Double Black

the transfer student with a hat

Dazai was hanging out in the student council room, with the other council members. His high school, Bungou Stray Dogs Academy, was quite an interesting place. And the people here were certainly interesting as well, to say the least.

The student council here was nothing like a regular official organisation. The first difference was in the name. For some reason, the group was called the Armed Student Council. Like, what did that even mean? Armed as in armed with guns or something? The title of the council confused almost all newcomers at the school. It certainly did not make sense to anyone. In fact, not even the teachers knew the reason behind the name.

Moving on to the members of the council, there were currently six of them. Dazai Osamu, the suicidal secretary who did no work at all, based purely on the fact that he was lazy and would rather die than do any work. Yosano Akiko, the brave soul in charge of the Healthcare Committee. She was known for her effective, and rather painful, treatments. It was often said that her treatment was the best the school had to however; however, she did nothing to alleviate the patient's discomfort. 

Then there was Edogawa Ranpo, the council president, self-proclaimed to be the greatest, most respected student in the whole school. And then there were the other two members, Miyazawa Kenji and Nakajima Atsushi. Finally there was Tanizaki Junichiro, a guy who was currently suspended. Apparently a teacher had found him walking the red light with his sister? Yeah, he had a complicated relationship with his sister Naomi. The three of them didn't hold any special title and were just regular (if one can say that about the Armed Student Council) members of the Council. In fact, Atsushi, who was the newest member of the group, still wasn't completely used to his knew working conditions.

He had joined the council only because the math teacher, Kunikida Doppo, had asked him to. Let's just say the student owed the teacher a favour. That whole situation was Dazai's fault anyway, not that he would ever own up to it. It had been a few weeks since Atsushi joined the council, and he still regretted it pretty much every day. But he had never regretted it more than the day on which they found out that Dazai actually had a boyfriend.

That's correct, a boyfriend. It sounds impossible, but as the council members found out eventually, it was true. Nobody could believe it at first. There's no way anybody in their right minds would want to date Dazai! Why, he was the most useless suicidal freak ever. There wasn't a single day he didn't try to commit suicide. In fact, the first time Atsushi had seen Dazai, he had been hanging from a tree, a rope around his throat. Atsushi had panicked and thought that the man was dead, at the time, but soon enough he found out that Dazai had just been "sleeping" in that position. Atsushi was genuinely scared of the bandaged man. 

This other time Dazai had jumped off from the school's roof, and had ended up forming a huge Dazai-shaped hole in the ground. He himself had popped right back up, healthy as a horse. According to Yosano, Dazai was practically resistant to death at this point. The more he chased it, the more the phenomenon eluded him. This brings us back to the topic of said suicide enthusiast's boyfriend. Who on earth would want to put up with someone who jumped off buildings for fun? Turns out, there was someone, and the council members met him on a fateful (not) day.

It was a normal day; well as normal as it could be in the Armed Student Council. They were supposedly having a meeting. The group had tried to conduct an actual meeting to discuss important affairs; they really had. But five minutes in, and everybody had already started doing their own thing. Dazai was on the couch reading a book on suicide. Yosano was working on something on her laptop; probably new painful treatments or something like that. It'd be suited to her character. Kenji was playing games on his phone, and Atsushi was just staring at his superiors, not knowing what to do. The president meanwhile, was busy gorging on snacks.