You long to end your life, so you never will die || bnha / bsd

Loneliness becomes a lover, solitude a darling sin.

[ New message from No Caller ID (13 seconds ago): To Ranpo, I'm sure you can guess who this is. Send over who's necessary. ]

[ New message from No Caller ID (4 seconds ago): To the Agency and everyone else, we're fine. There's no need to worry. ]

[ New message from No Caller ID (0 seconds ago): If anything, this is shaping up to be a lot of fun. ]

—

When Aizawa-sensei got in front of the class and solemnly announced that Dazai and Chuuya were found, safe, the class breathed a sigh of relief. When Aizawa-sensei announced that they would no longer be attending, the class looked at one another in bewilderment, and back at their teacher, who simply stared at the back wall of the classroom.

When Iida asked why, and when Aizawa responded that there was a legal situation, and when Yaoyozoru asked what kind, and when he responded, a criminal one, against those two, the class burst out into a confused chatter. When Midoriya and Uraraka and Todoroki and every single person who watched them leave on that night, protested, Aizawa could only tell them the truth. That a person had died, that their classmates were sitting in a cell in a police station at that very moment. They all yelled how unfair it was—it was self-defense, or it was the only choice they had, or it was their last resort. Why would their classmates, people that might even be considered friends, kill someone, if not for that reason?

Except, it seemed, everyone felt a strange sense in the pit of their stomachs. Everyone, especially the ones present when they stepped into that portal, could only wonder—who were they, really?

—

It had been two weeks since they had arrived to this strange world. Atsushi recalled his initial shock when he first stepped into the streets of Yokohama. So many things were eerily similar to his world, and yet weathered slightly different, or covered in a font slightly smoother. Despite this, the people, outside of some jarring physical features (that he's still not completely used to), were still the same. There was that same feeling of all-consuming pleasure in some areas, of completely smashed salarymen on their way home from bar-hopping, and that same feeling that you might get mugged, though this was Japan, so he really couldn't remember the last time anyone stole anything important.

Something he couldn't help but notice was the lack of those four imposing towers, which ruled their city—the Port Mafia headquarters were very clearly nonexistent. Every time he looked up into the horizon, he would be struck with a sense of unfamiliarity, which felt so foreign as he walked through Motomachi Road, where he always did the agency's shopping. Yet everything on Motomachi had changed—the store-goers that Kenji befriended were absent. The little stationery shop that Kyouka loved frequenting was a coin laundry. And that side road with several foreign shops was replaced with an inn that seemed over a century old, with ancient tatami mats and little cushions that smelled of cigarette smoke. Luckily, Atsushi was able to use what little money he had saved up to buy a room there, and when they were shown to their room and he opened the window and it faced a brick wall, and he could smell engine exhaust and seawater and hear the din of people, he was hit with a strange feeling of nostalgia.

Atsushi still found it hard to wrap his head around this entire situation. He couldn't believe that Ranpo was right (even though he always is) and that Dazai had been sucked into an alternate universe. Even stranger was the fact that he was standing in that universe at that very moment, grocery-shopping in this foreign Yokohama. Nonetheless, the only thing he could do was proceed as usual, though this assignment was definitely his weirdest yet.

Before they crossed over, Ranpo had given him the flip-phone they used to communicate with Dazai. Communication was sparse, and at times Atsushi would almost forget that Dazai was even in the same world. Occasionally he would assign them random tasks, such as trailing a random student or roughing a set of delinquents. Atsushi couldn't see any meaning in all of these scattered, spontaneous things, but he tried not to think too much about Dazai's mind. It was easier that way.