Work Text:
Dear fellow traveler
Under the moon
I saw you standing in the shadows and your eyes won't move
You put your hand out
Opened the door
You said come with me boy, I want to show you something more
Night-time has always been Akutagawa’s favourite. The city, never sleeping, pulsing alive underneath dim moonlight. Illuminated by car’s headlights, streetlamps and the neverdyinglights of the skycrapers. The majority of the dirty businesses takes place at night, making it perfect for two delinquents like them to blend in. Not that anyone would see them on the roof of the Mafia’s storehouse anyway.
And everything feels. Simply.
Calm.
He can make out the other one’s taller frame out of the corner of his eyes.
Can make out the visible eye watching the skyline.
Can hear him breathe in, loudly, and then see the white cloud of breath that would perpetually come to life just to fan out, to disappear into the heavy night air.
He still doesn’t know how to feel about Dazai’s presence only a few feet away from him. Rashamon knows better than him, the edgy trembling at his back reminding him of how cautious he should be supposed to feel around his superior. The dark and stinging mark on his ribs bringing back memories from earlier, from their training, as well. But all this still doesn’t make Akutagawa flinch when he sees Dazai suddenly turn towards him, feels his gaze on himself.
And so he looks up, just in the right moment to see Dazai stretching his hand out into his direction.
“Come,” he says, “I want to show you something more.”
There wasn’t any malice audible in his voice. No good will either, his tone had just been monotone, with a certain urgency hiding underneath.
An intaken breath escapes chapped lips, visible in the freezing air. “Alright,” he answers without hesitating, stretching out his arm and taking the other’s hand, a comforting warmth radiating from their touch.
The whole way his mind is running in circles, wondering if the small tug of lips had been just in his imagination or if Dazai had really smiled at him.
It doesn’t even matter where Dazai is headed with him. It doesn’t even matter if he has a real destination. It wouldn’t even matter if he were to try to drive into a brick wall. No, his eyes are just staring out of the window of the stolen car, nonchalantly watching the city’s lights pass them by. His ears listening to the other humming along to the cheesy pop song that's coming out of the radio. His fingers tangled with each other in his lap, secretly trying to keep the warmth from minutes ago and hoping for one of Dazai’s hands to return to them.
It doesn’t take them long to leave the city, to leave the busyness behind them and instead travel on a dim-lit country road. The fact that nature is so close to them when all they have around them all day is polluted air and people rushing from A to B is unreal. Not that Akutagawa wants to live his life any other way.
A cough escapes his mouth and one of his hands instinctively comes up to catch it. It hadn’t been his first cough of their drive but it is the first one to get a reaction out of Dazai:
“You wanna stop somewhere and get something to drink? Something to eat?”
He just shrugs, diesn't care. He is fine with everything as long as he is with Dazai. Standing in the cold. Or random excursions in the middle of the night. Even getting beat up.
Grey eyes lift just in time to see a smirk plastered across the other’s lips. Not the smile he had thought - hoped - to see earlier but still enough to make his heart flatter and his eyes quickly advert again, staring into the darkness and trying to make out the fields around them.
The 24-hour-restaurant they roll up in forty minutes later, after pulling onto a highway, is empty besides themselves, the tired-looking girl taking their orders and a truck-driver that sits in a corner and reads a newspaper.
Dazai pays for a quick meal and two bottles of water that they take back on the road.
Usually Akutagawa isn’t one to pay any mind to what other people think about him - besides Dazai-san, of course. But he can’t help but wonder how they look to strangers. Do they look like friends on a roadtrip? Or like family? Any thought of seeing Dazai as something else as his mentor, as his savior, enflames a weird feeling in his chest.
“You know,” Dazai had said earlier, during their meal, “you could actually try to make conversation with me.”
Akutagawa had looked up from the couple of leftover fries he had been picking on with his small, wooden skewer to meet Dazai's gaze. He had frowned and shrugged his shoulders. “What am I supposed to talk about?”
Dazai had just given him an amused look before he stood up and went over to the girl at the check-out to pay. She had kept staring and Akutagawa can't blame her; they sure must have left a weird picture; both with dishevelled hair, worn-out but determined looks on their faces, one covered with bandages and the other wrapped up in his long, dark coat and recurring coughing shaking his body. Maybe they looked like two run-aways from a hospital? Two boys, trying to run away from their fate?
Not that it matters anyway, what other people see them for. The girl would soon forget or have some new weirdos march into her workplace that she could wonder about.
“Where are we headed to?” Akutagawa asks, interrupting the silence and earning a short glance from Dazai. The radio had been silent ever since they continued their trip.
“Where do you want to head to?”
Akutagawa presses his lips together, not knowing what answer to give to that question.
“I don’t care,” he answers truthfully. I don’t care as long as you’re there, too.
Dazai’s fingers briefly drum on the steering wheel. “Me neither,” he then confesses.
And so they pull over a few minutes later and settle down on the car’s hood, their backs resting against the windshield.
The cold air bites into their clothes like a hungry beast and Akutagawa dares to seek comfort in holding Dazai's hand again. If Dazai minds, he doesn’t say anything. It had been him to pull them out of their usual trot, anyway, so Akutagawa doesn’t blame himself for getting bold all of a sudden.
“It’s beautiful, isn’t it?” Dazai says in awe, looking into the sky. “Sometimes civilisation is a shame, huh? Just imagine all the stars that could be visible if you were somewhere in complete wilderness!”
His voice is so full of emotion, full of almost child-like excitement, it makes Akutagawa stare in awe as well - not into the sky but rather onto his mentor’s face. Dazai is a mystery, his feelings tightly locked away most of the time. But sometimes, sometimes Dazai is like a glass, he thinks to himself; spilling over with emotions that drip onto Akutagawa as well, who can’t help but feel them cling onto himself, desperately trying to make him feel something else but his usual rage or numbness.
It works.
Ripping his eyes away from Dazai's face takes a moment, a feeling creeping up inside him as if he just did something forbidden, before looking back at the darkness above them. Grey eyes linger on the moon, half-hidden behind a few clouds.
“Yeah,” he agrees, “It’s beautiful.”
And he wonders if Dazai knows that he’s not talking about the view above them.
He feels the other’s thumb brush over the back of his hand and a breath hitches in his throat. Just when he wants to turn around and take a look at Dazai, his voice cuts through the coldness, softness tinting the words:
“Close your eyes.”
Akutagawa complies after a moment of hesitation and, soon after, hears the other shift next to him. The next thing he feels is how his arm, the one between them, is rearranged and then warm breath hits his face while another hand comes up to caress his cheek.
Dazai’s lips are softer than he would’ve thought they’d be. He doesn’t have the nerve to think how his own, chapped ones must feel. How Dazai must feel. If he feels just as intrigued? Just as lulled in?
When Dazai leans back, just a few centimetres, his eyes flicker open.
“Did I allow you to open them again?” Dazai demands to know, but his voice isn’t scolding and Akutagawa can just stare at him through lidded eyes, his brain processing everything way slower than it normally would.
Just as he is about to give an answer, a small ‘sorry’, Dazai shamelessly uses the opening of his mouth to crash his own on it again, this time more demanding. At this Akutagawa can’t help the little sound that escapes the back of his throat and his eyes flutter shut again while his free hand comes up, sneaks underneath his mentor’s coat to search for some of the warmth he is desperately longing for.
And they kiss again and again this night, underneath the moon who is the only witness of their doings.
He knows this won’t last forever, sees it in the way Dazai looks at him, feels it in the way those fingers, usually there to hit or grab him, gingerly rest on his face and in his own trembling ones. He hears it in the way his own voice whispers out Dazai’s name, so fragile and longing, finally earning him the chaste smile he had hoped to see again for the whole night now.
And Akutagawa lets go and feels as lost and torn as their mingling breaths, fanning out into the night.
After Dazai leaves he feels a different kind of lost.
Even years later he still sometimes stands on the same rooftop at night, watching his breath and the city that lives on normally despite the most important person being gone from his life. He then continues to clutch at his own hands, reliving those old memories, those touches, and is still, sometimes, able to make out the pain his mentor had given him.
Pain.
When that will fade away, what would he have left?
Usually, at some point, one of his hands comes up to press against his mouth. Catches his breath before it is able to form another cloud. Stilling the quiet sob that is about to leave his lips.
After some time he also brings it over himself to sometimes visit Oda Sakunosuke’s grave. The man had saved his life, after all, all those years ago. Shortly before dying himself. And even though he had blamed him in the beginning - it didn’t took a genius to figure out how his death and Dazai’s leaving were connected - his anger has now turned into something else. Remorse, maybe. For what, he isn’t too sure.
It happens in one peaceful night, reminding him of the one almost five years ago. As soon as his feet enter the graveyard he sees the tall figure looming in front of his destination. If he’d really want to he could still turn around, unseen, but his legs move automatically and make their way over to his ex-mentor.
When they are only a short distance away those brown eyes look at him with a knowing look, indicating that he had guessed who the approaching person was before having looked up.
“You’re here too, huh?” Akutagawa breaks the silence, his hands stuffed into the pockets of his coat, twitching in yearning for another kind of warmth that he doesn’t think they’ll get ever again. But he still hopes.
“Every now and then,” is the answer he gets.
An unreadable expression is on Dazai’s face as he approaches the black-haired man and Akutagawa takes in the sight before him, gets reminded of how both of them, boys back then, have grown up to be men now.
But the past will never truly leave them, will it?
It clings to their bones like the mist around them, like the stench of this city. This hellhole they call a home.
And Akutagawa feels the glass dripping over again.
Waits in cruel anticipation.
His right hand slowly leaves his pocket and he soon feels the pressure of another hand that takes it just as carefully. But he can’t look down, can’t let his eyes leave Dazai’s face.
“Do you want to show me something more?” He finally breathes out, sees the white cloud leaving his mouth, and in return Dazai gives him a fond smile before leaning down.