Bandages and Salt (PJO X BSD AU)

(Volume IV)...Chapter fifty-nine

A/N: Endgame is Soukoku for those that were worried about it

Dazai POV

Two years later.

Yokohama was surreal, unchanged in every visible way, yet completely different in how I transversed it.

The first time that I came here, I was stumbling through learning Japanese and my skin soon became caked with dirt as I lived among the slums of Suribachi City. Back then gazes of other were hatful, predatorial even, if the inhabitants of the Demon City bothered to look at me at all.

The gazes shifted once I became donned in mafia attire, the black clothes clad on my skin like a type of armor that suffocated as much as it protected those that wore it. When the civilians of Yokohama saw those colors walking like a stain upon the city, fear entered their eyes, irrational and rational all the same. It was always worse with those that remembered the days of the old boss, the reign of terror that he had seen to. To them, the mafia would always be the night wraiths.

Now the eyes slid over me with little more than a cursory glance as I walked down the street, a tan coat as long as the black one that I had draped over my shoulders before worn correctly, bandages, and a bolo the with a blue gem the color of another's eyes the only connection to a life that I had left behind and yet was so close.

The mafia towers stood proudly in the distance. I walked the other way.

The Armed Detective Agency was nothing like the Port Mafia, though I hadn't truly expected it to be. Where the mafia was dark colors, blood stained hands, and touches meant to hurt, the Agency was shades of brown that spoke of a consuming warmth, lives saved instead of taken, and soft gazes that didn't hide any underlying manipulations.

In a way, the Agency was just like Camp with everyone's eccentricities on display, with those that fought to preserve life rather than take it.

They were all so inexplicably human in a way that I felt every bit the inhuman creature that I was around them.

In a way that hurts.

Stepping into the office for the first time, I knew that I couldn't be who I was within the mafia, The Demon Prodigy had no place among the kind smiles that they all held, but I couldn't truly be the strange compromise of seriousness and sass that I had found back at camp over the past two years, a newcomer had no right to hold that level of skill or authority.

So a new facade was created out of the image of another.

—-

The wind tore violently through my hair as I stood on the deck of the Argo II, the night sky dancing above as the sea roared below, a constant reminder of how far away from camp we were and how much closer to Europe we drew. There was nothing here to make the stars seem lesser in the city light, so they shone proudly above, their vision only obscured to me the cigarette smoke that slowly blew from my lips.

"Those things will kill you, you know."

A smile curved on my lips, something sharp and knowing that would cut others but kill, as the other demigod finally drew nearer after lurking about in the shadows for so long.

"It's almost like that's the point."

Valdez looks bewildered at such a blunt reply, entirely without any of the sass or intimidation that was normally displayed so clearly and kept others from asking more. Among the demigods, Nico was the exception to that but he was often the exception to a lot of rules of our world.

"And here I thought that the bandages were for show," the fire user said, his voice light as he attempted at a joke and failed so horribly in the process that a look was enough to make him drop it. "Sorry."