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Entry tags:
Closure
Title: Closure
Fandom: Bungou to Alchemist, Bungou Stray Dogs
Character(s): BunAru Chuuya, BunAru Ango, BSD Dazai, BSD Kunikida
Pairing(s): BunAru Chuuya/BSD Atsushi
Genre: Hurt/Comfort/Things Blowing Up
Word Count: 1,750
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: Mentioned child abuse
Summary: Chuuya makes a trip back to Atsushi's former world in order to level an orphanage to the ground.
Notes: In the same AU-based-on-crossover-RP as Library Life, but with more things blowing up.
You can’t destroy an orphanage by yourself.
Well, no, that’s not true. You absolutely can, and Chuuya knows that right now he easily can. But he’s only one person, and herding all the children out of the building and keeping an eye on every one of them while he razes the place is a little beyond his abilities.
So he asks someone to come with him - anyone will do if they’ve got eyes in their head and don’t mind a little destruction. Miyazawa’s good with kids, but he’d be upset if any workers happened to still be in the building when it fell, so Chuuya doesn’t ask him. Hagiwara’s too much of a klutz to be safe in this situation, so in the end he settles on Ango, who agrees instantly.
It’s either because the prospect of blowing something up is too appealing to turn down, or because the fact that Chuuya’s completely sober when he asks is too out of character for Ango to leave him to his own devices. Or a mix of both.
He hasn’t been back to this world since he picked up Atsushi and Kyouka, but it looks the same as it did then. The detective agency is in the same spot, and Dazai still makes a joke about installing a pet door for Chuuya if he can’t reach the doorknob the moment he walks inside, which Chuuya only grumbles at for a second before he gets down to business.
Chuuya knows what the orphanage looks like, but he doesn’t know where to find it. If he’d asked Atsushi, maybe he would have told him, but then he’d have asked why he wanted to know, and Chuuya wasn’t planning on telling him that he was doing any of this.
Dazai’s willing to provide directions, and when Chuuya asks if they can bring the orphans back here for them to sort out or if they need to go to city hall, he shrugs and says that it’ll be more work for the agency and Kunikida will complain about the paperwork for weeks, but it’s probably not a good idea for two people who don’t exist in this world to announce that they pulled a bunch of kids out of a (presumably) legitimate orphanage and then burned it down, either. Chuuya’s taking that as approval.
Ango and Dazai have a brief moment of bewilderment at each other - naturally, since Ango doesn’t know the authors Atsushi and Kyouka all that well and Dazai’s only met Chuuya from his world - before Chuuya rolls his eyes and tells them to catch up after they’ve done what they came here to do.
The orphanage looks almost exactly the same as it did in Atsushi’s dream. It even has the same lock on the gate, which Chuuya promptly shoots out. The gunshot is probably not a reassuring thing to hear for anyone inside, but it’s not like he was going to climb the fence.
The layout’s the same, and while Ango waits outside to make sure the kids don’t run off alone, Chuuya scours every inch of the building for anywhere kids might be. When he finds one - usually panicking over the strange, visibly armed adults in the building - he explains to the child:
“I’m not going to hurt you, but I’m going to destroy this building, so please go outside so you don’t get hurt. Okay?”
Plenty of the kids run outside with no further prompting, self-preservation winning over anything else. Some stammer that they can’t go outside without permission, and Chuuya clicks his tongue at that before he answers.
“You won’t be going far. If anyone gets mad at you, you can blame me for it. They’ll definitely punish the stranger who broke in instead of you. Okay?”
Not that he intends to let himself be punished, but it works, and the kid escapes.
Of course, not everyone in the orphanage is an orphan. There are also plenty of workers that he bumps into, and those get a different ultimatum:
“I’m going to level this place to the ground. You probably don’t want to be inside when I do that, but it doesn’t make any difference to me if you live or die. Your choice.”
He doesn’t know which of these workers was around when Atsushi still lived in this orphanage. He can’t tell by their faces who whipped him, who denied him food when he was starving, who crumbled his self-esteem into fine powder. He doesn’t want to know.
These people almost certainly have done the same to other children, and that’s enough for Chuuya to not care for their lives.
Orphanage workers aren’t fighters, and Chuuya has a gun, so no one tries to stop him. They run.
Chuuya clears the whole place out, including the basement. A sense of nausea fills him when he sees the shackles on the wall, but he doesn’t let it distract him from his task.
One he’s absolutely sure there aren’t any kids inside, he returns to the front yard. The kids are mostly either gathered around Ango - he’s stroking a young girl’s hair gently as she cries - or hiding in the corners of the yard, eyeing the open gate with a nervousness that Chuuya recognizes from Atsushi’s dream - knowing that there is an outside world and that they could go, but not sure where to or how they’d survive.
The workers aren’t here. Ango is more intimidating than Chuuya even without a gun.
“All set?” Ango asks, when Chuuya returns to stand near to him.
“Yeah.” Chuuya checks the predicted blast radius - no one too close - and then pulls out a bottle full of a swirling red liquid from his pocket. He takes a deep breath, uncorks it, and then throws it at the building.
Miss Librarian’s alchemy is suited for her job because she can work with emotions attached to objects. She’d given him the bottle when he’d asked for something that could raze a building that shouldn’t exist to the ground and told him that it would collapse under the weight of its history.
Now he realizes exactly what she meant by that.
The bottle breaks, as any glass object thrown with force does when it hits a door, and the red liquid spreads out over the doorstep. For just a moment there is silence, and then the voices start.
Children’s voices. Some are crying, some are screaming. Some are asking what they did wrong, and some are begging to be given another chance. They mingle into each other, a cacophony of pain, until Chuuya can no longer make out individual words.
As the voices grow louder, the red liquid turns into a mist that covers the entire building. It swirls around it, and as the children outside huddle together in awe and fear, the orphanage starts to break down.
It’s not a quick and clean disappearance, because the pain of those who once lived here is a messy and awful thing. The ceiling caves in first. One of the outer walls snaps in half, the top sliding off before vaporizing entirely. From what of the inside Chuuya can see, even the furniture is breaking and shattering into powder.
The howling doesn’t stop. It only gets louder as more of the orphanage collapses and turns into nothing but red-tinted dust. It gets louder and louder, and Chuuya has to cover his ears - Ango is covering the ears of a child who can’t move his arms enough to cover them himself - or he feels like he’ll never hear anything but those screams again.
When the noise stops all at once, there’s nothing left of the orphanage but a hole in the ground. Even the basement has been utterly destroyed.
Chuuya uncovers his ears and looks over at the children. It’s silent, so silent that he thinks he might actually have lost his hearing entirely, until one of the youngest children asks in a quivering voice, “We… don’t have to go back?”
“You’re going to go somewhere better,” Chuuya says. “Promise.”
The walk back to the city proper takes a long time, mostly because all the children want to stop and check every detail of their surroundings that they haven’t been allowed to see. Chuuya doesn’t blame them. He also doesn’t blame them for how long it takes to herd a small sea of kids into the detective agency’s office, which was not made to hold an entire orphanage’s worth of children.
He’s pretty sure the guy whose desk had the candy stash is going to be mad that it was eaten, but maybe he should be at work if he doesn’t want his stuff stolen while he’s gone.
Kunikida looks like he’s going to have a migraine for the rest of his life as he goes on and on about long-term consequences and not solving the actual problem and couldn’t they have just found a way to replace the staff with people who weren’t awful- Every time he starts to raise his voice he seems to remember that he’s in a room full of scared children and lowers it again.
When he seems to be done ranting, Chuuya shrugs and says, “But you’ll make sure they get somewhere better, right?”
“At least take responsibility-!” Kunikida’s eye twitches when Ango laughs out loud and Chuuya snorts. Even if he knew the kind of people Ango and Chuuya are, he probably wouldn’t think it was hilarious as they do.
“He’ll take care of them,” Dazai says, sounding much more reassuring than he would if he was claiming any responsibility himself.
“Great,” says Chuuya, stepping back towards the door. “We oughta get going. Places to be, boyfriends to never mention this to.”
“Tell him I said hi!” Dazai says brightly. “And Kyouka too! Oh, Kunikida, do you have anything you want to pass on?”
Right now, Kunikida’s scowl would make Chuuya believe that he’s never smiled in his life. “Don’t change the subject, I’m not done-”
Ango exits with no more than a wave of his hand and, “Later,” and Chuuya turns to follow after him.
“Wait!” When Chuuya looks back over his shoulder, Kunikida’s expression has softened a little. “...Tell them to take care of themselves.”
“We’re glad they’re safe and happy,” Dazai says, with a smile Chuuya knows is genuine. “But they always have a home here, if they ever want to come back. ...It’d lower our workload, so~”
Chuuya grins. “I’ll tell them. But I’m pretty sure they already know.”
Fandom: Bungou to Alchemist, Bungou Stray Dogs
Character(s): BunAru Chuuya, BunAru Ango, BSD Dazai, BSD Kunikida
Pairing(s): BunAru Chuuya/BSD Atsushi
Genre: Hurt/Comfort/Things Blowing Up
Word Count: 1,750
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: Mentioned child abuse
Summary: Chuuya makes a trip back to Atsushi's former world in order to level an orphanage to the ground.
Notes: In the same AU-based-on-crossover-RP as Library Life, but with more things blowing up.
You can’t destroy an orphanage by yourself.
Well, no, that’s not true. You absolutely can, and Chuuya knows that right now he easily can. But he’s only one person, and herding all the children out of the building and keeping an eye on every one of them while he razes the place is a little beyond his abilities.
So he asks someone to come with him - anyone will do if they’ve got eyes in their head and don’t mind a little destruction. Miyazawa’s good with kids, but he’d be upset if any workers happened to still be in the building when it fell, so Chuuya doesn’t ask him. Hagiwara’s too much of a klutz to be safe in this situation, so in the end he settles on Ango, who agrees instantly.
It’s either because the prospect of blowing something up is too appealing to turn down, or because the fact that Chuuya’s completely sober when he asks is too out of character for Ango to leave him to his own devices. Or a mix of both.
He hasn’t been back to this world since he picked up Atsushi and Kyouka, but it looks the same as it did then. The detective agency is in the same spot, and Dazai still makes a joke about installing a pet door for Chuuya if he can’t reach the doorknob the moment he walks inside, which Chuuya only grumbles at for a second before he gets down to business.
Chuuya knows what the orphanage looks like, but he doesn’t know where to find it. If he’d asked Atsushi, maybe he would have told him, but then he’d have asked why he wanted to know, and Chuuya wasn’t planning on telling him that he was doing any of this.
Dazai’s willing to provide directions, and when Chuuya asks if they can bring the orphans back here for them to sort out or if they need to go to city hall, he shrugs and says that it’ll be more work for the agency and Kunikida will complain about the paperwork for weeks, but it’s probably not a good idea for two people who don’t exist in this world to announce that they pulled a bunch of kids out of a (presumably) legitimate orphanage and then burned it down, either. Chuuya’s taking that as approval.
Ango and Dazai have a brief moment of bewilderment at each other - naturally, since Ango doesn’t know the authors Atsushi and Kyouka all that well and Dazai’s only met Chuuya from his world - before Chuuya rolls his eyes and tells them to catch up after they’ve done what they came here to do.
The orphanage looks almost exactly the same as it did in Atsushi’s dream. It even has the same lock on the gate, which Chuuya promptly shoots out. The gunshot is probably not a reassuring thing to hear for anyone inside, but it’s not like he was going to climb the fence.
The layout’s the same, and while Ango waits outside to make sure the kids don’t run off alone, Chuuya scours every inch of the building for anywhere kids might be. When he finds one - usually panicking over the strange, visibly armed adults in the building - he explains to the child:
“I’m not going to hurt you, but I’m going to destroy this building, so please go outside so you don’t get hurt. Okay?”
Plenty of the kids run outside with no further prompting, self-preservation winning over anything else. Some stammer that they can’t go outside without permission, and Chuuya clicks his tongue at that before he answers.
“You won’t be going far. If anyone gets mad at you, you can blame me for it. They’ll definitely punish the stranger who broke in instead of you. Okay?”
Not that he intends to let himself be punished, but it works, and the kid escapes.
Of course, not everyone in the orphanage is an orphan. There are also plenty of workers that he bumps into, and those get a different ultimatum:
“I’m going to level this place to the ground. You probably don’t want to be inside when I do that, but it doesn’t make any difference to me if you live or die. Your choice.”
He doesn’t know which of these workers was around when Atsushi still lived in this orphanage. He can’t tell by their faces who whipped him, who denied him food when he was starving, who crumbled his self-esteem into fine powder. He doesn’t want to know.
These people almost certainly have done the same to other children, and that’s enough for Chuuya to not care for their lives.
Orphanage workers aren’t fighters, and Chuuya has a gun, so no one tries to stop him. They run.
Chuuya clears the whole place out, including the basement. A sense of nausea fills him when he sees the shackles on the wall, but he doesn’t let it distract him from his task.
One he’s absolutely sure there aren’t any kids inside, he returns to the front yard. The kids are mostly either gathered around Ango - he’s stroking a young girl’s hair gently as she cries - or hiding in the corners of the yard, eyeing the open gate with a nervousness that Chuuya recognizes from Atsushi’s dream - knowing that there is an outside world and that they could go, but not sure where to or how they’d survive.
The workers aren’t here. Ango is more intimidating than Chuuya even without a gun.
“All set?” Ango asks, when Chuuya returns to stand near to him.
“Yeah.” Chuuya checks the predicted blast radius - no one too close - and then pulls out a bottle full of a swirling red liquid from his pocket. He takes a deep breath, uncorks it, and then throws it at the building.
Miss Librarian’s alchemy is suited for her job because she can work with emotions attached to objects. She’d given him the bottle when he’d asked for something that could raze a building that shouldn’t exist to the ground and told him that it would collapse under the weight of its history.
Now he realizes exactly what she meant by that.
The bottle breaks, as any glass object thrown with force does when it hits a door, and the red liquid spreads out over the doorstep. For just a moment there is silence, and then the voices start.
Children’s voices. Some are crying, some are screaming. Some are asking what they did wrong, and some are begging to be given another chance. They mingle into each other, a cacophony of pain, until Chuuya can no longer make out individual words.
As the voices grow louder, the red liquid turns into a mist that covers the entire building. It swirls around it, and as the children outside huddle together in awe and fear, the orphanage starts to break down.
It’s not a quick and clean disappearance, because the pain of those who once lived here is a messy and awful thing. The ceiling caves in first. One of the outer walls snaps in half, the top sliding off before vaporizing entirely. From what of the inside Chuuya can see, even the furniture is breaking and shattering into powder.
The howling doesn’t stop. It only gets louder as more of the orphanage collapses and turns into nothing but red-tinted dust. It gets louder and louder, and Chuuya has to cover his ears - Ango is covering the ears of a child who can’t move his arms enough to cover them himself - or he feels like he’ll never hear anything but those screams again.
When the noise stops all at once, there’s nothing left of the orphanage but a hole in the ground. Even the basement has been utterly destroyed.
Chuuya uncovers his ears and looks over at the children. It’s silent, so silent that he thinks he might actually have lost his hearing entirely, until one of the youngest children asks in a quivering voice, “We… don’t have to go back?”
“You’re going to go somewhere better,” Chuuya says. “Promise.”
The walk back to the city proper takes a long time, mostly because all the children want to stop and check every detail of their surroundings that they haven’t been allowed to see. Chuuya doesn’t blame them. He also doesn’t blame them for how long it takes to herd a small sea of kids into the detective agency’s office, which was not made to hold an entire orphanage’s worth of children.
He’s pretty sure the guy whose desk had the candy stash is going to be mad that it was eaten, but maybe he should be at work if he doesn’t want his stuff stolen while he’s gone.
Kunikida looks like he’s going to have a migraine for the rest of his life as he goes on and on about long-term consequences and not solving the actual problem and couldn’t they have just found a way to replace the staff with people who weren’t awful- Every time he starts to raise his voice he seems to remember that he’s in a room full of scared children and lowers it again.
When he seems to be done ranting, Chuuya shrugs and says, “But you’ll make sure they get somewhere better, right?”
“At least take responsibility-!” Kunikida’s eye twitches when Ango laughs out loud and Chuuya snorts. Even if he knew the kind of people Ango and Chuuya are, he probably wouldn’t think it was hilarious as they do.
“He’ll take care of them,” Dazai says, sounding much more reassuring than he would if he was claiming any responsibility himself.
“Great,” says Chuuya, stepping back towards the door. “We oughta get going. Places to be, boyfriends to never mention this to.”
“Tell him I said hi!” Dazai says brightly. “And Kyouka too! Oh, Kunikida, do you have anything you want to pass on?”
Right now, Kunikida’s scowl would make Chuuya believe that he’s never smiled in his life. “Don’t change the subject, I’m not done-”
Ango exits with no more than a wave of his hand and, “Later,” and Chuuya turns to follow after him.
“Wait!” When Chuuya looks back over his shoulder, Kunikida’s expression has softened a little. “...Tell them to take care of themselves.”
“We’re glad they’re safe and happy,” Dazai says, with a smile Chuuya knows is genuine. “But they always have a home here, if they ever want to come back. ...It’d lower our workload, so~”
Chuuya grins. “I’ll tell them. But I’m pretty sure they already know.”