Spanner in the Works

Summary: Chuuya knew things were wrong. He stared at the bottle of pills in his hand. It was time to make a move. Beast AU.

Chuuya dealt with a sense of wrongness that steadily grew. First… they were faint feelings that briefly disoriented him. Those weren't too bad; He was able to deal with them.

The problem really started at age eighteen, the thoughts. Thoughts that were right and weren't.

The person leaving his office should be Akutagawa, not Atsushi.

Dazai, not Mori, should be sitting at that desk.

Gin should be part of the Black Lizards.

Then he saw Kyouka and Atsushi walking down the hallway. He clenched his fist to stop himself from reacting. His eyes grew glassy.

Kyouka should not be here either.

But there was the main one, the first one, where it had first started. That one was the worst. He could feel the whispers grow louder, shrieking at him how wrong it was whenever he saw the man.

Oda should not be in the Armed Detective Agency, and certainly not alive and well. Oda should be dead.

Chuuya knew, somehow, that he was right and the world was wrong. But… that sounded crazy, didn't it?

The flashes grew worse. He couldn't go through a day without freezing at the sight of his coworkers. It wasn't good.

He decided to go to Dazai. Maybe his genius a*shole partner would know what was going on, what was wrong. Dazai almost always knew.

XXX

There were constants in each world, universal constants that Dazai learned. For him, there were two: Odasaku would always die. Chuuya was always his partner- he always trusted Dazai without hesitation.

He had been trying to change the first constant for a long time.

He tried everything. From not befriending Ango to killing him, leaving the Port Mafia to staying, not finding Akutagawa or Atsushi to bringing them both to the Agency, leaving Chuuya in the Sheep longer to having Mori pick Chuuya off the streets right after the Arahabaki incident, crushing the Armed Detective Agency to making it flourish across Japan, killing Fyodor to letting him win....

It was the first time Dazai had done it right. Odasaku didn't die. He figured out the combination for Oda not to die. Kill Mori, never befriend Oda, get Atsushi to join the Port Mafia, force Akutagawa to join the Agency...

He had been through this type of timeline so often, over and over until it had grown dull. The only exciting thing was that Oda was still alive, farther than any other. And that spark of life was worth protecting, even if Oda didn't know him.

But there was something new. He listened with rapt attention, hidden by a lazy yawn to infuriate Chuuya. He hadn't expected Chuuya to get visions of the other worlds. It was probably because of Chuuya not being human, something to do with really being Arahabaki.

"You want the flashes to end, right?" Dazai smiled. It was time to take advantage of the perk of being the other half of Double Black-trust. He shook the unmarked bottle and lobbed it to Chuuya. The blue gel pills rattled inside. "Then take these."

"You're sure?" Chuuya asked, doubtfully. He felt his instincts screaming at him even as he just held it.

Dazai hummed, putting a finger to his lips. "Yup. I know because I had those things myself. Mori-san gave me these." The second part was a complete lie. "There are no side effects, aside from maybe sleepiness."