Chapter Text
The bar was exactly as she remembered it: same corny sign, same stupid pirate decorations, same crowd of annoying college students, same smell of body odor and cheap beer, same too-loud music.
Yosano wordlessly led the way to the table she’d sat at the last time she’d been here, tucked away in a quiet-ish corner, between a group of twenty-something-year-olds engaged in an intense drinking game and an old woman slumped forward on her table, seemingly unmoving and possibly dead.
As they scooted into the wobbly wooden chairs, Dazai shouted over the music, “Nice place,” which Yosano did not bother responding to.
Instead, she scanned the bar, shifting her focus from one person to the next, searching for suspicious behaviors.
A trio of middle-aged men caught her eye, but not because she suspected them; they all wore pirate hats and had fake eyepatches or hooks, and one of them even had a parrot that may or may not have been real on his shoulder. She allowed herself to stare for a couple heartbeats before moving on.
Dazai was poking her shoulder. She turned, irritated, and saw that a waiter was standing by their table with a tray balanced on one hand; Yosano had been too distracted to see her approach. The waiter smiled—she, too, wore a pirate get-up, although she made it look good, and in a flash Yosano recognized her as the waitress she’d been flirting with the last time she’d come here.
The waitress asked something that was lost in the music and clamoring, and Yosano craned her head closer. “What?”
“What can I get you?” the waitress repeated; she looked like she might’ve been from Europe or maybe America, but her Japanese was perfect. If she was being honest with herself, Yosano had mostly blanked out everything that had happened that night before the hitchhiker, and it had been the waitress’s outfit, not her face, that she’d recognized first.
Yosano leaned closer still; the bar only had themed drinks with really cheesy names, but if she was to recreate her last visit, it had to be down to the smallest detail. “I’ll have the—uh—Shipwreck.” She was trying to keep her voice down, but Dazai overheard anyways and snorted a laugh.
“Great choice!” the waitress—Rosie? Was that her name?---chirped. “And for your friend?”
“I’m the designated driver,” Dazai informed her sadly.
Yosano managed to glimpse the waitress’s nametag, which read, in English, “Robin.”
The waitress nodded, winking at Yosano, who realized awkwardly that in her efforts to see the nametag she had been staring at Robin’s chest, and told her, “I’ll have your drink ready in a minute, matey,” before disappearing back through the throngs of people.
Yosano sighed, Dazai raised his eyebrows at her. “I take it that’s the waitress you were talking about? She’s pretty.”
“She’s also a suspect right now,” Yosano said. “Until we figure this out, everyone here is a potential threat.”
He inhaled, like he wanted to tell her to relax a little, but evidently sensed that that would be a bad idea, and stayed silent.
Another few minutes passed, with Yosano still scrutinizing the bar-goers suspiciously. So far, she hadn't seen anything too out-of-the-ordinary, besides the pirate costumes, but she wasn’t going to let her guard drop for even a moment.
“I think—” she started, but was cut off by a sudden commotion as several things happened at once:
She spotted the waitress, Robin, picking her way through the bar with a precariously balanced tray of drinks, smiling apologetically as she pushed past people.
One of the pirate-costumed middle-aged-men swung a punch at his friend, whacking him solidly in the jaw.
The guy that received the punch stumbled and bumped into Robin, sending the drinks crashing onto the floor as she tripped.
In one smooth movement, Robin turned, grabbed the guy who’d bumped into her by the hair, and flung him to the ground with startling ferocity.
“Shit,” Yosano breathed, standing up fast enough that her chair toppled over backwards, the sound lost in the commotion as the bar became a battlefield in an instant, people lashing out with fists or elbows or fingernails like animals; a few college students climbed up onto the bar and started trying to shove each other off as more people attempted to clamber on after them; behind the bar the bartender snatched up a whole bottle of something vintage and started chugging it; several people flung themselves across the tables or chairs or floor in tangles and began doing something that was either wrestling or fucking.
Yosano spotted Robin, caught up in the frenzy, yelling barbarically as she launched herself into the fray.
“Robin!” Yosano yelled; no one would hear her in this. She skirted around the table and hesitated a moment before plunging in, keeping her arms close and defensive, trying to resist the urge to—
To—
To fight back.
But why shouldn’t she fight them? They were attacking her, too, and really, it looked like fun, all that fighting and drinking and fucking, all that humanity without the annoying niceties and rules, without anything to hold you back from just doing whatever you wanted.
Why not?
Why not just let go?
It would be so much easier.
It was so much easier.
Her fingers were digging into someone’s throat. She didn’t remember having made the decision to strangle the woman, but now that she was, it felt so freeing.
Some part of her, some vicious, feral part, wanted to tear it all down, destroy the whole world.
She wasn’t a healer. She wasn’t kind, or gentle; she was a fucking monster, and it was so relieving to finally let herself admit that.
A hand grabbed her shoulder; she whipped around in an instant and hit someone solidly in the face.
Yosano felt the satisfaction of her knuckles making contact, and then a split second later a wave of terror and guilt overwhelmed her.
What was she doing? She didn’t want to hurt people, kill people; sure, she was angry sometimes, but she was trying to save people; that was the whole point of being here in the first place, stopping the dangerous ability user—
Yosano managed a shuddering breath, coming to her senses; she was being dragged along by the wrist, and in seconds they were out of the bar, gasping in the cool night air, and she stared blankly at the bright colorful lights of the bar they’d just escaped, stark against the dark night.
“Sorry,” she said, belatedly, her breath coming in short sharp gasps.
Dazai had not let go of her wrist. She understood his apprehension; he was gingerly rubbing a hand over the fresh bruise on one side of his face, looking at her with reproach.
“I didn’t realize it was you,” she added, a bit lamely. “Also—”
“I know.” He grimaced. “At least now we can be sure they were there.”
She heard what he wasn’t saying, what they both weren’t saying: At least this time he’d been there. To stop her. To free her from the special ability that made all that violence feel so tempting.
Yosano cleared her throat. “If you hadn’t—” She stopped, cutting herself short. She’d felt that woman’s pulse, rapid as a hummingbird’s, beneath her fingers, the way her nails dug into the warm skin. She didn’t have to ask; they both knew what would have happened.
She forced herself to breathe slower. Exhale. Inhale. Act like a fucking person. “What about Robin?”
“The waitress?”
“Yes, the waitress,” Yosano snapped. “She’s still in there, in the fight.”
“And I’m sure she’s holding her own.”
“We can’t leave her. Or any of them—they’re just people, they’re going to hurt each other, maybe even kill each other.”
“What are we supposed to do about that?”
“Stop them. You can cancel out the special ability, and then we catch whoever runs.”
Dazai stared at her for a long moment.
“Okay,” he said, finally.