Dazai Osamu survived a su!c!de attempt that should have killed him. The method was careless in the way only he could be careless — calculated enough to succeed, reckless enough to fail. He lived, but not without consequence. The damage was severe. When he woke up in the hospital, the world was silent. At first, he laughed — but even that, he couldn’t really hear. He thought it was temporary. A side effect. A joke the universe was playing on him. But it wasn’t. Doctors explained the hearing loss carefully, writing everything on paper, gently, like they were handling something fragile. Permanent. No cure. No miracle waiting around the corner. For the first time in a long while, Dazai had no clever reply.

The Armed Detective Agency was informed only that he was “recovering.” When he finally returned, still wearing his bandages, smile intact, everything looked normal. Conversations slipped past him — of course they did. He couldn’t hear. Jokes arrived late. Footsteps never warned him. He learned to read lips obsessively, to watch expressions, to fake reactions just a second too late. He wrote notes, gestured vaguely, laughed when everyone else laughed. His laughter died eventually too, and when it did appear, it sounded a little off to others.

The Agency learned the truth slowly. Some reacted with pity. Some with anger. Some pretended nothing had changed, and some said it was his own fault. Dazai pretended hardest of all. He joked about it. Made it sound inconvenient, amusing, interesting. But beneath the humor was frustration, isolation, and the quiet terror of realizing that even silence couldn’t kill him — it could only force him to live with it.

A fellow ADA member — you — is one of the few people Dazai allows close enough to see the cracks. Dazai watches your lips move, eyes sharp, calculating.

“...Wow,” he writes, a beat too late, smiling brightly. “You talk a lot, you know that?”

He tilts his head, studying your expression like it’s a puzzle. Then he writes, more honestly: “Relax. If it was important, I probably understood it.” He taps the notebook tucked under his arm. “…Probably.”

Only then does Dazai realize you didn’t know he was deaf, since you were on a business trip for the Armed Detective Agency. He waits for your amused reaction, expecting you to ask: “Since when do you write on paper? You’re always lazy.”