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Dazai shuts the door behind himself and stands very still. Half a heartbeat later, a terrible force slams him back into the wood. Fingers curl around his neck, and he can feel the ghost of warmth leach through layers of gauze.
“Such a brute,” Dazai mutters unhappily. “When did you get out?”
“One hour ago,” Chuuya spits out, “to the news that you’re still as useless as ever. When are you going to stop ballroom dancing around with Dostoyevsky?”
“Dancers at least keep their distance from each other,” Dazai says, “which is more than I can say for— thank you. My neck was beginning to hurt. Now, what’s got your knickers into a twist this time? Besides my wonderful existence in general, of course.”
Having retreated, Chuuya stares at him for a moment. His fingers are twitching as though he’s aching to latch them onto Dazai’s throat again, and it’s rather difficult to decipher the look in his eyes. That last point in particular, Dazai doesn’t like. Dazai’s used to being able to read Chuuya like an open book, and actually having to ask a question aloud is really very rankling. But Chuuya seems especially strange tonight, almost as though, as though—
“That fucking ability user from the Guild wrote you into his novel, you know.” Chuuya’s hands remains by his side, with seemingly great restraint that Dazai’s airways appreciate. “Did you put him up to it?”
This is interesting. “Oh?” Dazai drawls out, mind immediately lighting up with several possibilities. “What happened to me? Did I die an honourable death, perhaps in the process of—”
Chuuya apparently loses the battle with his self-control: he grabs at Dazai’s tie, and pulls him down. “Tell me, did you?”
Dazai stares back, widening his eyes theatrically. He murmurs, “I can’t remember, let me think…” and when Chuuya tightens his hold on the ribbon with a vicious jerk, Dazai laughs out breathlessly. “Geez, hat rack, relax! I didn’t even know that Poe-kun could do that with real people!” Chuuya’s fingers brush against Dazai’s wrist as he pulls back, throwing Dazai away onto the closed door.
Fingers on his neck. Fingers on the inside of his wrist. Dazai pauses for a moment, before a smile slowly spreads on his face.
“Chuuya,” he purrs. “What happened in the book?”
“None of your business,” Chuuya snaps, and Dazai feels his beam widen. He knows that it’s part performative, and part infuriatingly vacant, and maybe also a little bit genuine. When he steps forward from the entrance, grim determination flares in Chuuya’s eyes as he visibly sets his jaw and refuses to move back.
“Could it be,” Dazai sing-songs, “that Chuuya watched me die? And that Chuuya made his way to my humble abode as soon as he could to make sure that I was actually alive? Because Chuuya was, let’s see, worried about me?”
The punch to his face is, he supposes, not entirely unexpected.
“Bleeding out from a knife wound?” Dazai says, sounding inordinately disappointed. “That’s— that’s not even original, in the slightest. And here I thought that it would be some amazing new method of murder, since Poe-kun’s decided that I’m worthy enough to star in his mystery…”
“Sorry that you didn’t get a glamorous death,” Chuuya replies snidely, and Dazai seems to take his retort at face value, probably — definitely — to annoy him further.
But Chuuya remembers the scene clearly, everything very bright and terribly sharp: limbs that were far too grey, skin that was far too cold, and the gush of red, so much red, which drowned the bunched fabric of Dazai’s shirt, trickling out steadily over Chuuya’s fingers.
“And no pretty ladies, either,” Dazai laments, sprawled out on his oddly comfortable couch, legs almost kicked over Chuuya’s lap. “Only— Chuuya.”
Chuuya had tried so hard to hold the wound closed. Just hang in there, he had demanded, teeth gritted in concentration, don’t you dare die on me. I’ll kill you myself if you close your eyes. A world without Dazai suddenly seemed like defeat: previously inconceivable, and then absurdly impending, leaving such a bitter taste in Chuuya’s mouth that he wanted to throw up twenty times over.
“Well, it was only fictional,” Dazai continues on cheerily. He plays the blundering idiot maddeningly well. “I bet that if I asked Poe-kun nicely, he’d write me a story about suicide where Chuuya isn’t in it at all!”
And Dazai — well, fake Dazai, the Dazai that existed in Edgar Allan Poe’s ghastly imagination — had smiled at Chuuya over his awful, shallow gasps. His awful, trembling hand had fluttered on the ground like a broken bird. Chuuya had clasped onto it in desperation with prayers on his breath, and it was frail and icy when it finally stilled.
“It’s not like you’d be able to get into any of Poe’s books anyway,” Chuuya mutters, instead of spewing out some stupid nonsense like ‘I thought you were dead’.
“Just knowing that it exists will be enough for me.” Dazai’s smiling a private smile, a little dark, a little gentle, entirely different to the weakened Dazai in Poe’s novel. “Or maybe you can read them to me, and we can see if that works instead.”
“In your dreams,” Chuuya snarls.
Dazai on the cusp of death was nothing new or revolutionary, of course, but watching the concept draw to its conclusion in real time was especially— well. Unsettling. Because even though Dazai is no longer a fixture in his life and has not been for the past four years, it had been a strange comfort in itself to know that he was out there, somewhere, forever screwing over people and grinning his vapid grin at unsuspecting victims. And before, Chuuya’s ability had been enough to ensure the safety of them both.
But abilities didn’t exist in the world of Poe’s book — and god, that had been a different kind of hell, like suffering the twinges of a phantom limb with all of its pain and the psychological trauma — and when fictional Dazai threw himself in front of Chuuya, directly towards the trajectory of the knife and into a clearly mortal wound, that had been like a death sentence for Chuuya himself.
He had wanted to say a lot of things, at the time. Things like you are my partner and I would have torn down the world to keep you alive if I could and you can’t leave me and how can I keep going on if half of my heart is dead?
And what he ended up begging, with warm blood staining his hands, was a frantic, useless, “Why?”
“It’s all in your head, Chuuya,” fake Dazai had murmured, as exasperatingly evasive as he had always been. “It’s not real.”
And wasn’t that just the problem: all of these feelings locked inside Chuuya’s chest, while his ex-partner, without any care or concern for Chuuya at all, just went and did... whatever he does.
“Chuuya,” Dazai is saying. He suddenly seems very close to Chuuya on the couch. In Chuuya’s experience, being in close proximity to Dazai is never a good sign. “Hey, Chuuya, you know that I’ll be fine, right?”
Mostly on reflex, Chuuya irritably counters, “I know that you’ll never die, like a particularly ugly and persistent weed.”
“Good.” Dazai smiles, and his mouth seems inexplicably soft. “And don’t you die, yourself, Chuuya — I’d hate to be without an ex-partner to bully.”
Maybe it’s the rare, unguarded expression on Dazai’s face, or maybe it’s the weirdly tender look in his eyes that tears the painful honesty out from where it was pressing against Chuuya’s throat— but Chuuya leans closer, and mumbles rather reluctantly, “I would have torn down the world to keep you alive, if I could.”
Dazai closes the distance. His fingers tangled in Chuuya’s hair feels like absolution, feels like benediction. It feels like an anchor grounding him to shore.
“I know,” he whispers against Chuuya’s lips, and when Chuuya presses into him, he lets him inside.
For the very first time in a long four years, Chuuya measures his breaths against a heartbeat not his own, and even though he’s on a foreign couch in an alien apartment, this — whatever this is — feels like home.