Chapter Text
Say what you will — that Nakahara Chuuya was fifteen-years-old, that Nakahara Chuuya was a dangerous Ability-user, that Nakahara Chuuya was a member of the Port Mafia, that Nakahara Chuuya was too old to be tucked into bed each night by his Ane-san — but, if he had to kill people during the day, he was allowed to get his goodnight kiss come bedtime. But don't you go around saying that it was because Nakahara Chuuya was a big baby, especially not if you were an accident-prone, smartass Casanova-wannabe. He wasn't the snivelling little kid that Kouyou first brought home so many years ago. He'd learned how to hold a knife and follow orders and earn his keep. So maybe he was too young to have washed so many bloodstains from his shirtsleeves and not young enough to hold on to the lie that Kouyou's lips could wash the blood from his hands, but anybody who still got kissed goodnight on the forehead couldn't be an entirely bad person, right?
Don't you laugh. It wasn't as if Chuuya still had a bedtime, or ever had one to begin with. Having been raised between mafiosi and Kouyou's girls, bedtime had always meant whenever work was done and there was nothing left to do. When he had been much younger, that had meant keeping himself occupied and out from under the girls' feet until their clients dwindled down to the few straggling drunks who would soon enough be tossed out onto the pavement by the Port Mafia toughs under Kouyou's care so she could excuse herself and go put him to bed. These days, he had work of his own to do.
Today, he had put some small-time, no-name gang leader in the ground under Mori's orders. Not literally; he left the body where it would be easily found behind some dimsum place in Chinatown. The highlight of the day had been the fact that the man had no front teeth from a youth of bar brawls and subpar fighting skills, so that Chuuya had to get creative with making him bite the curb — slicing open his cheek and making him grip the step with his molars had to be an excusable deviation from standard MO given the circumstances. Just business as usual, if he hadn't needed to explain what Mori called his totally uncalled for, completely unnecessary lapse from protocol.
He had to sit through almost two hours of Mori's friendly reminder that, apparently, what had been indispensable was breaking the jaw and not biting the pavement, and the importance of proper attribution. He had to work overtime to type up and submit both his report and the written version of his oral explanation. He had to run into an oddly moony-eyed Dazai on his way out of headquarters.
As much as he was grateful to the Mafia and enjoyed the familiar weight of a knife, he never did have much patience for paperwork or the Boss's brats and was glad to be able to come home to freshly-laundered sheets and Kouyou's long nails scritching soothingly at his scalp. He would never tell her this, because she disapproved of fantasies — the sort that could not be monetized or bargained with anyway; she traded in fantasies, after all — but, like this, he could forget about broken teeth and the way the gun did not shake in his hand. He was just Chuuya, fifteen-years-old, with his Ane-san.
He held the fantasy close as she leaned down to brush her lips to his hairline. She always smelled strongly of matcha, and, tonight, the subtle fragrance of lilies.
"Dazai came to visit tonight," she said when she resumed brushing her fingers through his hair. "He'd been waiting outside when we opened for the night, poor thing."
Chuuya bolted upright at that. It wasn't unusual for Dazai to visit. This was a Port Mafia-owned establishment, after all, and their own members accounted for a third of their loyal patronage. Dazai had been visiting ever since Mori determined that it would be best for his and Chuuya's psycho-social development. He had been a regular of his own volition for a couple of years now. But Dazai never waited outside for anyone and was bad news where women were concerned, and, as the man of this house of many women, Chuuya felt himself responsible for at least the younger ones who did not know Dazai or his silvered tongue very well.
"Oh, no. He wasn't any trouble," said Kouyou, always quick to settle him back into bed. "He even brought flowers: Casablanca lilies."
Night-blooming flowers, of course. Although, he hadn't pegged Dazai to be the type to spend so exorbitantly on a bouquet.
"Looking for me, then."
Kouyou stifled a giggle with the edge of her sleeve, in the way she rarely did since Tokutaro-san. "Not everything Dazai does is about you, Chuuya."
"Okay, I give up. Why the fuck was Dazai here?"
"Language." Typical Kouyou, strict as always. "He asked me for a date, would you believe that?"
The audacity of that bastard. Chuuya could only stare dumbly at his Ane-san.
"I told him yes," she said, as if it meant nothing. "He asked me out to dinner — where was it again? — Cafe Tosca. He paid for it too. Such a little gentleman. He even asked if he could kiss me. I just had to say yes."
If Chuuya had still been listening, he would have known that it had been a kiss on the cheek, because Kouyou thought it was cute that Dazai was playing at suitor the way he and Chuuya used to play at assassins, but that she didn't think much of it at all. Dazai was fifteen-years-old, after all, just a child, and raised by Mori, of all people; but don't tell Mori about that last part. How much could he know about love or courtship or women or how it hurt? However, Chuuya was far too horrified to pay attention.
He had automatically connected the word kiss with lips, a kiss on the lips, open-mouthed perhaps. Nevermind that he got kisses from Kouyou all the time. Oh, God. That was exactly the problem. He just got a goodnight kiss from Kouyou. It must have been his imagination, but he could feel his hair falling out where Dazai's lips by proxy had touched him. It had to be his imagination, because he could feel Dazai's slimy kiss sizzling on his skin, eating straight through his skull and into his brain, where he would never be able to wash it off, not even with Kouyou's kisses, especially not Kouyou's kisses.
It was just like Dazai to ruin everything, and Chuuya was certain that he meant to this time.
Well, Kouyou must have taken his dumbstruck ceiling-gazing as a cue to leave at some point, because Chuuya spent the night alone and unable to sleep and picking at his hairline until there was blood under his fingernail. It must have been between then and the sunrise assaulting his corneas that he decided that he would like to pay an early morning visit to HQ.
Some people would argue that 9:00 AM wasn't early at all, but those people didn't regularly turn in for bed at 3:00 or 4:00 AM nor did Chuuya regularly associate with those type of people. Where the Port Mafia was concerned, 9:00 AM was an outrageous hour to be visiting for any reason outside of a business transaction or an emergency, and Chuuya's visit was for neither of those. But the attendants were diurnal at least, despite also being Mafia, and they knew and trusted him well enough — or rather, they knew he was one of Kouyou's and they trusted her — to let him into Dazai's quarters without asking any questions or calling the intercom to see if he was awake.
Of course, Dazai had been asleep, but that was what Chuuya had been counting on when he kicked the door into the opposite wall, without checking to see if it had been locked, and pounced on the bed. To his credit, Dazai was quick to wake and level his gun at Chuuya with minimal fumbling beneath his pillow. He had that insufferable practiced sort of lazy grin on his face, as if this couldn't have been an attempt on his life, not that he would have particularly cared either if it had, but Chuuya hadn't missed the way his eyes had widened for a split-second upon waking. Chuuya would have liked to make his mouth bleed, if he didn't have the muzzle of a gun trained up the bridge of his nose.
"'Morning, Hat Rack," Dazai said pleasantly, rubbing sleep from his eyes, clicking the safety off the gun. That bastard. "It's so early."
Chuuya made a show of twisting his gun hand out into a wristlock until he could feel the joints creak satisfactorily. If he pulled down, he could pop Dazai's shoulder clean off, but he wouldn't. "It's nine o' clock. And I definitely got you this time. Fuck you."
"Oh, did you?"
"You know I did!" Chuuya applied just enough torque to see Dazai wince before easing up. "See this?"
"Oh?"
He could feel the point of something digging gently into the spot just below his sternum and looked down to see his own knife.
"I have two hands, Chuuya."
"Shit."
Dazai twisted the knife slightly, careful enough with Chuuya's shirt. "Wow. You're terrible at ambushes."
"Shut up!" Chuuya released his hand and snatched back his knife. He couldn't get distracted like this. "What's this I heard about you taking Ane-san out to dinner?"
Dazai didn't seem to think much of it either and was busy rubbing his shoulder. "Is that what has you yelling so early in the morning?"
"You got her flowers!"
"Are you jealous?" Dazai's grin widened. "Is that it?"
Chuuya spluttered. "What? No! Stop making this about me. What are you planning?"
"Well, if you must know," said Dazai, "I was thinking of asking if she wanted to go visit the Doll Museum on Saturday."
"No, no." Kouyou could scold him for it later, making decisions on her behalf, but Chuuya was putting his foot down here and now. "I'm forbidding you from asking. You keep your slimy lips away from Ane-san."
"But I—" Dazai cut himself off. There was a dangerous edge to his smile. "Oh, is that what this is?" he asked. "I could give you a kiss too if you just asked."
He leaned in to place a kiss on Chuuya's forehead, where his lips had allegedly already been indirectly, and Chuuya leaned away and put his fist in between them.
"That's exactly the problem!" he said, shoving off the bed. "How would you feel if I dated the Boss?"
Dazai sat up and prodded the blooming hematoma on his jaw. "Go ahead. Be my guest."
Well, what more could he really say to that?
"Fuck you. I will!"
Of course, somewhere between storming out of Dazai's room and punching Mori's floor number into the elevator panel, Chuuya calmed down enough to question the wisdom of his own words. He couldn't really ask the Boss out on a date, even if it was to prove a point to Dazai. No, unlike a certain supposed prodigy, Chuuya knew his place in this organization and considered himself smart enough not to involve any of the top management in whatever it was they called their relationship.
Luckily, Oda Sakunosuke was nowhere near that level. In fact, he was as low as they had. Which wasn't to say that he wasn't nice. He was nice, in that way that would have appealed to someone older than Chuuya was, and fairly handsome, but this wasn't really about Oda, anyway.