Work Text:
For the first three days after Tanizaki’s official transfer to the mafia, Naomi does not show up to work.
Honestly, Atsushi figured she just left with him. When it was decided Tanizaki would be the one to transfer, Atsushi assumed that meant Naomi would leave too—they’ve been a packaged deal ever since he met them. He couldn’t imagine one staying while the other was gone.
But on the fourth day, she shows back up at the Agency office with dark circles under her eyes and her jaw set. She doesn’t say a word, though she offers Atsushi a polite nod before making her way to her desk. He looks to Dazai for an explanation, but Dazai is suddenly pretending to be asleep. Kunikida’s gaze is fixed on his laptop, Ranpo is very interested in their bag of chips, and Kyouka looks just as baffled as Atsushi is.
“Hi, Naomi-san!” Kenji greets brightly.
“Hello,” she replies, polite but not sounding like her usual self.
“Dazai-san?” Atsushi whispers, leaning closer to him, so hopefully Naomi won’t overhear.
Dazai snores.
Atsushi rolls his eyes, giving up on that for the moment and choosing to focus on his work instead.
Kenji almost misses it, because he’s nearly finished with his lunch when Naomi peeks into the lounge. His eyelids are growing heavy as he slowly lifts the final bites of his meal to his mouth, and the room is empty apart from himself and Kunikida.
He sort of looks up at the sound of the door opening, but his reaction is delayed, so he really just sees Naomi frowning and then turning to leave. The door shuts loudly behind her.
Kenji blinks several times, clicking his tongue. “Is she okay?”
Kunikida places a gentle hand on his shoulder. “Don’t worry about it.”
(He doesn’t realize until after he wakes up from his nap that Kunikida didn’t really answer his question.)
It’s when Naomi drops a file on Dazai’s desk with just a bit too much force that Kyouka realizes what the problem is. Maybe it was obvious to everyone else before, but Kyouka wasn’t really involved in the mafia transfer discussion. Yosano and Kunikida both insisted she have no part in it, and even Dazai agreed, so Kyouka was forced to sit down in the café with Kenji while everyone else conferenced about which of them would be going to the mafia.
It didn’t really take as long to decide as Kyouka thought it would. But Kenji told her that Tanizaki had already volunteered, back when they first found out about the deal Fukuzawa and Mori made.
So why did they have to discuss it? Kyouka thought, but didn’t ask, because she supposed it didn’t matter. Maybe it was just a formality thing.
Now, though, she thinks something else must have happened in that meeting, because Naomi is angry.
She throws the file on Dazai’s desk and walks away in silence, expression blank.
Dazai makes a mocking expression behind her back, like he thinks she’s being immature. That Kyouka doesn’t understand, because Dazai used to belong to the mafia too. He knows what it’s like there. How could he not understand why Naomi is angry? It seems obvious to Kyouka—if Atsushi had been the one to go to the mafia, she would be just as upset—if not more.
She would be doing everything she could to free him from the darkness. It would only be fair, after everything he did for her.
“Dazai,” Kunikida hisses.
He scoffs. “What?”
Kunikida looks at him. Dazai rolls his eyes.
“She’s acting like Gin-chan,” he complains.
“What?” Atsushi asks.
Naomi stops walking. She pivots with stiff movements, an icy glare having overtaken her face. “Gin-san is the only person who has ever been right about you,” she tells him.
Dazai’s smile turns sharp. He opens his mouth to respond, but before he gets a chance, Kunikida stomps on his foot hard enough to shut him up. The uninjured one, Kyouka hopes, though she couldn’t exactly see. Dazai doesn’t verbally complain, though; just sort of makes a face at Kunikida before sighing dramatically and laying his head down on his desk. He turns his head so he’s facing Ranpo.
Ranpo doesn’t look up.
Naomi goes back to her desk.
“Um,” Atsushi says.
Kyouka meets his eye and shakes her head. He clamps his mouth shut and looks down at the report he’s working on instead.
Lucy is familiar with rage.
She knows exactly what she’s looking at when Naomi returns to work at the Agency after her brother’s transfer, but she doesn’t really say anything, because what’s left to be said? That she’s sorry? That she wishes things were different? That she understands the way anger digs into your soul, winding its way through your veins until it becomes the only thing you know? It’s not like Lucy can bring Tanizaki back, and it’s not like she’d rather the transfer have been someone else.
She greets Naomi when she comes in in the morning as usual, and Naomi smiles back.
She greets Naomi again when she comes back through the café on her way home at the end of the day, on her own. It’s strange to see her without the company of her brother, and strange to see an Agency member without any company at all. The only person who seems to leave alone is Kunikida when he stays late—and even then, sometimes it takes Yosano or Ranpo coming back to drag him out of the office.
“D’you want a drink to go?” Lucy offers, because it’s sort of the only thing she can do. “On the house.”
Naomi pauses. She blinks, tilting her head, then shrugs. “Sure. Tea would be nice.”
She takes a seat at the bar while Lucy makes the drink for her. As she’s pouring the steaming liquid into a paper cup, the elevator doors open and Ranpo and Yosano walk out.
“Heya, Lucy-chan!” Ranpo greets.
“Hi,” Lucy replies evenly. She seals the lid on Naomi’s drink, then sets it down in front of her.
“Thanks! You’re the best, Lucy-chan!” Naomi says, voice chipper. She takes the cup, slides off her seat, then walks out of the café without acknowledging either Ranpo or Yosano.
The door slams shut behind her.
Ranpo’s lips pucker. “Dazai-kun was right.”
“Be nice,” Yosano chides.
“Hmph.” Ranpo crosses their arms, turning their nose up. Instead of pestering Lucy for free sweets like they usually do, they stride right out of the café. Yosano offers Lucy a polite nod and a quick farewell before following after them.
Naomi is accustomed to not being taken seriously.
Hazards of being a seventeen-year-old girl—no one believes you, or cares about you, or cares to listen to you. She’s used to being overlooked and brushed aside, but most times, she doesn’t mind much. If no one notices you, it’s easier to get away with things. Back when her brother first joined the Agency, and she followed him because what else would she do, Dazai taught her how to use this to her advantage. He showed her all the ways flying under the radar can be useful in their line of work.
While Tanizaki was trained to be a detective by Kunikida, Ranpo, and Yosano, Naomi was trained to be an asset like Dazai. She couldn’t be a detective, technically, on account of her not having an ability—but she could effectively be on-par with them under Dazai’s instruction.
You make for a surprisingly good student, he’d told her. Much better than my last ones. One only ever let me down and the other hated me. You remind me of the latter, in a way—but you’re much nicer!
Naomi had her speculations about Dazai’s previous affiliation before it was revealed to the masses, but he refused to answer her questions in any way that would confirm them. She was pretty sure that he knew that she knew, though—he has a way of knowing everything.
Which is why Naomi cannot possibly fathom why he’s acting like he had no idea she would be upset by his advocation for Jun’ichirou to be the one who would transfer to the Port Mafia.
He and Ranpo both—the two super geniuses, feigning ignorance and shrugging off how Naomi feels about this. Like she’s collateral damage they’ve decided is worth the cost of—of what? The Agency itself? Or just saving their own backs—so neither of them had to be the one to leave? So Dazai could save Kunikida, and so Ranpo could save Yosano, because they don’t really give a shit about anyone about from themselves.
They’re fucking traitors is what they are.
The Armed Detective Agency is supposed to be a family—that is what Ranpo has always said. And yet, when it came down to it, they were more than happy to have Jun’ichirou pack his bags and leave if it meant they could keep those they actually care about close. They’d waved their hand carelessly, said It has to be Tanizaki-kun or Atsushi-kun, and Dazai said, It can’t be Atsushi-kun, and Ranpo said, Guess that settles it then.
Like Jun’ichirou meant nothing to them. Like he was just a pawn in their game of chess rather than a friend. What sort of family sells one of its members out?
Family.
Yeah fucking right.
It’s clear the only people Ranpo actually sees as family are Yosano, Dazai, and Kunikida. The rest of them are just useful cards that happened to be pulled from the deck, which can be sacrificed in a heartbeat whenever it’s deemed necessary.
After the revelation of his past, Dazai confessed to Naomi that the two students he’d mentioned to her were Akutagawa, and his sibling Gin. Akutagawa was the one who could never quite meet the standards he had set, while Gin was the one who hated him.
Because of how I treated their brother, Dazai explained, picking at his fingernails. But I merely did what needed to be done.
Naomi didn’t understand at the time, but now—
Now, she understands Gin better than she has ever understood anyone. She doesn’t know what all went down between Dazai and Akutagawa, but she knows how little regard Dazai has for the people around him and she knows how he sees those in his life as tools rather than humans. She knows what it’s like for Dazai to look at the person you love most in the entire world and say, Not good enough when there is nothing they could have possibly done to change that judgment.
Jun’ichirou could not have argued for himself in any way that mattered when Dazai and Ranpo had already made a decision about his fate. Naomi gets the feeling Dazai must have seen Akutagawa in the same way—that there was no possible course of action he could have taken to earn Dazai’s approval. And how is that fair?
How is any of this fair?!
If the choice had been Naomi’s, she never would have settled for the deal Fukuzawa made in the first place. Surely there must have been some other way—anything else. Anything besides sending Jun’ichirou away, anything besides carving out part of the Agency’s beating heart and tossing it to the devil like a bone to a rabid dog.
And if Dazai and Ranpo ever actually cared about Jun’ichirou, they could have found some other solution.
“She’ll be okay,” Kunikida says over lunch. “She’s a strong girl; she’ll be able to work through this.”
Akiko eyes his shaking hands as he clumsily lifts his chopsticks to his mouth. They still haven’t figured out what’s causing the tremors. She’s tried a full healing treatment three times now, to no effect.
“I’m not sure the issue is whether or not she’ll eventually be okay,” she replies carefully.
“The issue is whether or not she can get over herself,” Dazai huffs. Notably, he has not taken a single bite of his food. He’s just sort of been pushing it around in the bento box Kunikida made for him. He’s tried to offer some to Ranpo twice, and Ranpo turned him down both times, though they haven’t eaten anything of substance themself either.
“I don’t understand why she didn’t leave too,” they whine. “Obviously she doesn’t want to be here, so why not just go?”
“It’s not that simple,” Akiko points out. “Tanizaki-kun didn’t want her to join with him.”
Ranpo makes a face. “So? When has that ever stopped her before?”
“Ranpo-san, you wouldn’t want to join the mafia with any of us either,” Kunikida tells them. “I think it is perfectly reasonable for Naomi-chan to elect to remain with the Agency.”
“She doesn’t like you either,” Ranpo bites. “You’re just as much at fault as we are in her eyes! Because you agreed Tanizaki-kun should be the one to go.”
“He volunteered—!”
“That doesn’t matter,” Akiko cuts in. Ranpo snaps their mouth shut, but not without glowering in her direction. Dazai has stopped playing with his food and started gnawing on one of his chopsticks instead. He’s getting agitated. Akiko wonders how much of it is him poorly coping with the Naomi situation, and how much is him poorly coping with the issue of his leg. “I’m not sure any of you understand her anger.”
“Of course I understand it!” Dazai snaps. “It’s the same bullshit I got from Gin—”
Akiko slams a fist down on the table, effectively shutting him up.
“You don’t,” she insists. “You are a man. And when you were an angry teenager, you got a mafia battalion to back you up and do your bidding. You got to go prancing around the city with Fancy Hat killing people on a whim to take out your rage, and you were commended for it.” She folds her hands together. The weight of the butterfly clip in her hair seems to multiply. “You do not know what it is like to be an angry girl. Your rage has always been deemed righteous.”
“She’s angry?” Atsushi asks.
Kyouka nods solemnly.
“But…Tanizaki-kun volunteered to go to the mafia?”
Kyouka presses her lips together. She takes a long moment before responding, and when she does, it doesn’t really answer all of the confusion Atsushi feels:
“He might have volunteered because the circumstances demanded it. Everyone who winds up in the mafia is there because they felt they had no other choice. And…I think for many people, it is easier to be angry than it is to be sad.”
The eternal question Lucy finds herself asking is: How much anger is too much?
How much anger is righteous—how much is what you are owed, because you are a human being with every right to experience every emotion that exists—and when does it tip over into being a problem you alone can fix? Because she is right to be angry with Francis and the Guild for how they treated her, but there is no use holding onto the rage forever. Eventually, it will draw blood. Eventually, it will turn her heart black. Eventually, her anger will be the only thing she is.
But.
She still has a right to it.
And Naomi has a right to hers as well.
Betrayal cuts deep, and loss cuts even deeper. Lucy hates Francis for the way he turned his back, but the grief over losing the Guild left a wound in her chest that is still gaping, and not even her friendship with the Agency is enough to patch it up.
Naomi walks into the café on her second day back at the Agency with her anger wrapped around her like a suit of armor. And Lucy wants to say something, but—
She pulls back again.
It’s not really her fight, is it?
“I don’t get it,” Ranpo says to Naomi’s face on her second day back in the office, at nine-thirty in the morning. “Why are you here?”
The flames within her spark, raging within seconds, engulfing her entire body until she can feel nothing apart from the fiery heat. “What? You’re upset you couldn’t send me away too? You’d rather the president have made a two-for-one deal?”
“You don’t even want to be here,” Ranpo argues.
It’s true as much as it is false. Naomi doesn’t want to be here without Jun’ichirou, and with the others in the wake of their cruelty. But she wants to be at the Agency. She doesn’t want to go to the mafia; she wants to be here, but the here that existed before. She wants to be the student who lived up to Dazai’s expectations; the non-detective who was just as smart as all of those officially on staff. She wants to sit at her desk beside Jun’ichirou and gossip with Ranpo and have girls’ nights with Yosano and Kyouka. She wants the Agency she knew back, instead of this hollow shell with tension and apathy seeping from the cracks in the walls.
She wants the Agency that felt like a family, instead of a clique she’s standing on the edge of.
But at the same time—
“Don’t pretend like you care what I want,” Naomi spits back. “You have only ever cared about yourself.”
“Tanizaki-kun leaving isn’t my fault.” Ranpo crosses their arms. “I didn’t make that stupid deal; go get mad at Fukuzawa-san.”
“He was the most logical choice to leave anyway,” Dazai tacks on, because he can’t just shut the fuck up for some reason. Because he has to be right, and have the last word, and make sure everyone is sympathetic to him as if he doesn’t have the blood of thousands on his hands. As if he wasn’t rightfully sent to the highest security prison in the world with a triple life sentence on his shoulders.
“Yeah.” Ranpo shrugs. “Dazai-kun is right.”
And something in Naomi—
—snaps.
She turns on her heel, marching over to Ranpo’s desk and slamming her hands down on it. “You are supposed to be the smartest detective in the world! You and Dazai are supposed to be some crazy super geniuses, with no competition now that Dostoyevsky is dead.”
(The rage boils and bubbles inside of her, sparking brilliantly through her veins.)
“If you’re so goddamn smart, you could have found a way to stop the transfer altogether! Don’t act like you were powerless.” Her heart pounds; her limbs are numb. “If you wanted Jun’ichirou to stay here, you would have figured out some way to make it happen.”
“Naomi-chan, it isn’t that simple,” Kunikida tries, but Naomi is not listening to him. He might fall for Dazai and Ranpo’s lies hook-line-and-sinker, but Naomi is not that gullible. Dazai trained her to be better than that. She is not going to sit by and pretend Jun’ichirou’s leaving was a necessary tragedy when the Agency has the two smartest people in the world working side-by-side. Surely there must have been some loophole in the deal that was made, or some other bargain they could have laid over top of it.
Naomi does want to be at the Agency, but she wants the Agency to be how it was before the Decay of Angels incident. But the problem is—
“Of course we didn’t want Tanizaki-kun to leave,” Dazai lies.
—what’s done is done.
Even if Jun’ichirou returned now, even if Dazai and Ranpo were the ones to make that possible, that doesn’t erase the fact that they were so ready and willing to send him away. Nothing now can change the decision they already made and have chosen to stand by.
So the Agency can’t go back to how it was before, can it? Because regardless of how everyone else feels, Naomi knows she is never going to forgive Dazai or Ranpo—or Kunikida or Yosano, for that matter. As long as Naomi is here, they will be split down the middle, or she will be standing precariously on the outside, never quite fully allowed in because she refuses to set aside her distaste for those who wronged her and her brother both.
“Then why,” Naomi asks, like a knife against bare skin, “did you let it happen?”
Expectedly, neither Dazai nor Ranpo seem to have an answer.
Kunikida chides her for being too mean.
Kenji says, in his experience, it’s always best to be slow to anger.
But Naomi doesn’t have an ability that feeds off her emotions; all she has is herself. And when Kyouka takes her lunch break with Naomi later that day, she quietly admits she probably would have been even meaner. She probably would have drawn a knife where Naomi only cut with her words.
Lucy has another to-go cup of tea and a pastry waiting for Naomi when she gets off work.
Naomi just sort of looks at it for a moment, but the cup clearly has hear name written on it in clumsy katakana. There is no other ナオミ she knows, and the café is empty apart from herself and Lucy.
She takes a seat at the bar, at which point Lucy finally notices her arrival. “Oh, hey Naomi-chan! You don’t have to take those if you don’t want; I just thought—”
“Why?” Naomi interrupts.
“Um.” Lucy blinks. “I thought it might lift your spirits?”
“Why?” she presses. Lucy has no reason to be kind to her; Lucy isn’t involved in this at all. She just happens to be friends with Atsushi, and she happens to work in close proximity to where Naomi works.
Lucy purses her lips. Her eyes dart around, like she’s afraid of being caught or watched, and then she lets out a sigh. She tosses aside the cloth she’d been using to scrub down her workspace before making her way over to Naomi, leaning her arms on the counter. “Because I know what it’s like to be mad. Atsushi-kun’s kindness was like a light in the darkness to me.” She shrugs. “I guess I just want to pass that along if I can.”
Naomi wraps her hands around the cup, still warm, in a comforting sort of way rather than the way her anger heats her from the inside out. “It doesn’t fix anything.”
“No,” Lucy agrees. “Only time does.”
“I don’t think time will be enough.”
“Distance helps too,” Lucy offers. “Sometimes, you just have to leave and never come back. But I’ll let you in on a secret.” She leans in close, and whispers, “I’m still mad, too. It’s subdued now, but I don’t think it will ever fully go away.”
Naomi takes a sip of her tea. “How do you live with it?”
“The same way you live with everything else, I suppose. Try to keep moving forward.”
Naomi thinks of Dazai and Ranpo and all of the others still up in the office, and she thinks of a life where she continues showing up to work every day having to coexist with them. She thinks of this precarious balance stretching on for eternity, anger biting at her while she refuses to speak to Dazai unless absolutely necessary, never being able to escape the faces of those who wronged Jun’ichirou when they should have been fighting to save him. And she sort of wants to throw up.
But she thinks of following Jun’ichirou to the mafia, and—
Isn’t that the same as giving up? Isn’t that giving Dazai and Ranpo exactly what they want?
She asks Lucy, on impulse: “Are you guys hiring?”
On the sixth day after the mafia transfer, Atsushi arrives at work to find Naomi behind the counter in the café. She’s listening intently as the manager explains how the espresso machin works, and Atsushi has to do a double take to make sure he isn’t hallucinating. Even then, he’s not completely sure, so he turns to Kyouka and asks, “Can you see her too?”
Kyouka nods. She looks around him and greets, “Good morning, Naomi-san.”
Naomi perks up. “Hi, Kyouka-chan! And Atsushi-kun!” She’s smiling at them, which is something Atsushi has noticed she only really does when speaking to him or Kyouka, or maybe Kenji. It’s strange, because she used to be peppy and happy around everyone else in the office. She joked around with Dazai and gossiped with Ranpo and teased Kunikida and assisted Yosano in the infirmary.
Now, though, she hardly bothers to acknowledge they exist.
Kyouka and Atsushi still get smiles and kindness from her, though. Which Atsushi supposes means she doesn’t blame them for her brother’s fate—even though Atsushi is partially at fault. He’s the lucky one, the one who was saved in Tanizaki’s place, because really, the options for the transfer were just the two of them. No one would send Dazai, Kyouka, or Yosano back to Mori. Kunikida is set as the next president, Kenji is too young, and Ranpo is the Agency’s linchpin. Atsushi and Tanizaki were the only feasible options.
And Atsushi got to stay, so Tanizaki had to go.
He’s doesn’t understand why Naomi isn’t mad at him too. He might deserve it even more than Kunikida and Yosano.
“Are you working here now?” Kyouka asks Naomi.
“I’m trying it out,” Naomi replies.
Dazai and Yosano show up about ten minutes after Atsushi and Kyouka have headed up to the Agency office. The bell above the door rings, and Naomi tenses, same as she has every time the door has opened since she first arrived this morning. This time, though, her instinctive reaction was correct.
She greets them with a glare instead of a smile.
Dazai clicks his tongue in dismay when he sees her. “You could’ve taken your brother’s spot as a detective, you know,” he says.
“Did you try to win Gin-san over with the same empty promises?” Naomi shoots back. “‘Oh, if only you’d continued training with me, you could have climbed the ranks even faster than Akutagawa-kun. You could be an executive by now but you just won’t listen to me’.”
“They could have been,” Dazai says. He turns away. “I’d have killed Verlaine to give them his spot if they proved themself worthy of it. But they have the same problem as you: They’re too attached to their feelings.”
Naomi’s grip tightens around the mug in her hand. She imagines it shattering beneath her grip, and then imagines throwing the shards in Dazai’s face. “And you aren’t?” she hisses.
He looks back up at her, a dangerous darkness in his eyes.
“You picked Atsushi-kun to stay,” she says, “because you like him more than you have ever liked my brother.”
“You would be better off if you stopped stewing in your anger and moved on,” Dazai tells her.
Yosano steps in then, kicking Dazai’s uninjured shin and giving him a look of dismay. It’s the first time she’s acted in defense of Naomi since everything went down—the first time Naomi hasn’t seen her just turning a blind eye to stay in the others’ good graces.
“That is not your decision to make,” she tells him. “Naomi-chan’s anger is perfectly justified. And no one can choose what she does with it apart from Naomi herself.”
“I understand anger,” Yosano says, seated at the bar in the café two days later. Naomi and Lucy are both behind the counter, and Kyouka is beside Yosano, picking at a pastry. “And I understand the grief that comes with it, too.”
“Then you should talk to Dazai and Ranpo,” Naomi tells her. “They’ll listen to you better than me, because they actually like you.”
“And what would that accomplish?”
Naomi opens her mouth, and then closes it. It might accomplish making Dazai and Ranpo both acutely aware of how mad she is at them, but they’re not stupid. They already know. Any lingering confusion or surprise at her reaction is either a faux innocence meant to protect their image in the eyes of everyone else or a willful ignorance that will not be upended by Yosano any more than it was broken by Naomi.
“Like I said,” Lucy sets a cup of steaming coffee in front of Yosano, “time and distance do more than anything else. If Fitzgerald wanted to apologize for how he treated me, he would have done it already. He hasn’t, so he must not be sorry, and I hate him for it, but there’s nothing else that can be done.”
“Do you not miss the Guild?”
Lucy looks down, fidgeting with the hem of her apron. Quietly, she admits, “I’ve never missed anything more.”
“But the Guild doesn’t exist in the same way it used to,” Yosano fills in. “Even if you went back, you wouldn’t find what you lost.”
Lucy nods. “Exactly.”
“It’s not wrong to be angry,” Yosano says. “I don’t think it’s even wrong to never offer forgiveness. I think you can be angry forever, but the trick is finding happiness to balance it out.”
“It’s the same as being sad,” Kyouka mutters. Naomi wasn’t expecting her to say anything—she hadn’t spoken since the conversation began, and honestly, Naomi believed Yosano only brought her along as a peace offering or maybe a shield. “No kind person asks you to stop grieving those who have passed, but if you’re only sad forever, you have nothing to live for.”
As much as Naomi hates it, it makes sense.
But—
“How am I supposed to find happiness that isn’t tangled up with the hurt?”
Lucy and Yosano sort of look at each other. Kyouka goes back to picking at her food without actually eating anything. Whatever answer they have must be something they know Naomi doesn’t want to hear.
“Only you can really decide…” Yosano starts.
Lucy interrupts to say, “I think you should leave.”
Kyouka hunches her shoulders.
“Fuck the Agency,” Lucy continues. “Fuck Dazai and Ranpo and that shitty ass deal your president made. And fuck the mafia, too. Everyone is in the wrong here, because that deal shouldn’t have been made, and then it shouldn’t have gone through, but it was and it did and now you’re the one suffering in the aftermath, and literally fuck all of that. Neither the Agency nor the mafia deserve your allegiance. But staying here and working in the café is not going to give you the distance you need. As much as I’d love to have you as my co-worker, I don’t think you should stay. I think you should maintain contact with the people here you’re friends with, but I don’t think you should stay.”
“I agree,” Kyouka whispers.
And Naomi wants to yell, to scream ARE YOU TRADING ME AWAY FOR THE SAKE OF YOUR OWN CONSCIENCE? DO YOU WANT DAZAI AND RANPO TO WIN?
But what are they winning?
They already won, because Jun’ichirou is already gone. Anything past that has no victors and no losers. There is no point in Naomi sticking around to wage psychological warfare against two super geniuses because the only person who will wind up hurt is her own self. It’s like staying with a shitty boyfriend to spite your family. There is literally no fucking point.
“Oh,” Naomi says. “I see.”
“You don’t have to decide right now,” Yosano tells her. “Just whenever you’re ready. If you think it over and you want to come back to the Agency, I’ll make sure you still have a place with us. And if you want to leave, I’ll help you in any way I can with that, too.”
Lucy and Kyouka nod in unison.
“Anything you need, you can count on us!” Lucy declares.
“No matter what you choose, you’re still our friend,” Kyouka finishes. “That is much more important than where you work.”
(And for just one moment, the roaring anger within Naomi’s chest quiets; for just one moment, the eye of the storm settles over her heart and she can see the sun.)
“Coward,” Dazai says, dropping Naomi’s letter of resignation on Kunikida’s desk.
Ranpo rolls their eyes. “She’ll be back. She’s just trying to get us to go back on our decision by playing the only card she has.”
Kunikida furrows his brow.
Yosano picks up the letter, folding it up neatly and slotting it back into its envelope. “I don’t think that’s the case at all.”
Ranpo tilts their head. “What do you mean?”
“I don’t think her leaving had anything to do with you two.” She turns away, heading towards the president’s office so she can pass the news along to him. “I think she did it for herself.”