Mori took me back to the room that I've been staying in for the past week to wait while he went to inform the higher ups of the boss's passing. I immediately laid down on the bed, savoring the feeling. After my testimonial, I would be back on the street. Only for a little while though, death would soon follow, but that time spent there would still be uncomfortable compared to a real bed.
Mori came back for me sometime later. I tried reading his expression, but it was carefully hidden behind his kind doctor facade. He was keeping tight lipped about the outcome of his talk. I wanted to tell the man to drop the act, but every conversation with him was a minefield where we were both planting deadly bombs in the other's mind. Every word was a chance to manipulate the other party, to turn them into your marionette while you played the puppet master. It was impressive, truly, until it was aimed at you.
Mori led me to the office of one of the mafia's executives. I didn't know this man. There are five executives within the Port Mafia: an older man with a monacale, a lady with long red hair and more classical Japanese style clothing, a foreigner with a permanent chill, and two others that I had yet to meet.
The man sent me a harsh, appraising, glare, and for a moment I imagined just slitting his throat like Mori had done to the previous boss. The thought came unbidden. The most startling thing about it was not how easy it would be for me to do with my training, but how little the thought seemed to affect me. In that moment, I could have killed the man in cold blood, and I don't even know if I would've felt bad about it. Maybe everything good in me died with me when I jumped. Or maybe it was earlier than that, with the fire. I stood up straighter, pushing the thoughts from my head. Demigods killed monsters, not mortals.
The man had short blue hair, pulled into a ponytail at the base of his neck. His eyes were an eerie blue green that seemed to almost glow as he stared at me. He held out his hand and introduced himself, though I didn't listen to his name. I was too focused on the way my ability showed itself when our hands met.
"Mr. Osamu," the man said in a haughty tone, using my first name freely without permission, "I'd ask that you not use an ability in here." The man looked terribly offended with me. The hypocrite.
I gave the man a smile that was all sharp teeth. "My ability is a passive one Sir," I explained, enjoying the way the man's confident expression turned into a complicated one. Passive abilities were dangerous. They were weapons without a sheath to protect others from being cut.
The man coughed, alarmed, "What does your ability do?"
I lowered my face, showing the executive a hooded glare. "My ability allows me to nullify all other abilities through touch," the man was sweating, like he was the one being interrogated instead of me. Messing with authority figures is the most fun I've had in a year. "It only shows itself like that when it comes in contact with another active ability," I explained, stressing the word. Cheap tricks wouldn't get the man out of this one.
I liked watching the way he squirmed under my gaze. There was something dangerous in the interaction, something alive. "What's your ability name Mr.-?"
"Dazai," I cut in before the man could finish his sentence, "my name is Dazai."
The man nodded and tried again, "what's your ability name Mr. Dazai?"
"No Longer Human" If my theory was right about the origin of abilities, then I really wasn't all that human. I was more god than human, more monster. That was the main reason I didn't fight Mori when he proposed the name earlier this week. It seemed Mori could feel the otherness in me too.
The man gave a stiff nod, seeming to find the name appropriate as well. I'm sure I didn't look all that human to him right now. "I just need your account from tonight and then you can go," he explained. The man sounded ready to be rid of me and never see me again. The feeling was mutual. The faster I got out of here, the faster that I could die.
"The doctor, Mori-san, and I went on our nightly visit to the boss's room. When we got there, the boss seemed a little erratic, more so than normal," I explained. The thing about lying was that the best ones were always a masterful balance between lies and truth. Enough of one to cover and support the other. "He wanted to make sure that he had a proper successor. I think he could feel his time running out," I lied, keeping my face the same careful blank. "He named Mori-san his successor just before going into convulsions. Mori-san acted quickly and performed a tracheotomy, but it was too late," I finished. That was a part of the lie that we had come up with to cover why the boss's neck had been slit.
The executive excused me after writing the story down, double checking the finer points with me before letting me go. Mori was waiting for me outside the executive's office with what appeared to be a proud look on his face. Though if he was proud of skill to lie or his plan succeeding at that moment was unknown, but if I had to guess it would be the ladder. We walked down the hall to the elevator, heading to the doctor's office.
I automatically moved to my spot at the stool while Mori collapsed at his desk. A thought grazed my mind as we sat there in silence. Mori was pouring over a set of lab results that came in before we left to go kill the boss. His face held a disappointed expression, but his body language gave him away. The doctor held the paper like it was a piece of gold.
"Mori-san," I called, pulling the man out of whatever spiral he was diving deep into.
"Yes Dazai-kun?" he looked up at me, placing the paper carefully on the desk. Seeing his whole face was even worse. Whatever was on that paper made the doctor look like Tantalus, a starving man presented with food, but was unable to eat it. Whatever he was looking for was just out of reach. He looked so disgustingly human at that moment.
"That executive, what was his ability," I asked, letting curiosity overcome my revulsion.
"Ah," Mori smiled, leaning back in his chair. He was doing that face where he was deciding how best to phrase his words. What information to give and what information to make me guess at. Always testing my brain to see just how fast I could make it work. "It's called the Lost Hero," he finally said. "The ability allows him to wander into your recent memory when he touches you," Mori explained, "though he doesn't remember what he's seen. Only when you tell him what happened does he get brief flashes of the past."
So it's almost like an amnesia ability.
I nodded my head, understanding now why he was the in-house interrogator. "Is that why you walked me to my room before going to his office, so you could draw out some sort of time limit?"
Mori gave me his small proud smile, the one that he always gave me when I did something intelligent that he liked. "Correct," he confirmed.
The look of the doctor's face changed, like a thought had just occurred to him. I knew him well enough by now to know that that look was complete bullshit, nothing more than a clumsy facade to fool lesser men. Mori never did anything, never said anything if he hadn't already thought through all of the details of it. He never shows when he gets an idea either. "Dazia-san," he started, leaning forward to garner attention, "what if you stayed here with me, in my care until you find a suitable way to kill yourself?" he proposed.
I know that he's playing me, that whatever motive he has for doing this has to do with those test results. Probably something to do with me having a more potent concentration of the original mutated ability gene. And maybe even a little bit to do with the encroaching loneliness that will take him away once the only other person that knows the truth of our crime is gone. Even so, my only other option was to leave here and try killing myself again. Though suicide attempts would undoubtedly happen either way, at least here I had more access to resources to do so. Back on the streets, I would starve again, something much more painful than I'd originally thought it was. I could always try my luck at jumping again, but last time I fell from a deadly height and didn't even break a single bone. This, this offer, was easier. It was a cheap way out, but still it was easier than going back to the slums.
Despite my better judgment, I found myself agreeing.
—
To celebrate Mori's successful promotion, he took me out to eat. "Being a doctor among mafioso is a lonely profession," he explained when I asked why it was just the two of us. "When you are always the one cleaning up their messes and not out there causing them alongside them, an invisible barrier seems to form."
Some people might have thought he was crazy, but strangely I understood what he meant. Going back to school after spending my first summer at camp, going back into the world of mortals, it felt like I no longer belonged among them. In the end the only friend that I made there was Tyson, my half brother and a cyclops. Mortals were out of the question. However, ability users felt different. Each of them were off in some way. It was like you had to give something up to gain an ability in return. But it was this strangeness that made being around them slightly more tolerable than being around mortals, though being around either group still felt like it's own brand of torture.
We sat at the table with our food before us. I'd ordered some crab, finding it to be one of the few meals that I liked but even as I sat there eating it, I could only eat so much. Mori gave me a pitying look, it told me that he knew that when Elise found me about to kill myself and on the brink of starvation that eating would be a problem from there after. I tried to push the food away, but his look morphed into something else, it told me that we wouldn't leave this table until I finished all the food on the plate like he already had.
I'd shoved the last piece of food into my mouth when my gag reflex finally kicked in. I ran to the bathroom, throwing up the entire dinner. I'd know that I would regret staying with the doctor, I'd just not anticipated the regret coming this early, not even a full night later.