you can take my Soul, but never my Heart (omegaverse)

Chapter 6: fortune Is unpredictable and mutable

Two years have gone by since Dazai was accepted into the Armed Detective Agency, but push has come to shove.

Life gets very busy after Dazai joins the Armed Detective Agency properly.

(Then again, anything after nearly two years of being stagnant qualifies as "busy".)

He starts working at the office, assigned a desk across from Kunikida that neither of them are happy about for the first several months. Yosano wasn't kidding when she said Kunikida has a stick the size of a tree up his ass, and Dazai takes way too much entertainment in torturing the alpha just to get a rise out of him. A spare room in the office is converted to a small nursery just for Koko, furnished with an armload of blankets from their nest and soon filled with stuffed animals and pillows from all members of the agency. (Ranpo gets her a stuffed dog and Dazai wants to replace it with a cat, but she gets unexpectedly attached to it, so the silly little basset hound stays.) She comes to work with Dazai every day, only staying in the nursery when he needs to leave to do work on the scene. The first time this happened, of course, both of them were so distraught that anyone else would have thought the world was ending. But they both adjust, and soon Dazai just needs to press a kiss to her temple and promise he'll be back, and they're just fine until that happens.

Kunikida, incidentally, is the one that hears Koko's first proper word.

Mama came to her a few weeks after her first birthday, and things like yes and no were close behind. But her first real word was said in front of Kunikida while he was trying to soothe her that Dazai would be back soon; she had snatched him by the collar and proclaimed "stinky!"

(Dazai is very proud of her word choice.)

Dazai is there for her other firsts, though he does hold the speech over Kunikida and will probably never drop it. But Dazai is the one that sees her take her unsupported first steps in the comfort of their dorm, after watching her totter across the nursery at the office. She goes through another three months of teething hell before they all settle, and before Dazai knows it, they're throwing a party in his tiny dorm for Koko's second birthday, and then another one a day later to celebrate Dazai having one year at the agency.

Stability is a strange sort of thing. He has a routine now, a proper job, a roof over his head, and a healthy, growing daughter to juggle on top of it. He grows closer to the members of the agency as they work together, and he finds a new respect for Ranpo and Kunikida both when they crack the Azure King case.

That case is the first one where they suffer such a monument of loss. It stings all of them, but Dazai learns ways to cope that aren't drinking himself stupid or running away, so he considers it a success. He acknowledges the fact that he's grown.

They even get new members to the agency as time goes on; a boy from the mountains that Dazai is honestly a little scared of after hearing what he did to said mountains, and a young man with a stealth gift and his younger (questionable) sister that tags along to give Haruno some overdue assistance after school as a part timer. It's a chance for Dazai to see just how harsh the entrance exams can be, and to learn of Fukuzawa's gift as well. He settles into his place, he and Kunikida no longer try to kill each other across the expanse of their desks, and life goes on.

It feels like the blink of an eye as he puts a number 3 candle in Koko's strawberry birthday cake. It doesn't hit him the day after, when there's less of a party, because two years isn't as fun as one (Yosano gifts him a bottle of white wine that he still doesn't have much of a taste for, and Ranpo gets him cake that he mostly eats himself). It doesn't hit him until four months later, when he's flipping through the morning paper at his desk and reading an article about signs of a tiger attack near the river.