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There is a click in the lock of his door at 1:37 in the morning.
Chuuya listens to the quiet scrape of metal on metal, tumblers being expertly shifted into place one by one. At first he doesn’t bother to move from his position in front of the window — the moonlight reflects off bruised clouds rolling in from Tokyo, heavy over the churning waves of the bay — but soon enough he tosses away his current video game and walks over to the door.
He jerks it open just as the final tumbler clicks. Dazai looks up at him, wrists falling loose from the doorframe.
“What the hell happened to you?” Chuuya demands.
Dazai looks like the view outside Chuuya’s apartment: muted shades of grey, skin bleached moonlight pale. There’s something storming in his unbandaged eye. He shoves his hands deep inside his pockets almost immediately, and when he pushes past Chuuya, he smells like scotch.
“Feel free to make yourself at home,” Chuuya calls out sarcastically. He slams his door shut with pointed irritation. Dazai’s already kicked off his shoes and commandeered Chuuya’s previous position on his couch, so Chuuya heads to the kitchen and pours himself a single glass of good wine. It seems like it’ll be another one of those nights; he’ll need it. He doesn’t bother to offer any to Dazai.
He heads back to the living room and prods at Dazai’s leg with his foot, frowning a little when Dazai absently makes room for him with no complaint.
“Alright, spill.”
“There’s a storm coming,” is what Dazai says. He’s staring across the bay.
“If I wanted a weather forecast, I’d turn on the goddamn television. Which would be better company than you, let’s make that clear.”
“It was raining in Tokyo, you know.” Dazai’s taken ahold of a paperclip, twisting and bending at the thin silver wire. Chuuya categorically knows that Dazai didn’t go anywhere near Tokyo the day earlier: he was with Chuuya at the docks, setting up a trap he’d devised for an enemy who turned out to be a few straggling small fry. Later, he’d tried his hardest to wander into the brief crossfire. But Dazai seems fixated on the innocuous detail now: “It was raining in Tokyo,” he repeats, “I checked the reports,” and he seems unusually restless, and then a laugh suddenly bubbles out of him.
It sounds sharp; it sounds helpless. It goes on for entirely too long, and at the end of it, he murmurs, “There’s no other explanation, then, is there?”
It’s not a question. Chuuya doesn’t have an answer, anyway. Instead, he takes a sip of the wine.
“I just wanted,” Dazai starts, “to have— something. Something that was my own.”
The wine goes down easy— it’s a vintage Domaine Leroy, after all. Of course Dazai isn’t getting any of this. “Sure,” Chuuya agrees, after he’s savoured the taste. He knows that Dazai can hear what he doesn’t say: you’re making no sense to me. That doesn’t seem to matter much to Dazai; likely, that’s why he’s here at all. Information in their world is strictly on a need-to-know basis — a commodity, and as an interrogator, Dazai knows the price of it well.
Even if he sometimes comes over and babbles nonsense, when he forgets how emotions work.
“I should have known that it wouldn’t work out so easily,” Dazai continues. He drops the mangled paperclip onto the coffee table, and Chuuya scowls at the action on reflex. Dazai’s hand disappears inside his trouser pocket again. Chuuya can see the outline of his finger moving, tracing over the straight edge of something over and over.
“Sentimentality doesn’t become you.” Chuuya takes another sip.
Dazai tilts his head towards him. Chuuya raises his eyes from his glass. It’s been a while since he’s actually looked at Dazai: the planes of his newly-adult face are both familiar and unfamiliar. They say that it takes ten years for the body to completely regenerate itself. It’s true that Dazai is now a different person to the boy that Chuuya met, but the petulant, arrogant confusion at not knowing something seems to be just the same. There are some things, maybe, that you can never change.
Chuuya is the one who looks away first, and he takes a few moments to polish off his wine. When he stands up, Dazai’s gaze follows him silently in the ghostly reflection of the window pane, superimposed on the charcoal-grey clouds.
“You can let yourself out whenever,” Chuuya says. As though Dazai would, the lazy leech. Chuuya washes off his glass in the kitchen sink, and when he passes by the couch on the way to the bathroom, Dazai is already fast asleep.
Bastard. Chuuya levitates a blanket over to him.
…
Chuuya wakes at 6:15 in the morning, fifteen minutes before his alarm is set to go off. Seven minutes later, a shrill ringtone cuts through the air.
He makes his way to the living room and fishes out the offending phone from the black coat thrown haphazardly onto a stool. Dazai is still blissfully asleep on the couch. The blanket has been kicked off to the ground, and the red-hued morning light casts a glow onto his face.
“Get up, asshole.” Chuuya drops the phone onto his head. “It’s for you.”
Dazai moves with a groan and the lethargic slowness of a blind tortoise, but still manages to make a rude gesture in Chuuya’s general direction. When he picks up the call, though, his voice is clear. A terse “Hello,” and then a very cool “I see.”
He’s absolutely livid.
Chuuya doesn’t really feel like dealing with another one of Dazai’s moods, so he migrates to his kitchen and starts making coffee. From the living room, he hears catches of instructions: strip the bodies. Examine all of their possessions. Find the identity of the poison, the method of delivery. By the time the coffee machine is spitting out the blessed liquid, a bleary-eyed Dazai has joined him at the counter, shirt askew.
“Fucking guards, can’t do a single thing right.” Dazai drags a hand through his hair, which is even messier than usual. “Is that coffee?”
“Yes, my own.” Chuuya deliberately takes a large sip in demonstration. It’s too hot. It’s the principle that matters.
Dazai glowers at him, but is cut off from his forthcoming complaints by the ring of another incoming call. With a violent jab, he accepts it, and Chuuya wanders off to his poorly-stocked fridge to scrounge up whatever breakfast he can find.
When he turns around again, Dazai has straightened up his clothes and his hair looks much more presentable. In fact, he’s smiling sweetly at Chuuya when he tucks his phone into his pocket.
“Hey, Chuuya.”
Chuuya places a carton of eggs onto the table. “Nope.”
“Take me to the harbour,” Dazai says.
Chuuya shrugs. “Sorry, no can do. I haven’t eaten yet.”
Dazai glares at him. “I haven't, either. Eating twenty minutes earlier won’t help you grow any taller, you know. Midget.”
Chuuya bares his teeth in response. “And yet I’m going to do it anyway.”
Kouyou had pushed some fruit onto him a few days ago while muttering uncomplimentary things about his breakfast choices; Chuuya grabs a banana from the mix. He pauses when he hears Dazai come up behind him.
“Come on, Chuuya.” Dazai has a very annoying habit of drawing out Chuuya’s name, low and husky, mouth wrapped around the syllables as though sampling an expensive cabernet. Not that Dazai would know a Lafite Rothschild if it came and dumped itself over his head, really, but— in any case, it does things to the inside of Chuuya’s chest that he will not ever admit. Possibly, though, Dazai knows it already. There’s a sudden glint in Dazai’s eye that Chuuya doesn’t like, and he watches warily when Dazai skips away.
“This game.” Dazai returns and waves the handheld console around. “You were stuck on it yesterday, right? I’ll get you past the level.”
The laugh expels itself from Chuuya, unbidden. “Sure you will.”
Dazai puffs up imperiously. “Do you think that I can’t?”
Dazai is good at many things, Chuuya may reluctantly admit (sometimes; if you find Chuuya on a good day, if threatened with a hot poker with no way to fight back, take your pick). Video games are decidedly not one of them. “It’s like chess,” Dazai would whinge, “You can win, but it’s all in your head. What’s the point? It’s a waste of time.” Dazai claims that he only has time for things that are grounded, things that are real. Chuuya suspects that it’s the result of an epic sulk: Dazai lost to him, once.
“Please,” Dazai says, and then there is a terrible softness in his eyes, and god damn it, it’s never been about video games, if Chuuya's being honest.
“If you jump in the river, leave the game on the shore first,” Chuuya says, reaching for his keys. Of course, they’re no longer on the counter, and he rolls his eyes as he goes to pick up the motorcycle helmets by the door.
Dazai sings out, “I promise I’ll get it back to you safely!”
…
At 9:52, Yokohama is flushed with grey, as though it has lost its colours in a wash of not-yet-fallen rain. Chuuya’s phone vibrates in his pocket. He glances at the screen before picking up.
The obnoxiously cheerful greeting comes: “Hey, Slug.”
“What,” Chuuya snaps.
Dazai gives him three addresses without further ado. “Send your best men. Capture anyone you find alive, otherwise search the buildings and get all the information that you can. I need to know who was there recently, where they come from, what their objectives are, anything, as soon as possible. Their emblem is an old grey European pistol. Chuuya? Did you get that?”
“All right,” Chuuya says. “Understood.”
…
The rumours, twisting and slithering as they are, first reach Chuuya at 8:29 in the evening. Chuuya has sent off his reports to Dazai and the Boss. Executive Dazai threatened to kill his protégé, the whispers say, and when Chuuya walks past the Akutagawa kid in the hallway, his eyes are burning with ice.
The wind outside headquarters is just as cold. The sky sinks with the weight of grey cloud and gloom: there’s a storm coming.
…
The next night, there is a knock on his door at 12:41.
“Chuuya, open up.” Dazai sounds pissed. The knock comes again, although to describe it as a knock would be quite generous. Chuuya has neighbours, damn it.
“Calm the fuck down,” he shouts back. He jerks the door open and finds Dazai standing there by the threshold, thrumming like a live wire, eyes very bright. He looks furious. He looks very alive.
“I let him go,” Dazai says. “I let him go.”
“What the hell are you talking about?”
Like before, Dazai pushes his way into the apartment without invitation, movements completely lacking his usual cat-like grace. He spits out, “Sakaguchi Ango,” and his voice is, rather strangely, the coldest that Chuuya’s ever heard it.
“The traitor.” Chuuya closes the door. “That’s not like you.” That’s so wildly out of character that— well, that Chuuya can’t even claim to be surprised. This is Dazai, after all.
Dazai growls inarticulately. “I know,” he says. “I know. But I—” and then he doesn’t finish, and his breaths are coming quickly, chest rising and falling with the crude strength of his unfocused fury. He has his hands clenched into fists, as though to throw a punch, or as though to hold himself back— Chuuya can’t tell, and that is what alarms him.
He’s not here to deal with this shit, not here to talk down someone who, by all reports, have been especially unpredictable for the past couple of days. Nowhere in the records will they ever find an order for Nakahara Chuuya to keep Executive Dazai Osamu in line, to keep Dazai Osamu alive, and at no time has Chuuya ever consented to be handler to a genius terrified of the monsters in his own mind— but this is Dazai, and this is what Chuuya has been stuck with since he was eight years old, and Dazai has always, always been like this. Always been high-maintenance, always been set on causing the greatest inconvenience for others, always been caught in things much larger than himself.
Yes, Chuuya has always known Dazai.
So he sees it, the moment something flickers in Dazai’s eye, the moment his breaths change cadence. He sees it when Dazai shifts to fall back onto the wall, when Dazai’s arms snake around his neck and pull him forward in the same motion. He sees it in the way Dazai’s pupils are blown wide, in the way the frustration sparking the air bends to something deeper, something more raw, and when Dazai’s fingers knot into his hair, he feels the brush of No Longer Human swell through his whole body.
Oh, but Dazai’s beautiful when he’s unstable like this: that moment of silence at the height of summer, before the thunder strikes and rain buckets down. He’s warm, and he moves so well against Chuuya’s body, and when Chuuya licks into his mouth he sighs into it and his eyes fall shut. He feels incongruously small in Chuuya’s arms, and he feels alive, he feels fragile. If Chuuya can keep him like this forever, safe, balanced on the precipice between desperation and this strange tenderness, then oh, wouldn’t his life be so much easier, like this.
Dazai never lets his life be easy, though, not if he can help it. “I knew that there was a storm coming, but it’s even bigger than I initially thought,” is what he mutters against Chuuya’s lips, distractedly, and Chuuya knows that behind the caress of his fingers on Chuuya’s cheek is his mind running at triple speed, going through data, statistics, probabilities.
Dazai has always been someone he can touch, but not reach.
But he mouths down the side of his neck anyway, because this is enough, this is enough — Chuuya knows Dazai, after all, and he knows that there are some things that you can never change — and when Dazai lets his head fall back— well, if that is surrender, Chuuya will take this as a victory.
And tomorrow will be a brand new day.
…
At 8:32 in the evening on the next day, a bomb explodes from underneath Chuuya’s car.
He’s protected from the worst of it by his ability. They recover the fragments, but no usable fingerprints are ever found. When Chuuya finally gets discharged from the hospital, a video game console rests at the centre of his kitchen counter.
He throws it in the trash.