Chapter Text
Est time till arrival: 1h 45m
“Are you sure you brought everything, Dazai? We can still turn back now if you’re not sure-”
“Yes, for the fifth time, I am totally definitely sure” Dazai waved his hand passively at his partner from the passenger seat, “Have faith in me, i promise I havent left any of your precious underwear behind, not even the ugly friday ones~”
“Did you remember to pack the paperwork?” Kunikida fretted, drumming his fingers on the steering wheel, nerves getting the better of his control over those anxious habits.
Dazai sighed over dramatically, staring out the window at the sky above, his chair reclined further than really neccecary and feet propped up on the dashboard. “Yes, I promise, and I didn’t even try to pawn mine off on atsushi this time!”
“Did you pack our toothbrushes?”
“Yeppers”
“Spare coats?
“Absolutely tootely”
“Passports?”
“Of course Kunikida, because what on earth would we ever do without our passports?” Dazai gasped, throwing his hand up against his forehead as he pulled the crank to recline his chair even lower still. “How ever will the people of the oh so distant land of Chōshi know we are not wayward stowaways without our trusty passports to prove that we are but good Yokohama citizens?”
“Please be serious, Dazai!” Kunikida scolded, but failed to hide the smile that snuck into his features “It’s important to keep legal identification on you at all times, and you dont have a drivers licence!”
Dazai flapped his hand in a chatty mocking gesture “Relax, we’re only going two hours away, they are not going to be checking us at the border, unless yokohama gets attacked again while we’re gone, and Fyodor turns everyone there into horrible contagious ooze monsters, and they need to detain every yokohama citizen to ensure we do not spread and destroy Japan!!!“
Dazai wailed, playing out the story with dramatic finger puppets, Kunikida sighed.
“I was thinking more for if you get blackout drunk and the police find you before I do, though maybe it’s better off if you dont have your passport” Kunikida kept his eyes in the road. “i’d rather you didnt buy any sake at my parents’ house, you might upset the neighbours with your drunk antics”
“Kunikida?” Dazai said, peering up at Kunikida with a serious intense gaze
“Yes, Dazai?”
“Would you still love me if i was a horrible zombie ooze monster?”
Kunikida sighed
“Yes, I would, but I doubt you’d be an ooze monster, if your implying it would be some kind of ability user attack, you wouldn’t get to be ooze”
“Kunikida?”
“Yes Dazai.”
“Would you give me true loves kiss to end the ooze curse? would you kiss this horrible oozy face?” he squished his face childishly in his hands.
“Yes of course Dazai”
“Even if the ooze was like really gross? what if it made me really really ugly? like all green and squishy?”
“Yes Dazai, ‘gross ooze’ or not, i’d kiss you to end a horrible curse” Kunikida batted a hand at Dazai’s feet. “Now please get your shoes off my dashboard.”
est time till arrival: 1h 15m
“You know i’ve never driven this far out of Yokohama before.”
“You haven’t?” Kunikida asked, turning his head briefly in intregue.
Dazai shook his head “I’vr left before, of course, but not by car” he draws lines in the condensation on the windows, Dazai talking so candidly about himself was exceptionally rare, so Kunikida wished for him to elaborate, but his brunette partner seemed to have no iintention of doing so himself, perfectly entertained by his little doodles of stickmen.
“Then have you been to Chōshi before?”
“No, but dont worry, I did my research, I wont be embarrasing Kunikida in front of his friends and family and hometown with my poor local history facts.” He grins at his reflection, kunikida rolls his eyes at his partner affectionately.
“It’s a nice city, though about five times smaller than Yokohama, but the coast is nice, its a lot bluer than ours.”
“Whatms the tallest building there?”
Kunikida humms thoughtfully, “The port tower, its not big though, only fifty metres or so, they dont have skyscrapers in Chōshi like we do in Yokohama, nothing quite like the Mori Corp towers by any means.”
Dazai rubbed his arms idly, Kunikida saw, so Dazai leant forward to turn the heating up slightly.
“Hmm, no, thats nowhere near tall enough, sure the fall could kill me, but if it didn’t it would hurt a whole lot”
Kunikida sighs “Dazai?”
“Hmm?” Dazai kept tracing the raindrops on the window.
“Could you please keep the suicide jokes to a minimum this trip, you are going to scare my parents to death if you go raving on about jumping from every building you see.”
Dazai paused in his drawing for a moment, then turned to kunikida with his hand on his heart in a mock decleration.
“Why of course, anything for you my dearest Kunikida, my love, light of my life” he made the gesture to cross his heart, “I don’t like death by falling anyway, way too messy, i’d better leave a pretty corpse, don’t you think?”
Kunikida sighed at his partner.
“We should stop somewhere for dinner, would you like McDonalds?”
“I thought it was the great Kunikida that always said “You can’t just always eat that greasy junk food, you bandaged animal, it will ruin your arteries!” dazai put on a very poor impression of Kunikida, shaping his fingers into circles round his eyes for glasses.
“Better clogged arteries then your cooking, Dazai, I dont know how a man gets into his twenties and still somehow manage to set rice on fire!” kunikida complains, but the laughter catches in his voice, and in the corner of his eye he can see dazais reflection grinning widly
est time till arrival: 45m
“What actually happened in the mukurotoride? You never filed you report properly, you know.”
Dazai waved his hand vaguely, the other arm draped over his eyes
“It was too boring for a report, really, Shibusawa and Dostoevsky are the driest company to try and hold a conversation with, it’s all just cryptic pretentious literary references and ability jargon, I could swear I was half asleep for most of it.”
“It couldnt have been that boring , Dazai, didn’t you get poisoned? or stabbed?” Kunikida asked, brow furrowed in confusion.
“Oh yeah, that was a tricky little move from our beloved Fedya, but nothing new really, they make antedotes for everything these days, and I mean, stab wounds are quite run of the mill in our business, arent they? you have that one on your ass.”
“Sure, but it’s not every day you get stabbed by a mass terrorist, and detailing the events is important for records, Dazai! letting your coworkers know what you’ve experienced can help us all determine further leads in the case”
“maybe the demon Fyodor thought my colon fancied a breath of fresh air” Dazai flicked the air freshener that hung on the rear view mirror, a yellowed grumpy little ginger cat wearing sunglasses that no longer smells of citrus. Dazai bought it for Kunikida a long time ago, saying he needed to ‘spice up the dreary grey interior’, the silly cat had reminded him of someone familiar.
“Where did the suit come from?”
“Hmm? oh, the white one? I have no idea, really, I think shibusawa brought the outfits with him, had all our measurments perfect and everything, but the fabric.” Dazai shuddered, “So scratchy, awful, I burned it as soon as I got back to the dorms.”
Kunikida looked confused. “In a fire? Where did you make a fire?”
“In my dorm, of course.” Dazai said nonchalantly.
“Dazai!”
“Hmm?”
“You cant set fires in your apartment! its against the building regulations!” Kunikida complained, you should have disposed of it appropriately, or taken it to a charity store or something.”
Dazai shook his head overdramatically “Oh no, trust me, I couldn’t curse any poor unknowing soul to wear that itchy thing, it needed to be purged from this world entirely.”
Kunikida drummed his fingers on the steering wheel. “Well, maybe next time you feel the need to burn something, please do it outside and not in our apartment, okay?”
“I swear on it, I wouldn’t dare put your precious wool blankets in danger, they deserve their own personal fire pit, in the depths of hell.”
kunikida sighed “You are right for once, those blankets are awful.”
“Right???? they’re horrible, they make me want to peel my skin off with my nails, it’s the worst sensation in the universe, I don’t know why you keep them” dazai then gasped and clapped his hands together excitedly. ”why dont we burn them, together? boyfriend burning party!”
kunikida shook his head with a smile more like a grimace. “Definitely not, they were gifts from my mother, she’d never forgive me, and we’re trying to make sure you make a good first impression.”
“Hmm, your right should i tell her the story of the mukurotoride and the ability fog? it could be a fun icebreaker.”
“No, Dazai, I don’t think-“
“Your right, maybe that one is a bit too intense, how about the battle on standard island? most people like timetravel stories-“
“Dazai you can’t-“
“Or the azura apostle? I guess that counts as our meet-cute now, though don’t tell her about the part where you pointed a gun at my head, might be too romantic for her to stomach-”
“DAZAI! my parents donmt know we’re in the Agency.”
Dazai stopped playing with the air freshener.
Kunikidas hands were wound tight around the steering wheel, his knuckles white with the pressure.
Dazai hadn’t noticed he was making his partner worry, he hadn’t been thinking.
He didnt know how he could be so stupid.
Dazai sat back in his chair, fixing his eyes on the road ahead. “I don’t think I understand, what don’t they know exactly?”
Dazai tried hard to keep his voice at the right level, but the attempt to sound calm and serious came out wrong, and he could almost swear the icy tone made Kunikida shiver.
Kunikida sighed shortly, rubbing the bridge of his nose. “I’m- I’m sorry. I should have warned you sooner, but I thought I would have had it sorted by the time you’d ever have to meet them, but after the news about the guild attack became widespread news my step-dad got worried and insisted we come visit early.”
Kunikida breathed for a moment, he was keeping calm. Dazai watched him stiffly, he tried to copy his partners breathing, slow and steady.
Kunikida continued, “considering the situation I didn’t exactly know how to tell them that actually we were the ones fighting magic american terrorists in a damn whale above the city, so I was hoping to try and break it to them softly, after this has all blown over.”
Dazai thought about it quietly for a while, letting kunikida get his piece out.
This was,,, a change of plans. Dazai didn’t like it, but he could adapt, lying didn’t exactly come hard to him, after all.
Just a bit,,, frustrating. On such short notice.
“So, what do they think we do?”
“We are teachers. As far as they know I finished my degree and became a full time math teacher, we work at Kanagawa together, i’ve never told them which department you work in, they just think you’re also a teacher”
Dazai nods, staring at the seam between the front windshield and the dashboard.
“Okay. how long do they think weve been together?”
“Two years-“
“Kunikida.”
“I know- that was a bad idea, but I already told you they’re weird about the whole ‘their eldest son is bringing home a man’ thing, that wasnt a lie, it would’ve made it worse to tell them we’ve only been together six months, it’d only bring more questions.” Kunikida sighed, “I dont like lying, but I do actually think about these things.”
Dazai didn’t know what he was supposed to say, he was thinking. They had barely 30 minutes until they would arrive at the Kunikida family home in Chōshi, and in that time he needed to coordinate an entire backstory where he was a normal teacher at a normal school, and his we’ve-barely-ironed-out-the-specifics/boyfriend is his two year long life partner.
Sure, he could do that, maybe. at the very least, Dazai had lied about worse before.
Fucking hell, this was going to be a fun two weeks.