"Kunikida is Dad and Dazai is Daddy."

She spat milk.
They were words the brunette wrote herself, typed by half asleep thumbs during another midnight binge, but seeing it in the light of day gave her a different interpretation—especially with the two thousand comments, likes, and reposts filling up her notifications. Even early morning text messages from mom were hidden by arrays of tongue and eggplant emojis, and exclamation marks both upside down and right-side up. At the sight, she continues to cough liquid out of her lungs and onto the sidewalk, drawing judgmental eyes of those around her. This was not how she expected the morning to go, but at least this made for something interesting.

Stepping up her pace, Quinn shoves the phone into her jacket pocket. These are not the things she needs to be reliving in the morning, mothers texts aside. She has a job to get to, after all, one that requires undivided attention crossing the street and into glass doors. The job also gives her an opportunity to forget about the rise in attention of what she has to say, save for the rumbles of her pocketed phone every time she receives another notification and the 'excuse me' she mutters to crowds around the second pair of front doors to her place of work.

The job did not give her the opportunity to forget what it was she said as the first thing she heard before sitting down at her designated rolling chair is "Are you Osamu Dazai? Cause I think you're my father."

"That's not funny—!" in a sharp whisper, she lightly pushes down her hands as to gesture for her co-worker to quiet themselves, or silence in entirely. Instead of doing so, however, the opposite girl squeals, smiling as she begins to spin in her chair. Her personality, of course, as fired up as the red hair she insists to be natural. Quinn continues her attempts to silence her, a bit overwhelmed by the noise she spurts in rotations and the repeated buzzing in her pocket. It was a first, but only because the two were seated at the entrance of a library having nearby patrons shush them instead of it being the other way around.

"I can't believe you watched it all in one night! Don't you have any self-control!" steadying herself and her voice, the co-worker Rita still kept a grin on her face making Quinn nearly squirm as she removed her coat to sling it over the back of her chair. No answer came in the next few seconds, her focus instead on setting up her computer and counting the eyes that still peered their way. Rita never cared for crossing professional lines during their day-job, but Quinn was a stickler for lasting impressions.

"And you live-tweeted the whole time, it was incredible! You loon, how could you not expect people to love it!"
"SH!"

Quinn pushes her finger into her coworkers face with the sound, one meant to elicit silence but instead causing a giggle.

This moment outburst really traced back to months ago when Quinn first started working at her campus library during the height of her freshman year, only getting the job because she was somehow the only one in the applicant pool with actual experience thanks to a week of high school volunteering and a falsely exaggerated summer job. She was trained by her current co-worker, Rita, a rising junior who was still undeclared and willing to spark conversation about anything other than the Library of Congress system. That led to the common conversation on movies while shelving, expanding into actors and silver screen roles, and soon voice acting and the dynamics of the sub versus dub argument to popular anime's. Once they reached the center to their black hole Rita began a 'must watch' list, at the top with many hearts lying a 2012 phenomenon "Bungou Stray Dogs". That night Quinn watched the pilot with excitement, but she did so to all the other twelve shows on the list given to her, and while she picked up some with a fervor they never lasted her longer than a weekend or left her wanting more. They were more or less concluded, and she was okay with that.

Until the night before now when she saw episode two of Rita's beloved Stray Dogs, and the next giving her the chance to fall in love with a sea of characters with only more added to the list at every passing twenty minutes. Before she knew it, it was three am and Twitter was still open on another tab, fingers flying as the next generation Soukoku landed a perfect double punch to an American tycoon. It was graceful, and she needed more,

"I get that people love it but I can't even get to two dot's without another notification popping up…" Quinn grumbles her words as she fishes back for her phone to show her excited friend what she woke up to.

"Well, thank god you used a pen name for that account, otherwise you would never be hired again." Rita's joking words earned a stifled laugh from the brunette beside her, and soon she took the phone right out of her hands to scroll through the madness. Some of which included a sea of "same" and "fuck u right", others instead instigators that suggested the Port Mafia held more "Daddy" characters than the Armed Detective Agency ever could. It was a mess, and she found it hilarious.

On the other side of the desk, Quinn groans, dropping her head onto the keyboard in front of her and ignoring the series of error messages that pop up. Right now, her life was an error; all productivity she meant to achieve last night down the drain and only having poor commentary to show for it. But this was the youth in her, after all, shouldn't she go with the flow?

The flow eventually died out from this ecstatic conversation with her coworker, leading her to explain that "non-circulating" books are not meant to leave the library on multiple occasions and live with the horrors of reshelving in-house books on her lonesome as Rita went to 'use the bathroom' for an hour and a half. This was her life though, momentary ups and splurges of embarrassing moments sandwiched between absolutely nothing; eventually, the tweet was forgotten, the flurry of commenters gone allowing Quinn to text back her mom and play a couple rounds of two-dots, and her mind instead fixated on school. Though she would find herself daydreaming about the incredible world building and regional groups created by the show, the thoughts wouldn't last too long before she had to be concerned with crossing the street without being hit by a bicycle or making a weeks worth of dinner and not burning the dorm room down.

Only when she was finally in bed for the night could she remember the start of the day, the flustered emotions back as she covers her face in her arms despite her roommate not even there with her. You're so stupid… Quinn chants to herself, but soon her mind drifts off to the comments, the ones beyond eggplant emojis and "fuck u right"s, instead considering the instigators and laughing at her new amended version as she slowly drifts into sleep.

"Mori is Dad and Chuuya is Daddy."

The room smelled of seawater all of a sudden, but somehow mixed with rotten eggs and fermented piss. It was disturbing, considering Quinn lived on the ocean for part of her life, and she never experienced a smell other than the crispness of salt and the freshness of water combined in a beautiful sensation that even the chronic beach-peers couldn't ruin. She had no prototype for this new smell then, other than the Hudson River, maybe, but with her eyes closed she turns over in her bed expecting the opposite side to smell better.

Turning, she realizes, was impossible; her body somehow no longer in a laid position but standing, and weirdly hovering. She opens her eyes but they burn and still see nothing but black. Worried, she closes them and gasps but the air she expected to fill her lungs is instead water.

Water.

Quinn is abruptly met with the idea that she is drowning, and though she struggles against the water that suddenly engulfs her with a closed mouth she realizes she's sinking. Though it hurts, she opens her eyes again and is still met with black, but it almost looks fabricated, like a bag.

A body bag.

She wants to scream but her lungs are already throttling from the choked water. It's worse than the morning's milk, deadlier even, and she can imagine her body convulsing in the water until finally it gives in and she dies. Currently, she couldn't give a shit about context, like why or how she was suddenly bagged and weighted to fall into water in the first place. Her burning eyes instead look for anything that could help her out, and when they find light at a small hole in the side of the bag, her flailing hands grasp the fabric and begin to tear. Relief floods her body, but so does more water, and in a fight or flight response her arms begin to reach above her head to pull her body up; the weight, thankfully, attached to the bag and not her body, and somehow she was comforted by the idea that whoever attempted to kill her was an amateur.

As her legs kicked and her arms pulled, Quinn couldn't help but give a silent prayer to whatever God insisted to her mother that she take swimming lessons, eventually reaching the surface and letting out a hollow gasp for air. The water she swallowed now coming back up in a heaving cough, her body nearly doubling over and back into the water, but her treading legs kept her steady enough to stay above.

Now her mind began to race in thought, her body tired and limp despite moving at its best rate. Wasn't she just asleep? She sure felt exhausted from the swim alone, but the way her mind clouded almost reminded her of a REM cycle. The sudden possibility of this being a lucid dream (or rather, nightmare) better in her mind than thinking she forgot her entire abduction.

As a heat hits her back her thoughts were thrown off again as she realized it was as bright as day outside, the sun boiling the air but the water chilling to her bones. To the left of the celestial mark lied a bridge, she observed with half-lidded eyes, and to the right a city. What is this, the Brooklyn Bridge? George Washington? Quinn began to list all the nearby fixtures she could think of until she realized none of the structures matched, nothing looked familiar, even the body of water she barely floated in was foreign to her in color and in depth. This was not good… Her eyes caught the city landscape again, skylines that didn't match anything Manhattan had to offer mixed with an active port. San Francisco? Maybe that explained the change in light out, and the grey structure leading to the city looked like the Oakland Bay Bridge. The shift in location wasn't comforting, but as she kicked her legs up and her arms forward she began to head towards the city buildings.

If this is a dream, she thought with jagged breaths, I sure am getting creative.

The tide was up, proven by the rough knocks of the port's water against rock. To be out in the morning was nearly a sin, but the situation was all too perfect—too convenient. Traitors were a once in a month chance to apprehend, sure, but it was their dialect that proved interesting; their insistence of fidelity with quick heartbeats and shallow breaths was amusing to the young man now throwing stones through a gloved hand. He expected nothing to be unusual when he first returned this morning, nothing pressing his immediate presence, but a group of individuals who somehow swindled the Port Mafia of nearly thirty percent their monthly income earned his attention.

He watched as the three responsible were forced to bite the pavement before the sun could rise, but as the mafiosi brought with him took out their guns he was attracted to the roars of the ports; the sounds nearly covered up the nine fired shots, maybe because he was focused on the rising dark lines against rock rather than the scene behind him. Any sort of guidance unnecessary as this group was often tasked with retaliation efforts, but when a roughhousing that wasn't the current filled his ears he was forced to turn away and smack a suit upside the head.

"Cover her back up." Chuuya's voice was brittle with the command, eyes on the mafioso dead on as his pale hands shakily fixed the slip of a female body clearly pulled for his own content, a small "Yes sir" muttered with the motion. His two snickering pals were silenced, their eyes focused on the knots around the legs that tied the bag closed and the weights tight. Though they were his people, Chuuya couldn't help but think of them as disgusting if that's how they normally treated the bodies they would be assigned to make disappear; murder and necrophilia, while each an extreme itself, of entirely different extremes.

A glove reaches for another stone in the ground, thumb testing its smoothness as though he could really feel the polished rock. It's about shape anyway, Kouyou pointed out to him the first time they sat near enough to the water that he began to pick up the rocks, and without any prior knowledge nor any ability-influenced skill, he roughly tossed them against the waves to see how far they could go before they sink. Now he could do all kinds of tricks with a flat rock, yet he still chose to let the one currently in his hand plop into the oncoming current, no tricks, no skips, head down curious to see how fast it could sink with the fighting waves.

"Sir!" a voice landed before the stone, earning a small hum from the ginger as he looked up. Instead of turning, however, he gazed beyond the water where, amongst the waves, a body was coming towards the shore. It wasn't pushed by the waves nor still in a floating position, but an actual avid swimmer pushing to the port. Behind him, the sounds of readied weaponry played against this swimmers strides, but Chuuya held up a hand to stop them and they were soon lowered.

A minute past and the body came into view—and was definitely not a real swimmer. As it made one final push onto land, he noticed its femininity, though above all its familiarity. She doubled over onto the sandy stone of the port, coughing up seawater, and in this obliviousness, he took the chance to step closer, look closer, pointing out every little thing he could have sworn he saw on a dead body seconds ago. "Jesus, fuck," she says with jagged breaths before turning on her back against the stone, her slip that was only stained by blood now soaked with brown around the edges, and though there were still holes where she had been shot, the skin behind them was smooth, healed.

Her eyes remain closed as he takes his final steps closer, now standing above the body by her head, looking down on the suddenly alive cadaver. He blinks, unsure what to think or where to go, so he nudges her shoulder with his foot. More superlatives come out of her mouth as he does so, but when she opens her eyes they widen within seconds; what she says next does, indeed, elicit a cruel smile from the ends of his mouth.

"This is definitely not San Francisco."

A bagged head, the cut of tweed, a car door slam, and a series of orders that were too far to make out. Quinn relied on sounds like these now to put the pieces of her shattered mind together, but still, she remained at a loss. The bagged head was her own, and she was thankful it was cotton, but the air was still stuffy in the old car she was shoved in. Though her hands were tied around her back with the rough tweed she could still feel the leather of the seats beneath her and the holes that wore into them over use. She mentally gives herself an applause for such incredible detail her mind created for a mere dream. If Inception ever became a reality, she could go far as a minds architect, from the bumps she felt in the road to the fact that she could not remember how the hell she got there.

Stranded in the water seemed frighteningly real, but when she came ashore to face what she swore was a Nakahara Chuuya look-alike she considered the world to be less of a reality. It wasn't anything like the grey scaled photograph from the true authors Wikipedia page either, but the astounding colors of blue and orange that gave the fictional character a two-dimensional life. Her brain was clearly going through an obsession, she decided, conjuring the executive even as she sleeps. Perhaps that was why she was breathing evenly in the car even though she was shivering from the water; the idea that this was all fake, like bad, undrafted fanfiction, keeping Quinn from throwing up whatever seawater was left to mingle with her stomachs bile.

Or so she thought.

The minute the car stopped and the bag was taken off from her head she doubled over again, feeling her bodily acids singe at the inside of her mouth before vomiting right onto a pair of shined black shoes. "I am so sorry," she muttered before gagging and feeling a second round come up, but instead of liquid she nearly choked on what she thought was a regurgitated bone. The thing that came out of her instead shining next to the shoes she just defiled. She narrows her eyes and refrains from picking the item up as her hands are still behind her back, but from where she stood it looked like a piece of jewelry, just a bit odd in shape. The body housing the shoes she threw up on groaned and kicked the liquid pile along with the odd jewelry away, soon lifting his knee to what should have been her chin if a hand on her shoulder didn't pull her bent frame to stand.

A gloved hand.

"Knock it off and clean this mess up." Chuuya spoke, and though his hand on her was loose and non-threatening she couldn't help but tense up at the neck. "Hand me your jacket." he added, and she watched as the black-suited mafioso with the now un-shined shoes frowned as he unbuttoned his outerwear and held it out to the executive with a clenched fist. With his other hand, Chuuya grabbed the jacket, but soon his light touch left her shoulder to drape the black fabric over her exposed skin. She wanted to look back, maybe to say thank you, but the circumstance told her it was a bad idea.

The other two mafia members were now out of the car and in front of her, their even steps soon followed by her own as she was nudged to follow by the man behind her. Quinn decides against looking around as she walked, instead watching the feet in front of her to be sure she never gets too close. They were near a building, sure, but it wasn't as though she would remember exactly where and with what features for later. It wasn't as though it mattered, she reminded herself with each step, even as they entered a building with no walls and began a descent into the dark down an extreme flight of stairs.

The further below ground they are the more Quinn feels herself shiver. Her hands twitch against the twine that surrounds them in another attempt to move and tighten the coat draped over her shoulders. She refrains from asking "are we there yet?" and continues to remain evenly paced behind the men in front of her. After a while of walking in the same direction, she assumes where they're headed—she's about to be hung from her arms against a brick wall that has been rebuilt countless times due to torture and interrogation. There's no doubt, it was featured in both seasons after all, and her brain is too stupid to think of anything original.

When the walls suddenly become a clean chrome, she nearly trips at the reflection of light off of the surfaces. Quinn coughs to cover up the stumble and her expression of "what the hell is this?". Apparently, her mind isn't too stupid to think of anything original as the stairs stop and the floor becomes flat. In the center of the room where she, for some reason, still expects a brick pillar stands a chrome box not unlike the rest of the room. Quinn stands still to observe this even as the mafioso's feet in front of her continue on and open the door. The shivering gets worse and her throat feels dry as she thinks about how much easier it is to clean blood off of chrome than brick. She takes a step back as if she could run but instead she hits a body—Chuuya's body.

"You afraid, Masamoto?"
"I—what?"

The name threw her in for a loop but it wasn't one strong enough to remain as Chuuya nudges her forward into the open door of the glimmering box. Instead of keeping her head down Quinn stares ahead with every step, and when her and his footsteps finally echo from entering the room there's a loud creak behind them followed by a large slam. The door is closed, and she is still cold.

Quinn's eyes bounce around every corner of the room taking in its predictability. Matching chrome table and chair set at the center? Check. A wall that's actually a mirror hiding two-way glass on the other side? Check. A water cooler in the corner with little paper cones? Odd, but sure, check.

As she notes the few distinguishing features of the room she soon observes Chuuya sitting on one side of the table with his knife in one hand and the twine that was around her wrist in the other. The sight makes her immediately bring them up to the front of her body and what she sees is not something as ordinary as one would expect hands to be.

They're calloused, not a single corner smooth even on the underside of the palm and it's not just because of the twine. Even the crevices between each finger have their own scars that stand out as a bright pink against her pale flesh. The flesh color, surprisingly, doesn't concern her as much as the torture evident on every corner of its skin. For some reason, she thinks about how if that were her own body she wouldn't have been able to take any of it, and at the thought, she puts her hands back down and then threads her arms through the sleeves of the jacket. Now covered, she shivers less because of the cold and more because of a creeping uncertainty. She looks back up at Chuuya who now wears a scowl.

"What the hell was that?" his voice bit as much as his teeth did to each other, and like a tardy student Quinn shamefully sits down in the chair opposite him.

It's quiet then, like he waits for her to explain herself. She opens her mouth like she could actually try and attempt to explain anything but instead closes it. With a frown she leans further back in her chair now; there's nothing she can say to make the situation better which only meant it was bound to get worse, and clearly she was brought there because she, for some Freudian reason, thought that she deserved to be encased in a shiny metallic room by a semi-fictional Japanese ginger.

The semi-fictional ginger, too, sat back in his chair with a frown. The room, though shiny and cold, began to feel suffocatingly warm as the only sound was their breathing and whatever static was transmitting that sound to the other side of the glass. Whoever was observing would have witnessed something like an uneventful cop drama Quinn would have never bothered to watch had she not been abruptly cast as the main character. Whoever was observing…

"Is this about the 'dad' and 'daddy' thing?" she suddenly blurts, pointing one finger at Chuuya and one at the tinted glass behind him. His already irritated scowl only worsened at her words, expanding with a hiss and yet he said nothing—so she continued. "Look, it's not that I don't think Mori is 'daddy' material or that you are exclusivly, I'm sure he really had it going for him in his military years, but I definitely don't need a subconscious journey to convince me of that."

At the bosses name the scowl falls and his eyes widen, though only for a second before he regains all composure and instead wears a delicate smirk.

"You know a lot for a low-level security girl."
Quinn blinks. "It's just the circulation desk." she clarifies, but Chuuya snorts like it's a joke. She sits unsure that she knows the punchline.

"Right, circulation, you'd know all about that wouldn't you."
He seemed to not understand what she was trying to say, but she was just as lost as she assumed he was. "Customer service rep?" she tilts her head like that was a better choice of words to explain, forgetting her earlier rule that explaining would only get her in the mud as exhibited by the echoing sound of a gloved fist knocking against metal.

"Just give the jig up and tell me where the money is or I'll make sure someone gets it out of you in the most painful way possible, Masamoto."

Now she was completely lost. Masamoto? "Machada you mean—wait, no, I don't know about any money or any Masamoto." saying it reminded her of when he said it before, taunting her by the entrance to the cube they currently sat in. "There's been some kind of mistake, I'm not—,"

As the words dangle off of her lips, Quinn suddenly realizes what exactly she's looking at as she faces the chrome table beneath her. Though the image is a bit blurry and oddly proportioned she could see that the face that was speaking, that she was so sure to claim with her own name, was in fact not hers. From the smaller shape of her face to her wider and brighter eyes, Quinn was suddenly smacked in the face with the idea that she really was not herself. Though the iris was still a soft green like her own she looked at and picked on so many times there was nothing else familiar about the face she saw. A long nose and thin pink lips that matched her hair was unlike the stout nostrils she often made pig noises for and the thick lips that looked as unnatural as a mii's. Matched her hair… Matched her hair! Oh how her dad was going to kill her to see the sudden pink of her hair, fading or not. But it wasn't her hair, she had to remind herself, because the only time she had hair like that was in dreams where she was being whisked away by astronaut Mike Dexter.

In dreams…

"I'm not me…" she whispers, still looking at the wonky reflection, missing whatever irritated faces Chuuya may have made across from her. Chuuya, that's right, he doesn't actually exist and neither does her little skinny face, there's no real way any of this captivity could be real no matter how much the seawater stung her lungs or how she could feel the vomit burn her throat when coming up. It was all a dream, a crazy fan-induced dream, and now was a good a time as ever to wake up.

What did they do in Inception again? She wasn't sure. She wasn't sure? Now of all times she chooses to not remember key events to a Christopher Nolan movie?! Quinn grits her teeth together as she stares down at the chrome table beneath her and the reflection that's not hers. Maybe a good blow to the head would do it, she considers as she breathes in, once, twice, and on the third breath she recoils her head up before smacking it against the cold metal in one harsh swoop. Quinn cries out in pain, Chuuya cries out in curses.

"What the hell Masamoto!"
"This is a dream, this is a dream, this is a dream," though she hears him get up she repeats the statement like a mantra, a point of focus as her vision begins to blur. There may have been a crack on the harsh contact but she tried not to focus if that caused significant pain or where it may have come from. Another breath in, once, twice, and again on the third she slams her head against the cold metal. "this is a dream, this is a dream, this is a dream," She groans the words into the surface as nothing happens again, except for the sudden red that begins to collect into its own pond streaming from her face to the table, and the sudden numbness in her face from what she assumes to be bruises. She raises her head again and plans to drop it one last time—.

But she can't move.

In fact, she can't even breathe, or maybe the air is just too thick to make its way through her lungs. Everything just feels heavy, and looking at the empty chair across from her reminds her why: gravity.

With a gloved hand around the back of her throat, Quinn sits, motionless, weighted down to the chair. Though she's stuck her eyes still dart themselves through the room, from the empty chair to the off red glow that reflects from the table—or maybe that's just her blood.

"I knew you were unhinged but this seems excessive." Chuuya tsks, and Quinn wonders just how much force it will take to throw one last blow now that she couldn't even breathe.

Inception, Inception, think Inception… Though she couldn't move to speak her thoughts raced like the Zach Galifianakis gif whose context she still didn't know, but that was not the movie she was concerned with. Dreams, dreams, when you die you wake up, that's what she was going for, like a kick, or a French song, or other details she couldn't place. It's a dream, it's a dream, but if it's a dream why does her body throb for any excess oxygen without moving at all?

Her vision blurs, the weight is gone, and in a third swoop, her head collapses against the cold table.

It's a hollow noise sounded by the back of her throat as she finally breathes in, sits upright in her bed, and grabs at her neck. Her nails dig marks into her skin, but she needs to make sure each inhale will be followed by an exhale, and every time her neck shrinks she wants it to expand before the second passes.

Her bed?
Her bed!

Looking around the room that is her overpriced Manhattan dorm Quinn's breath slows. The outside sounds of a sedan honking at an occupied ambulance amidst street curses only aiding her relaxation. She is in her bed instead of an interrogation room, she is in New York instead of Yokohama. Even when she peaks beneath the sheets she is met with the same nightshirt she's worn all this week, a torn 2001 Gap commodity, instead of the slip and blazer of horrendous stains.

Most importantly her hands are her own; no scarred tissue even in the crevices, no pale skin that could be easily bruised. She turns them over to be sure there were no secrets on the other side but no, it was just her tan hand, a birthmark here and there, and sweaty. With a sigh of relief, Quinn brings her arms around herself in an embrace. How she missed her disgusting sweaty body.

The door opens.
"Hey, do you have any q-tips—?"
"BELLA!"

Quinn nearly pounces her roommate once the door opens, the shorter girl yelling superlatives with wobbled steps back.

"Bella, this is important,"
"Yeah, I'm sure, look what about the q-tips?"
"Have I been in the dorm the entire night?"

The other girl's face goes monotone for a second, like a robot in reboot mode, before one eyebrow goes up with a scoff. "Dude you went to bed at seven like you always do, you didn't even move when your alarm went off grandma.
"Alarm?"
"Yeah, it's like ten AM I figured you just weren't going to class—,"

And here comes all of Quinn's stresses again, her mouth muttering curses to herself as she pushes past her roommate and into the bathroom—brushing her teeth, putting on deodorant, and then back into the room where she pulls on a pair of pants from her hamper. What a dream that was, really, but it wouldn't compare to the nightmare before her being late to her classes.

"This is a dream, this is a dream, this is a dream—!" the words stop, there's a pop, and a shrill squeak fills the room before her voice returns. "This is a dream, this is a dream, this is a dream—!" he stops it again, rewinds the tape, and plays it a third time. Her voice begins again, and again, and again until finally, he pauses the tape. His voice thrums against his throat as his lips form a smile, his fingers intertwine in his laps.

"When she blacked out her heart rate fell real quick. We would have called her dead again if the doc didn't catch it. They're trying to see if she's comatose now."
"Oh dear… And she really called me by my name?" Chuuya scoffs, Mori smirks.

"It's not impossible she overheard it, she was in shipping security for a long time—,"
"She called you daddy, you know that, right?"
"THAT'S—," Chuuya points a gloved finger at the man seated in front of him, jaw tight, but the moment rolls over as he exhales and fixes his hand to his side. The bosses smile never leaves, clearly amused with his executive. "That's not unusual for her, people who work with Masamoto say she roughhoused a lot."

"Oh Chuuya, have you been paying any attention?" Mori turns back to the images on the screen and points his pinky towards the girl in the corner of the frame. Around it are other angles of the same image: her face, scared, confused, frightened, staring at the table like it was more threatening than the one seated before her. She has no bravado, no sign of composure even the lowest mafia members have. "this girl isn't Masamoto…" Chuuya gapes and attempts to speak, to question his judgment, but when Mori closes his eyes and the younger closes his mouth. The value of her life to them immediately decided with one string of words:

"Whoever she is, she will be a lot more useful than her predecessor."

"Head up, Quinn!"
"Ms. Machada, no sleeping in class."
"Can someone wake up the brunette in the back whose sleeping on top of her closed textbook—who, Quinn? Wake up, Quinn!"

"It's embarrassing." reciting all the ways her professors have called her out in the past day, Quinn lies her head on her work desk with half-lidded eyes waiting to close for good. Next to her, Rita is hard at work on her computer opening tab on tab on dream theories. She really snowballed after Quinn told her of her crazy anime themed dream, likely due to the one psych class she took the year before and falling into a psychoanalyst mindset—the first thing to question: penis envy. Quinn really mulled that one over before answering, no, she does not regret having a vagina.

"Well, when you fall asleep in class do you at least dream of your daddy?"
The brunette gurgles in response and now allows her eyes to close. "No, I actually see nothing." it was true; her head was already wonky throughout the day like she wasn't all there, but she attributed that to the lack of rest that was sucked away by the stress of her dream. The white void she saw every time she closed her eyes and shut off her brain for a few moments, that she wasn't sure how to identify. Maybe she convinced herself she had a concussion.

"So how did you wake up? Was it sudden? Did everything end? Or was it like how you forgot how the dream began?" Rita's taking notes now, only missing a pair of glasses to nudge up against her nose like a professional question-asker.

"Cognitive recalibration." Quinn mumbles, and for a second her nose stings like she really broke the bone. Yikes. Rita signs, unenthused.

"You're not helping."
"Helping…?"

Quinn slurs her words from exhaustion but can distinctly hear Rita's fingers fly on her keyboard, clicks from her mouse only come in-between like she's checking words for spelling or opening links. The noise, though keeping her from falling asleep, is appreciated. The sound almost acts as an anchor keeping her in the moment and away from the white void that seems to call her beyond the darkness of closed eyelids. Quinn opens her eyes; the thought of darkness scared her.

Now moving closer to peer at the light from Rita's computer screens she reads through the tabs. "Lucid dream?" that's what she originally thought when the water bit at her skin and the sun seemed to burn that sensation away, but then she saw the peculiar gingers face and it was just a dream-dream to her—that's how they work, right? Fuck, she really should have paid more attention in that high school psychology class.

"Well you seem to vividly remember everything, and don't get me wrong but you usually can't remember shit."
"Hey!" Quinn raises her head from the desk as though she's suddenly alert. Rita snickers.
"What's our supervisors' name?"
Quinn's head falls back down. "… Fair."

"As I was saying—you remembered it better than an actual memory and even put Chuuya in the plot because of your lonely hearts desires. More importantly, you knew it was a dream as you were dreaming."
"Well, I wasn't sure I was dreaming…"
"You woke up didn't you?"
"I—…" Quinn frowns. She still feels sleepy, asleep even, but maybe that's just what it means to be a college student.

"So it's a lucy dream or whatever—,"
"Lucid."
"Shouldn't I have been able to wake up as soon as I realized that? Or feel any kind of conscious connection with my body?"
"Okay, I'm reading the Wikipedia page, I am not an expert of out of body experiences." Quinn makes a fart noise and Rita shoves her body back to her side of the desk with her elbow.

"Besides," she continues, "aren't you thinking about how important it is to identify this so that you can do it again?" Again?

Yes, apparently again because when their shifted ended Rita followed Quinn back to her out-of-budget dorm and expelled her roommate with one word: experimentation. The red-haired-girl was obsessed with getting Quinn back to the version of the Yokohama port they each considered to be fictional, and so she read up on studies and managed to pluck out a few dream theory books from the library shelves in order to build the best experiment—er, experiments.

Experiment one: body oils. Rita read that something about a specific stench would tether her mind to this plane (sure) while she goes on her mental adventure (if that's what you call it). They bought the oils from a closing stand in Union Square and Quinn couldn't help as though it was the biggest waste of thirty dollars in her life (and she paid for Gravity on blu-ray). When the oils themselves weren't working Rita took a tip from Teen Wolf and attempted to guide her (but she sounded more like Malia than lover boy Scott McCall). Quinn ended up gagging at the excessive smells of the oils and took a cold shower to freeze them off of her. The water woke her up, and in time for Rita to lay out a plan b.

Experiment two: watch and sleep. They ended up rewatching the second season (after arguing for a half hour on whether they should watch the sub or dub; Quinn argued dub because if she was to fall asleep she could do so to Dazai's delicious and smooth pudding voice, Rita argued that Dazai's delicious pudding voice was really the poop emoji) until the roommate insisted she be let back into the room to sleep. They moved to the student lounge to continue the experiment but Quinn couldn't get comfortable on the pleather couches. They laid on the floor and continued the binge but an RA complained about the noise during quiet hours.

After the antics—or really the steps squashed between them—Quinn eventually found she wasn't tired and they abandoned the idea to eat donuts.

"Maybe it was just a one-time thing." The two sit in a now empty park with a dozen donuts warming their laps (really ten as they each had one in hand). "How many times do you have the same dream?" Rita mumbles a response through her food, something that sounded like "never".
"So," she swallows and now Quinn takes her own bite. " let's say, for some cosmic reason, it's not a dream."
"Wha fo youf—eh—what do you mean?"
"I mean, what if you're right, and you should have felt some kind of connection with your body outside of the dream or whatever and the reason you didn't was that it wasn't?" Quinn doesn't respond, instead grabbing another donut from the box. Rita took the opportunity to keep going down the rabbit hole.

"What if in your dream state your subconscious traveled through realities?"
"There is no scientific reason for that." Quinn gets a bit of chewed up donut on the sidewalk. Rita chooses to ignore this.
"Screw science—!" "You mean fuck science." "we're talking about a reality where people have supernatural abilities here." "A fictional reality." "So why wouldn't you be able to be one of them just suck in the wrong continuum."

Quinn swallows her final bite as she watches her coworker spin into madness using words she's only heard in Star Trek. She just wanted some show recommendations. "You're suggesting that I'm an ability user and that my ability is to shift my consciousness between realities?" Rita's lips are curled up into the largest smile without teeth, her eyes nearly sparkling in the lamplight, proud. Quinn sits still, worried. "Okay…" she plays along, "if that's true then why should we believe that there's any reason I'll end up in that world again?"
"Because that's where you belong?"
"Sure, but if that's a real world and supposedly where I belong then all the characters we think are fictional exist." Rita hums for her to continue. "And after spending all this time watching them, why should we think that they would allow me to go back?"
"Allow?"

Rita puts down her donut. Things are getting serious. "Why would you not be allowed to go back? It's your consciousness."
"Yeah, but, the body my consciousness technically inhabits is with the Port Mafia."
"So?"
"Mori runs the Port Mafia."
"And?"
"Mori will kill me."
"… Is that logical of him?"

Quinn stops and puts down her own donut. Things are getting serious.

A month passes and a stench stands out; it seems like a high-class Clorox with a lemon scent, artificial but nonetheless citrus. It's the scent of clean, but it's working against something musty, dirty, old, like mold that refuses to be cut out by any household or industrial strength cleaners. Quinn would have thought it was her bathroom, but she doesn't sleep in her bathroom. Yes, she is asleep again, but she is now awake somewhere foreign, somewhere clean.

She refrains from opening her eyes. Everything behind them is dark, something new compared to the white void that continually crept up on her as the days go by. She didn't dream anymore because of it, and she got too much sleep but always felt like she needed more. Her body was tired all the time, her mind tired, it was an odd sensation and for a while, she was starting to think that maybe Rita was right—this wasn't her world and her body knew it now.

But now she's afraid to open her eyes and see the world she is supposed to be part of, the world that is supposed to be hers.

She takes another breath and sees what she can tell about the room around her without waking to it; she is lying on her back, definitely in a bed, but the sheets are itchy like they're made out of an expensive material not made for comfort. Her hands are numb, unable to fist themselves around the top of the sheets where she presumes it lays as it's colder than the rest of her body. Her right hand is number, though, and she wants to scratch it hut she refrains from moving. To her right, she hears the faint beeping of machines. It sort of makes sense now—a hospital. Maybe she's safe, and they gave her body up, or maybe she's still where she considers home and just had a bad concussion.

Quinn begins to open her eyes now with less fear, but they meet an aged canopy and not a white tiled hospital ceiling. She blinks, like it's a trick of the light, but the excessive victorian fabric is still above her shielding her from any light. That explains the cold. She looks to the right to see her hand with an IV line poking out and leading up to where she finds the bag with half its fluid besides a beeping machine. Heart monitor. Behind the machine and the bag is the most hideous wallpaper she has ever seen, a pattern of diamonds with intricate symmetrical line-art in each, the art black against the wall's pale blue. It looks familiar, but Quinn puts it on watching too much Fixer-Upper until she notices how it matches the color scheme of the of the canopy above her, the art also black against blue but more circular, less intricate. She looks back to the wall to see if she can see just exactly how different they are until she notices a panel stained, brown, like mud that someone kicked into the room and refused to wash off. But, she realizes, it's all at an angle. The splatters, the blood splatters she soon recognizes, like a cone that comes from her place on the bed. Their stains not even the slightest bit washed out, like they were left there for a reason, a memory.

She wants to groan. It's the room of the dead boss, and definitely no hospital. No wonder it's musty, and the artificial citrus is all too fresh. When was the last time someone stayed in that room longer than fifteen minutes to ponder their inanity?

"Good, you're awake." now apparently.

Slowly she sits up while forcing her hands to clench the top of the blanket. She doesn't look towards the voice and instead out the window at the foot of the bed. The ornate pattern of the walls continues on the glass, etched to fill every spot and creating a shadow of the design onto the floor from the incoming sunlight. Quinn could only see nature as tree's lined each side of the sun like a frame. It was surreal, beautiful, calm, and then she turned to the corner of the room where Mori sat, waiting, creeping. He looks too comfortable, a threatening smile with his hands folded in his lap and his legs crossed over. At his feet sat Elise, dressed in pink frills with her hair pulled back in a matching headband furiously eating a slice of cake from a petite plate.

"Are you comfortable?"
She doesn't reply and turns back to the machines, to the IV that pinched her hand, to the blood stains on the wall.

"You know what this room is."
"Yes." her voice cracks, she almost feels the skin at the back of her throat break from the action.
"How?" she turns to Elise on the floor, seated as though she's completely unaware of the conversation and lost in the frosting she licks off of the fork.

"How old was she when she died?" at the question, the young blonde looks up, first at Quinn on the bed and next at Mori seated above her. His smile falls, his hands clench. He quietly suggests she leave the room to get another snack, and as she does she watches Quinn with what she could have sworn were snake-like eyes. The door sends a creak vibrating through the walls of the room as it opens and closes, and when the lock is turned it seems to echo for too many seconds.

"That's an unfair question, Ms. Machada."
"I'm sorry I assumed you would have an answer."
"Fourteen. Her parents were devastated."
"I'll bet."

Mori tsks. "You know a lot more than I thought."
"Would you believe me if I said you're from a TV show?"
"No, what's the genre? Comedy?"

Quinn looks back down at her hands. She wants to pull the IV out, scratch the skin, maybe throw it in his eye and give him an infection he couldn't even cure. Instead her hand just twitches—it is her hand now after all.

"So you know my name?"
"I heard it from a tape."
"The interrogation…" who said there needed to be someone on the other side of the two-way glass, why couldn't it be something? Or maybe it was the water cooler—she should have asked for a drink to find out. "That was new. Were the pillars full?"
"I'd assume."

"It was probably just Dazai. I think Chuuya has a thing for him."
There's a silence from the other side of the room but Quinn never looks away from her hands, the scars that she now claims as her own, the complexion that is now her counterpart.

"Do you know the situation of that body?"
No. "Yes."
"Juno Masamoto. She stole a considerable amount of money before she was apprehended."
Apprehended? "Sounds like a traitor."
"Yes, well, we're having a bit of trouble finding where she kept it, or weeding out just who helped her."

"I can't help you." she looks back at Mori who is now standing to her left, towering, daunting. Taunting? "Like I said: I don't know who this Masamoto is or what she's done before me." Above her, Mori smiles, like that's exactly what he's counting on.

"Ms. Machada, when you knocked yourself unconscious the body was more than just that. Some of our doctors almost felt the need to call it a coma but your physiology seemed perfect just… Slow. We waited a few days to see if it improved, then a few weeks, and then suddenly your condition seemed perfectly stabilized overnight—and then you woke up." as he weaves his tale she couldn't help but feel uncomfortable at how lost he was in his story, how infatuated he seemed with the problem. His character always intrigued her but she's barely held her conversational ground with his near masochistic mind already, let alone thought she would be an exceptional point of that focus. "Does this happen a lot?" he pouts as he poses the question, like a student who disagrees with a grade. "How often do you fall out of your body Ms. Machada?"

Fall? "This would be my first."
"First, huh." Mori likes this answer. At least he seems pleased while taking a step back from the bed to look at the machines on the other side. "You know, I can say the words and you'll be unplugged and tossed out of this house within minutes. You'll be alone in the city, erratic, an enemy to the mafia, and an equal opportunity hag for the rest of the hungry miscreants on those streets."

"But you haven't." Quinn points out, grasping at the straw that was a park bench and donuts where her coworker reminded her of her inter-dimensional value. "Because that would be illogical of you."
He smiles again, and it's anything but warm.

"Like I said Ms. Machada, we're having a bit of trouble concerning our situation with a late employee of ours, and you seem to be having trouble with assuring the safety of your body should you encounter another falling episode. Only Port Mafia members reap the health and safety benefits of the Port Mafia, so I would decide wisely."
"Decide… To work for you?"

His proceeding silence spoke volumes, so she sighs loud enough to serve as her own response but gives him one anyway; "Budgeting. Give me the numbers and I can cut your losses so you earn the money back and then some." Mori seems to have concocted some amusing response but she stops the spread of his smile and continues to speak. "But I want a box of brown hair-dye in return."

He still seems amused, he laughs even, hard enough that his eyes are closed. She bets he still sees everything, omnipotent, like a God, or one of his fallen apprentices who was forced to take on the title of demon.
"That sounds like a wonderful idea."

AN AHEAD . . .

hey y'all, it's me, the girl who never updates anything but starts a bunch of random projects that seem promising but only last for about a month before i get bored and begin to rewatch thirty rock for the need to feel alive. anyway, to cope with voltron i went from dipping my toe to diving into the lava hellfire that is bungou stray dogs and then this happened. it's okay, i hate it too, but sometimes if you want something out of your head you gotta get it out on paper. i'm still working on the black paladins (slowly but surely) but i figured i'd begin this lil episodic thing. chapters will be sporadic, as usual, but definitely not as long as this one. think of it as a self insert bungou stray wan i guess that feeds my need for mundane!port mafia and serves as a fandom outlet that is not a group chat filled with people who have no idea what i'm talking about.

anYwAY follow my dazai playlist on spotify (because someone followed my oc specific playlists but not an iconic one i made for a canon character blasphemous). if you care about the bullshit i have to say on a daily basis outside of this or any of my other fics follow my spam ig too (which is basically stuck on chuuya loving hours until further notice). links for those are in my profile. give me love and appreciation (ie comments and pms) and i will do my best to respond to y'all since i love me some good attention.

stay warm stay safe stay sassy, jackie.