Molly's Fics Cause she Refuses to Read Them on Ao3

Hearts Wrapped in Bandages

None of the Armed Detective Agency could have ever foreseen that this one particular trait of one of their employees would, one day, disrupt the peace in their office by causing such unexpected chaos.

Dazai Osamu was a man of many talents, and known for several things all at once. He was a genius, there was no doubt about it. He was perfectly capable of coming up from the smartest, yet somehow the most twisted strategies ever. Whenever the Agency had shared missions with the Port Mafia, Dazai was somehow always involved. And it would generally be okay if he stopped at that, but he also somehow always got this one gravity manipulator mafioso involved.

His co-workers could list many, many things about him; and some of them were quite unusual too. For example, it was apparently common knowledge that the detective was rather fond of canned crab? According to the monthly salary of a detective at the Agency, it wasn't uncommon for everyone to enjoy canned meals. But canned crab?! Wasn't that really unhygienic, and kind of disgusting?

Moreover, that wasn't the only odd thing about Dazai's tastes at all. Case in point, his never-ending rolls of bandages. Seriously, those white tendrils of gauze were everywhere. Dazai would never be seen without being all wrapped up in bandages. It was, uh, quirky, everyone supposed. But it wasn't harming anybody, so it was fine. It most likely portrayed Dazai as a man of terrible fashion sense, but that was it.

All of that was fine (kind of), but Dazai had recently come to be infamous for another particular trait of his. That, being his super huge collection of, uh, hairpins...? Very few people could exactly point out when this trend started, but it was actually the Dead Apple incident. The Agency members had run into Dazai after all of it was over, and they had been quick to notice that his hair was pinned up by a hairpin.

You know, because they were a group of detectives and everything.

Kyouka had been the one to comment on it, and Dazai had merely grinned in response, saying something along the lines of that being his hobby. Ever since then, whenever he showed up to work, he usually had a hairpin tucked in the side of his hair.

It'd still be a little more believable if those hairpins were normal. But actually, they were anything but! No, all of Dazai's hairpins had different shapes on them. For example, flowers, or rabbits or wine bottles. He usually wore two complimentary hairpins at once, so there was that too.

Yosano, on the other hand, was quick to notice that Dazai had a lot of hairpin shaped in the form of emoticons. Right, 'emojis' as they were used on LINE or something like that. Online messaging, Kunikida believed the exact term was.

It was actually Atsushi who first made guesses as to which one of the hairpins just might be Dazai's favourite. After a very serious debate with a select few of his co-workers, they finally settled on the crab pin. Dazai-san like crabs, so didn't it make sense that his favourite hairpin would be the one shaped like a crab?

All these reasonable arguments that make perfect sense, and yet Ranpo-san insisted that Dazai's favourite hairpins were probably the ones shaped like wine bottles, and the hat-shaped ones. Wasn't that weird? Dazai-san didn't even like wine! And his distaste for very tacky hats was widely known, alright?

Kyouka might have mentioned in a very low voice sometime during this discussion, that Dazai-san had no interests in those particular items itself, but he might just be rather familiar with a certain person who liked those things. As expected, she was completely unheard, however.

Obviously, Dazai's many, many hairpins came to be a fun topic for conversation in the Armed Detective Agency office. Wasn't it fine, after all? It was just harmless anyway. Plus, it was fun to gather around in the morning to debate over which specific hairpin might the genius detective be wearing when he strolled into work that day.