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Kunikida walks into the Agency headquarters expecting to see the aftermath of a bomb or possibly a heap of dead bodies. He’s bracing himself for something awful anyway, and it’s ominously quiet, after all.
Instead, he finds the other Agency members sitting in a rough circle, every eye on the two in the middle.
Atsushi and that new girl. Kyouka. They don’t seem all too aware of their audience.
“What’s going on?” Kunikida hisses to Dazai, who’s closest.
Dazai shrugs. His eyes are wide and strangely surprised, which sort of worries Kunikida. Dazai is not the stupid fool most people take him for, and Kunikida has worked with him long enough to know when he’s genuinely shocked. And he doesn’t look at Kunikida even once.
“… Really?” Atsushi is saying.
Kunikida figures it can’t hurt to watch whatever has so captivated his colleagues.
Kyouka nods, pushing up her sleeve to display her arm. There’s a huge welt stretching from the crook of her elbow to her wrist, long and straight and very obviously caused by some other person. “It hurt quite a bit.”
There’s a murmur from the watching Agency members. The two Tanizaki siblings both shudder.
“Well, this is mine,” Atsushi says. He unbuttons the sleeve of his shirt and rolls it up past his forearm, showing three long scars, reddened and shaky and deep.
Dazai’s jaw drops. So does Kunikida’s. He feels vaguely sick, and his hands tighten on his notebook. What exactly are their two new members doing?
“They’ve been doing this for fifteen minutes,” Junichiro whispers, leaning over to Kunikida’s ear around his sister’s shoulders. His eyes are as round and surprised as Dazai’s. “They’re comparingchildhoods. How messed up is that? It’s like… which one of them was treated the worst. I think Dazai’s going to cry. And Naomi lost it a few minutes ago.” He gestures to Naomi, who’s brushing her eyes with her sleeve.
Kunikida’s heart sinks. Great. So the orphans are swapping sob stories? Amazing. Just the way to set the mood on a Monday morning.
“How did you get yours?” Atsushi asks, rubbing his arm and looking at Kyouka inquisitively.
Kyouka shrugs. “I think I didn’t get Demon Snow out in time. It took a while, back at the start. The Port Mafia needed me to be more prompt. How did you get yours?”
“Mm.” Atsushi nods as though Kyouka’s story is totally commonplace. (Kunikida feels furious.) “Oh, these? I blocked a beating with my arm, that’s all. Nails in the stick, that’s the thing, although it hurt a hell of a lot.”
She hums again, curling up on the floor and shaking her sleeve back down past her wrists. Atsushi tugs his own sleeve down, copying her stance with his back against Rampo’s desk. (Rampo himself is sitting next to Dazai with his glasses tucked on top of his hat. He’s handing Dazai tissues automatically at this point.)
“How often did you get them?” He - Atsushi - asks, brushing the longer side of his hair out of his face.
Kyouka tips her head sideways in thought. “At the start, whenever. Later on, just when Demon Snow wasn’t working fast enough, you know? Not that often, really. Were you worse?”
“Ah, only when I deserved them,” Atsushi says casually. He turns around, lifting the hem of his shirt to show his back criss-crossed with scars. “Left a mark, though, see?”
“Mm,” Kyouka pokes one of them. “What, like…?”
“You know, stealing food and all. And crying. And complaining. And conspiring against the governors. And skipping on work.” Atsushi pulls his shirt down. “You ever steal the food?”
(”I think we should go and kill some people,” Dazai mutters.
Kunikida nods with his teeth gritted. “I think we should go kill a lot of people.”
“Yeah,” Rampo says. He keeps staring at Atsushi. Kunikida has never been angrier at both of those brats.)
“Ah, only when I was especially hungry. They fed me quite often. Hot meal once a day and a bowl of rice in the mornings sometimes,” Kyouka says with a contented smile.
Atsushi shoves her shoulder as if they’re engaging in some sort of companionable, light conversation. “Lucky! They fed us by age, so I had to give mine to the little ones most of the time. ‘Cept I was one of the worst at stealing the food, so I got caught all the time. Hot food every other day, leftovers the rest of the time.”
“Ah,” Kyouka nods as though it makes sense.
(Naomi sniffles on her brother’s shoulder.)
“I’m hungry even thinking about food, to be honest,” says Atsushi, tapping his stomach. Still too flat. Kunikida can see his ribs when he takes his shirt off, when he gets injured and has to change. He gets the sudden urge to take them both to a restaurant and feed them every single thing on the menu.
Kyouka nods feverently. “Do you want to go get crepes?”
At this point, Kunikida makes a strangled sort of noise and they both look up as though seeing their audience for the first time. Maybe they are.
Atsushi squeaks. “Ah! Uh… guys - how long have you been here?”
“Atsushi-i-i-!” Naomi screeches like a banshee, leaping off the table and tackling him around the shoulders in the sort of hug she gives to Junichiro after a dangerous mission.
Kyouka giggles.
“And Kyoukaaaa!” Kenji wails. He grabs her arm and hugs it tightly.
The two kids exchange helpless glances at each other over the heads of their attackers.
“What?” Atsushi asks in a confused, totally oblivious voice. “We weren’t talking about anything that important.”