicked to the cloth, then away again. His jaw tightened. “…Leave it,” he said.
“All right.”
Oda set the kit down on the table, in plain view, and took a seat on the floor instead—close enough to be present, far enough not to crowd. He leaned back, legs stretched out, posture loose and unthreatening. They stayed like that. The room filled with the quiet sounds of breathing, uneven on one side, steady on the other. Dazai swayed faintly where he stood, eyes half-lidded now, exhaustion beginning to outweigh whatever had carried him here. Oda didn’t reach for him.
Dazai lasted longer than Oda expected. He stayed standing long past the point where the effort stopped being subtle. At first it was just the way his weight kept shifting, heel lifting and settling again like a nervous habit. Then it became the slight bend in his knees, the way his shoulders crept higher as if bracing against something invisible. His head dipped once, sharply, before he caught himself and straightened with a faint, irritated huff through his nose.
Oda didn’t comment on it. He knew better than to draw attention to a thing someone was fighting to keep hidden. Nevermind a teenager. A mafia executive. Fatigue, especially, carried its own kind of exposure. People said things when they were tired. They softened. They let go by accident. Dazai’s gaze kept drifting, unfocused, then snapping back as if he had startled himself awake. Each time, his jaw set harder, mouth flattening into something stubborn and closed. Whatever was in his system was pulling at him steadily now, dragging him downward with patient insistence.
After one particularly pronounced sway, Dazai finally glanced at the floor. The look on his face wasn’t embarrassment. It was calculation.
Slowly, like he was conceding a point he didn’t want to lose, he lowered himself to sit with his back against the couch. He didn’t choose the table or the armchair. He slid down until he was on the floor, knees drawn loosely in, arms wrapped around himself in what seemed more out of habit than comfort. The movement cost him; Oda saw it in the brief tightening around his gaze, the careful way he shifted his leg, the angle of his tailbone against the floor afterward to find a position that hurt less. He also saw the immediate tension that followed—Dazai’s shoulders locking, breath held for a second too long, as if sitting had made him suddenly, dangerously visible.
Oda didn’t look at the blood again. Didn’t ask if Dazai wanted water. Didn’t do the gentle, hovering things people did when they were trying to be helpful but didn’t know how. He just sat, gaze resting somewhere neutral—not on Dazai, not pointedly away, but available if needed.
The silence stretched. At some point, Dazai’s breathing evened out despite his best efforts. His head tipped back against the couch, dull eyes slipping shut for half a second before snapping open again. His lips parted, then pressed together, frustrated.
“Tch,” he muttered.
Oda glanced over. “You don’t have to stay awake, you know.”
Dazai’s head turned sharply, eyes narrowing. Wary. “I do,” he said.
Oda accepted that without argument. “All right.”
That seemed to throw Dazai off more than if he had insisted otherwise. Another long pause passed; the tension in Dazai’s posture didn’t disappear, but it loosened in increments—small, reluctant concessions. His grip on his own sleeves eased, shoulders dropping a fraction. He stopped flinching every time the apartment creaked.
It occurred to Oda, distantly, that this might be the first time Dazai had been in his space since the seemingly-fated day they met and the subsequent days he had held Dazai hostage. That first day had been almost surreal with the strangeness of it—blood, movement, decisions made in a snap because there was a feral thing on the loose.
This was quieter. Harder, in its own way.
Oda tried, not for the first time, to imagine what could have happened to bring Dazai here like this. He didn’t get very far.
Dazai was private by instinct and by design. What he revealed was almost always deliberate, shaped to mislead or distract. Lies came easily to him—not the panicked kind, but the polished ones, offered with a smile and just enough truth to feel convincing. Oda had learned early on not to take any single version of Dazai at face value.
What he did know was simpler, and more troubling.
The injuries never stopped. There was always something new: a bandage where there hadn’t been one before, a limp that vanished after a few days, a new broken bone to flout or show off, bruises that appeared and disappeared without explanation. Dazai carried damage like a revolving door—nothing stayed long enough to heal properly before something else took its place.
Oda wasn’t surprised by that. Concern, yes. Disquiet, definitely. But surprise implied a belief that things might have been otherwise.
He shifted slightly, adjusting his position against the wall. The movement drew Dazai’s attention again, his eyes tracking Oda with lazy precision.
“…You’re not asking,” Dazai said. It wasn’t an accusation. More like an observation, faintly puzzled.
“No,” Oda replied.
“Shouldn’t you?”
“Maybe.”
Dazai stared at him for a moment, as if trying to find the angle, the trick. When he didn’t, his gaze drifted away again, unfocused but less sharp around the edges. “That’s weird,” he said.
Oda considered it. “Maybe,” he said again.
Another quiet stretch followed, and Dazai’s head tipped forward in the valley of it, chin brushing his chest before he caught himself again. His eyes fluttered, lashes casting shadows on his cheeks. The exhale came slowly, a sound that might have been a sigh if it had carried any feeling with it.
“…Odasaku… You’re safe,” Dazai mumbled out of nowhere. The words slipped out unguarded, flat and distant, like Dazai was reciting something he had learned earlier and only just remembered.
Oda didn’t respond right away. He didn’t want to treat it like a confession. Or worse, like a reassurance owed. “You can come over again if you need,” he said instead.
That seemed to satisfy whatever part of Dazai had spoken. His shoulders sagged another fraction as he shifted against the couch, head resting lower, more snug against the cushion, eyes closing for a second longer this time before reopening. He was still fighting it, but the fight had lost some of its desperation.
They stayed like that—two figures on opposite walls, the space between them unclaimed but steady. Oda still didn’t know what had been done to Dazai. He likely never would. He didn’t know how bad it was, or how deep it went. What he knew was that Dazai had nowhere else to go tonight.
And that, for now, was reason enough to stay exactly where he was.