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In the flesh, rather than a granulated figure in a surveillance photograph, Osamu Dazai is rather unremarkable — brown hair, brown eyes, pretty mouth curled into the simper of a liar. He’d lost the head bandages somewhere from Yokohama to St. Petersburg. Nothing more, now, than a wild bird caught in Fyodor’s cage.
“So, what?” Dazai murmurs against his lips. The flickering halogen lamp filters the light from his eyes. His wrists are loose under Fyodor’s hands. “You got me,” he adds, quite unnecessarily. “Did you think that you could use some… other methods of persuasion?”
For the so-called demonic prodigy to fall into a trap— Fyodor drops his head, tests the weight of his derision on the junction between neck and shoulder. He smiles at the shivered response; startles, then, at a sharp pain in his wrist. He looks down.
Dazai breathes into his ear, “I don’t like pain, you know.” His thumb digs into pale skin as though he means to push through, right through, into the hollow between ulna and radius. Perhaps he does, and perhaps Fyodor would even like to see him try: to see the blood and bones and ligaments that will curiously mark him out as human, at least in components. With morbid interest, Fyodor stares at his own skin drawn tight. It’s effort to keep the discomfort from his face. He counts — one and two and three and — then, he jerks his hand away from the tight grip.
Dazai lets him go, small smile playing on his lips.
“You knew it was a trap,” Fyodor mutters, suddenly furious. He shoves Dazai back against the wall. On impact, Dazai’s breath hitches. Fyodor crushes the urge to swallow it down, to steal it as — he realises now — Dazai managed to deny him the climax of the chase. Instead, he settles for a hand wrenched into brown hair. With aggravating easiness, Dazai lets his head follow the direction of his pull.
“Such an invitation you extended to me,” Dazai looks up at him lazily, fingers feather-light at his waist, “how could I ever resist?”
“And you delivered yourself on a platter to Piter, for— for what?”
Dazai shrugs. “You were interesting,” he says, reaching his other hand out with infuriating slowness: the manner of an owner to a pet. Fyodor does not flinch when he feels it on his throat, trailing to settle on the carotid artery. “It’s been a while since something has piqued my interest, after all. Consider this a compliment.”
His fingers are cool against Fyodor’s choke of laughter; it has been a long time since Fyodor considered himself surprised. “You’re a fool.”
“Concerned for me, Fyodor Mikhailovich?”
Fyodor considers the idea, as foreign as the awareness of a live body under his fingertips. “Disappointed, really. But you’ll do.”
Dazai lets his hand drop away. “Will I.”
“At the least, your ability will.”
Dazai’s smile grows; Fyodor follows it with the pad of his thumb.
“You’ve been looking for a purpose your whole life.” Fyodor lets his hand fall to the tan trenchcoat, pushes it from Dazai’s shoulder. “With me, you would be something greater than this.”
Dazai tilts his head, eyes widened to an overblown thoughtfulness. Fyodor wants to claw them out. He wants to tear his heart from his chest, scoop out his lungs and extract his brain and perhaps then, if they’re laid out, neatly, like gears from a clockwork mechanism, people could begin to understand exactly how Osamu Dazai fit together. (If his blood runs red— if it runs at all.) Perhaps his viscera, if nothing else, will spell out what makes him tick, what makes him want, what makes him decide that “I don’t know, I’ve had enough of partnerships for a while.”
Such sentimentality. It makes Fyodor sick. He says this out loud.
“Oh?” Dazai murmurs. “Well, we can’t have that.” He sounds amused.
Later, his coat falls to the floor like shed snakeskin, and maybe it is another kind of a cage: without it, he’s warm under Fyodor’s hands. A little more and a little less human. His fingernails rake across skin like talons; naturally, there isn’t anything else quite like the affinity between game and hunter.