#this was months ago aka before I read that BEAST author's note abt canon skk ditching the pm together in an alternate timeline

[daturas-are-pretty]

Benefit of the Doubt

Premise: ADA!Chuuya and ADA!Dazai, both going straight after a life in the PM, but they don't know each other.

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Chuuya had a hunch.

A grave, destructive hunch whenever he saw Dazai's eyes darken when he thought all heads had turned away.

The Agency was ruthless, but only when it needed to be. It had been carved into them, one way or the other.

Switching sides was more than shedding a coat, but symbols made it easier to draw a line in the sand.

This is who you are |This is who you were

Now, in face of the truth, Chuuya sometimes wondered if Dazai abhorred black for the same reasons as he did.

If he looked in the mirror and realized how dangerously easy it would be to just slip into the grooves of what they had once been.

If his sins were the demons that kept him up at night.

Or if it was the mistakes, the losses, the screw-ups that writhed and crawled in his veins, failure a bone-deep, burnished black he would never cleanse his hands from.

Chuuya would wade through an ocean of corpses if it meant the Agency's safety.

Those two years had been so lonely. Hanging between the underground and the surface world like a stray mutt who had been only trained to kill, kill, kill, and knew nothing else.

Waiting for the light had been so lonely.

Surely, Dazai knew what it felt like.

Chuuya didn't know Dazai, but the Agency had given him the benefit of a doubt when he'd first joined, and then time and time again as a fully qualified member.

Assholery did not guarantee suspicion, and unless and until he gave off the slightest hint of malice, Chuuya would find it in himself to keep making excuses for him.

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