It's my birthday, have a special write dedicated to it
“Sorry you had to stay open so late. I completely forgot about the date.” Dazai scratches his cheek to a bakery staff that looked a little tired. She eyes him semi-suspiciously for the briefest of moments; at this late of an hour, a man dressed in black, a scar running down his bandaged eye, and a sharp, red-eyed gaze. His features seemed soft enough to trust, deceiving as it may be. She smiles.
“No worries. I’ll have it out for you. I froze it a bit, if you don’t mind, we had the heater cranked up in the shop today.”
“That’s fine, my daughter’s birthday is tomorrow. Or…” He checks his phone and squints at the dim light.
“Today, rather.” He corrects, as it was five past midnight, now.
“You kept me waiting, knuckle-head. Do you know how little sleep I’ll be receiving because of you?” Calls an annoyed, yet joking tone as the woman reappears with a pale orange cake (Dazai notes how Chuuya would have felt jealous from encountering this interaction between them. It's a cute thought, so he mentally slides it away to keen over later). It’s carved and shaped like a pumpkin for the telltale fall of October. Dazai made sure to ask for it to appear as realistic as possible. Along with it were branches that held cartoon black cats and witches, ghosts, skeletons, you name it, there was aplenty.
“My apologies, my apologies.” The brunette saunters up to the counter with a shit-eating grin.
“Busy day today? Your shelves are missing most of its stock.”
The woman snorted, or held in a scoff and it slipped by anyway. “Yeah, definitely saved me the trouble of putting the inventory away, but me and the guys worked our asses off.” Gently, she packages the cake away in a white box, almost gingerly, even, making sure the shipment and its contents weren’t going to crush anything delicate.
“Store this somewhere cool, or all our work will be for nothing,” she jests, placing the box on the counter. “5,948.40, if you will.”
“Sure thing.” Dazai flicks out his credit card held between his middle and index finger. She takes the edge of it and swipes it after dialing up the accurate amount.
“Speakin’ of busy, your little friend isn’t with you.” She notes to the vacant spot beside Dazai. For some silly reason he looks beside himself, as if to entertain her.
“Oh, Chuuya?” He asks, cocking a head to his blind spot.
“He’s taking care of my little girl.” He’s careful not to spill the our hanging in the air around his lips, as he didn’t care to tell anybody about his personal relationships—with his husband, no less.
“Is he? Never pegged him the type to babysit.” The woman returns his card as Dazai snickers. “He’s actually a real softie, y’know. Especially when it comes to kids, if you can believe it.” From a standpoint of seeing the redhead so often with a scowl and/or a serious expression, it almost felt like he was cranking out the most labor lies on the block.
“Can’t say I’ve heard that story before.” She checks the cashier. “Receipt?”
“That’d be great.”
She hands him a slip of paper.
“Thanks for staying open late. That was nice of you.” He tips a bill of 10,000 yen to her, personally. “Keep the change.”
“Wait, what?—”
Dazai turns, halfway towards the door with parsal in hand.
“Hang on, sir, you seem to have made a mistake—”
“Night, ‘mam. ‘Till we meet again!” He salutes her with one arm before going back to cradling the box. He could hear a faint: “You…too.” Before a jingle rang through the muffled doors and glass of the shop as he shut the door behind him.
Dazai only walks a few paces, before hearing familiar sets of guns click around his vicinity.
“Salutations…undistinguished guests.” He greets, tucking the receipt under his thumb casually, though rather uncaring for it.
“There’s no way you can be a mafia-boss. You’re either toos brave tah stand around wit guards or yahs just plain stupid.” A man with a sort of drawling accent where he dragged his s’s pulled closer. The nozzle of his gun was aimed at him, as many other muzzles were, stashed away in the shadows. Dazai takes in the distinct shadow he makes. Judging from the fine line of a lump the light cast for his silhouette, he has a pony tail, and a cigarette. Though the vile smell of the smoke was a dead give away.
“Drop the cake, princess. Ya ain’t foolin’ anyone wit’ it.”
“No way, I just spent a pretty penny on it.” He retaliates, his sharp sense of smell latching onto every scent surrounding him. The metal of guns and gunpowder, the salt of the sea.
He’a come across this smell before, and immediately pinpoints it as the Octo organization, strict on building their hide-outs beside the sea, so they could use stolen submarines to escape.
They cropped up at the beginning of the month, and Vigilante seemed to destroy them had they set foot on their turf or started fucking with either of their affiliates. So far Intel progressed enough to uncover they were from overseas. They had a mass of weaponry and aimed to shoot down the head of Mafia.
“Fish outta water, huh?” He asks coyly, still not bothering to turn around despite being held at gunpoint, “what are you doing so far from the shore? Must be getting hard to breathe this far on land for sea-dwellers like you.”
“Funny ‘yer insulting us. Ya ain’t got guard. Yer unarmed. All ya gotchaer are ya wits. That enough to take a bullet, sweetie?”
“I’d advise you to watch your mouth. Only my husband refers to me as such.” His voice drops an octave, threateningly. His expression remained between a shift of neutral poker face and a smile.
“‘AN NOW HE’S THREATININ’ US!” He barks out in laughter, his mates howling deliriously.
“Ya really are sometin arentcha? That’s cute, really.”
The way he mumbles around the cig really irks the brunette. He wants the man to choke on it, burn himself halfway down his throat and die.
“Enoff chit-chat. Let’s cut to the chase.”
“Excellent idea.” Dazai agrees, preparing to step forward. “You guys think for a while like the numb-skulls you are, and I’ll maintain my schedule by arriving back home on time before my little-chibi-wife finds out I was gone.”
He hears blustered stuttering amongst the group.
“You dog! You think you can mess wit us an get away with it?! You ain’t goin anywhere!”
“Oh, so that insults you—?”
The brunette felt the barrel of the gun nudge against the back of his skull, stranded in the curls of his soft brown hair, which didn’t bother him in the slightest.
“I’ll blow yer head off, ya bloody scoundrel, I’ll—”
“Pity.” Dazai interrupted him, as if spitting out the word.
“I was going to let you live if you didn’t touch me.”
“ANH?”
“Ah well. Plans always change, I suppose. Oh, and it’s ex-mafia boss, to you.” Dazai closes his eye and grips the cake box a tad tighter.
“WHO CARES, YA BLOODY RAT!? WHO DO YOU THIN—”
BANG!!!
Dazai heard the delightful sound of a body crumble and collapse, a gun clatter to the concrete. He smells the telltale scent of blood, and the cigarette trails off its aroma in such a way to alert the brunette it departed from its original owner.
He sighed with a bout of pleasure, before taking his feet to bring him to a leisurely stroll.
“BOSS!?” One of the men yowled, like a cat, which grated on Dazai’s ears.
“Sigh.”
He heard a gun adjusting behind him.
“YOU’S PIECE ‘A SHIT! YOU’LL PAY! YOU’LL—”
Just then, before the man could pull the trigger, another man before Dazai solidified, brandishing a scalpel.
Scarlett eyes, a menacing expression, a cloak of darkness.
“I’d prefer if you clean this up quietly.” Dazai spoke airily, as the scalpel had long been flicked into the man’s direction, carving a deep crevice into his thick skull.
The ground rattled with the collapse of what Dazai assumed to be a rather burly man with either a lot more fat or more muscle, or both. Either way, it didn’t matter anymore.
“I’m off schedule because of you.” The brunette spoke with a note of pity, maybe sorrow, under the voice drenched so deeply in darkness the man could vouch to be the very essence of it.
His figure appeared more lean, and the shadows of his face only grew. The light around the surrounding area seemed to dissipate, the shadows swallowing up anything that emitted a source of light in a ten foot radius. The overhead street light extinguished entirely.
His eye opened, now, a dark red, like cut-open flesh, yet shined like a blood moon. “Dispose of them swiftly. I can’t waste any more time of little leeches like them.”
The prince of darkness whisked away as the very blades, cards, and various other weapons alongside abilities, vanquished all the foes left behind flawlessly, disposing of them in a timely matter and settling back into the seclusion of the shadows. Various eyes trailed at the lingering path Dazai took, the night having swallowed him a long time ago, no traces of his arrival nor departure, personally, to be seen.
The only thing remained behind the trail of Dazai were only a few splatters of blood, none of which was his own act of doing. and a flickering street light that suddenly, with a buzz, it flickered and snuffed out.