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The sheet rustled quietly, breaking the silence of the bedroom.
However, it wasn’t the weight suddenly withdrawing from around him that woke Chuuya, nor the insistent chirping of birds outside the ajar window. It wasn’t even the pale rays of opalescent green coming from outside, peeking in the first attempts to wash away the night.
It was the lack of body heat. The lack of itchy bandages brushing against his naked back, used as he was to be the small spoon.
A chibi is not qualified to be the big spoon, Dazai usually said.
Chuuya scoffed in his pillow. The sound ballooned in his head, still dizzy from sleepiness. Disappointment filled his body immediately after, instinct telling him that they had at least another hour of cuddles.
Still, he could feel Dazai silently slipping back into his work clothes, scattered at the feet of their queen-sized bed. Well, Chuuya’s bed. Sure as hell they had not proved themselves great at honoring the nuptial vows, had they? Love, they had plenty. Honor. Trust. Absolute, utter, deeper-than-life and longer-than-death devotion.
But domesticity, a shared home and mornings lazily spent snuggling? Occasions to prove the entire city they belonged to each other? Not so much.
It was a Shakespearian kind of bond, the one they shared: secrets, rival households and impending doom included. And weretigers. And motherfucking dragons.
With a muffled sigh, Chuuya stretched an arm in Dazai’s direction, shuddering lightly when the cold air of the morning prickled his skin.
“Come back.”
It took unbelievable strength to utter those words. Years of pride cast aside. Dazai’s chuckle filled his head, rich and wrapping Chuuya like a blanket. Still, the executive frowned at the lack of a real answer. After four years of emptiness, he recognized the sound of Dazai leaving him.
He knew it wasn’t forever.
He knew.
But half-asleep and engulfed in the comfort of a warm duvet with the lingering scent of his husband still on it, that chuckle had a strange, definitive ring to it.
“It’s not even morning, Chuuya. Go back to sleep.”
“You’re dressed,” the redhead pointed out, pressing a pout against the pillow. It must have sounded childish enough because Dazai’s quiet humming moved closer.
A moment later, slender fingers slipped in between his hair, smoothing the copper strands in slow, feather-light movements. Kindly, lovingly.
The executive thanked the pillow for hiding the smile that curled his lips.
“I have to go back to the agency’s dorm, silly chibi,” Dazai whispered, bent to speak against Chuuya’s hair, sending a shiver down his spine.
Silence settled between them, an old friend that with the years had turned from awkward and sharp to gentle and comfortable. The more their trust and familiarity grew, the safer that silence sounded.
It was after those long moments of silence that the important things were said.
“No, you don’t. It’s ridiculous that—”
Dazai cocked an eyebrow in his direction, waiting. Still dozed off, Chuuya’s rolled his eyes at the sheer amusement in his husband’s gaze.
“What? Carry on, chibi. I’m listening.”
“Move in with me,” Chuuya mumbled inside the pillow. One might even suspect that he was asking that to the fabric, or that he had said nothing intelligible at all, but Dazai’s hand froze, retracting carefully from the other’s hair.
“I am here more often than not,” he said, not unreasonably.
But very few things in their relationship seemed reasonable at all, starting with the fact that they were hiding it. Or that the executive was asking his husband to share a home with the all too real possibility of him saying no and ghosting him for a month.
Sometimes, Chuuya wondered what was the point in having something if his fate was to swing between his loyalty to the Mafia and a husband who didn’t treasure his own life.
'Till death do us part', to Dazai, sounded more like a challenge than a hopefully distant occurrence.
Shaking the thoughts away, Chuuya rolled on the side to face his husband.
Not a great decision, since his head was now spinning like he had a ride too many on the Cosmo Wheel. It seemed worth it when his eyes met Dazai’s, though: a familiar brown tinged with surprise, and an unfamiliar wideness that the executive recognized as horror.
Chuuya’s eyes narrowed, wounded by the light and the certainty he might have been a bit too direct for his husband’s taste, fully aware of what would happen.
So, yes.
Let’s fight with the stupid, dumbass, constipated love of your life before six am, what could ever go wrong?
Considering the iridescent grey of the sky outside, almost greenish like an underwater kingdom, Dazai had told the truth about being early. Too early to fight, surely, and yet.
“It’s absurd that I don’t get to have you every day.”
“Does my darling husband miss me, a-na-ta?” Dazai sing-sang, spelling the last word as if it was nothing but a joke. As if, after a relationship years in the making and after a marriage, it still partially daunted him.
With little effort, the detective avoided the lazy swing of Chuuya’s hand, the executive being still too sleepy and cozy to put any real effort in punching the mackerel.
That, of course, didn’t stop Dazai from pretending Chuuya’s hand hit him, the shenanigan presenting the detective the perfect excuse to pull away.
Chuuya scowled but didn’t stop him.
Walls, walls. If the executive could use Corruption to destroy the walls Dazai kept building around himself with the same simplicity he used his power to break havoc in the city, he would.
Dazai’s hand retreated from the executive’s hair, the other one letting go of his fingers with nothing but the phantom of an affectionate squeeze.
For the second time that morning, Chuuya shivered because of a cold that bloomed from within.
“Ouch. I don’t want to move in with a violent chibi~”
Another swing, waving this close to Dazai’s smug grin. This time, the detective didn’t even falter; the lying bastard.
“You know what? Never mind.” Chuuya yawned as he nuzzled in the pillows, searching for any remaining trace of body heat. “And I want a divorce, bandages. You’ll hear from my lawyers.”
“I am wounded,” Dazai answered, a bit too quickly, as his fingers swiftly secured the cuffs of the light blue shirt.
Chuuya clicked his tongue.
Such a shameless liar.
Yet the executive was graceful enough not to point out that his sweet, good-for-very-little husband had been sending him signals for a while now, even though he was too much of a dense mackerel to vocalize it. Not that Chuuya expected much from someone who bet that ‘a chibi would never marry’ (and look how things turned out).
For full disclosure, Dazai made that bet on the altar; Chuuya still wondered if, after a full year, the bruise from the kick he landed on Dazai’s shin had finally faded.
Either way, Dazai wanted it. He wanted the domesticity, craved peace and calm and a home that didn’t come in the disgraceful form of a dorm room, stuck between a notebooks enthusiast and two underage kids.
As if the executive’s wardrobe wasn’t filled with stupid shirts fit for a lanky beanpole and his bathroom cabinets weren’t overflowing with spare bandages. As if Dazai hadn’t repeatedly complained that Kunikda’s credit card didn’t have enough money in it to buy a decent house.
But Chuuya never wanted to bound Dazai. He truly never wanted to.
Even if they were not free to live their marriage, Chuuya had given more than one thought to the many ways a high-ranked executive could talk Mori into providing the former Soukoku with a shared space.
In his spare time, Chuuya had considered asking for a safe house for them to fall back into a familiar pace they had already mastered to perfection. A place to wake up next to his husband and regret all of his life decisions before breakfast, but still having him around. There were just so many excuses that only waited to be considered, so many ideas Dazai put aside with not much more than a dismissing shrug.
That was Chuuya respecting Dazai’s decision to stick to the dorm. That was Chuuya letting him be free.
“I do miss you in the morning, you know,” Chuuya said. He decided to settle for the truth because everything else seemed meaningless, but the impish grin he earned back didn’t look genuine at all. It seemed sad; as if Dazai had just been asked to return to prison instead of moving to one of the most luxurious penthouse in Yokohama with his husband.
Or maybe he was just reading it all wrong.
The idea flashed through his mind and Chuuya was quick to crush it, knowing that hopes and Dazai seldom led to happy outcomes.
“I do, too. But I’ll see my handsome prince in two days?”
Two days, if they were lucky.
After dinner with Ane-san and a sea of meetings, parkouring their ways in between jobs and life to steal scraps of time. For some reason, it didn’t seem enough anymore.
Chuuya was not even sure he would have an off night, or if Dazai and the stupid Agency would be stuck on a case. He sighed, rolling back to muffle an insult into the pillow. Or maybe it was to hide the hurt flickering in his eyes so early in the fucking morning.
Even the Snow White joke was getting so inevitably old.
“Chibi?”
The phantom touch of lips brushing his hair.
Dazai’s voice, soft and close. His name held many more questions, ones Chuuya didn’t have willpower to indulge before cockcrow.
“Sure,” he mumbled, then clicked his tongue at the sound of his own voice.
God, he felt so bratty.
Sure as hell he needed a coffee or a glass of wine or both, just to remember how to adult before 8 am and in time for work.
“Sure, mackerel. Try not to do stupid shit while I’m not around.”
“Can’t promise anything.” Dazai chuckled, straightening up, “go back to sleep, slug. You have a few hours, still.”
“Can’t promise anything,” he parroted, only half-kidding. “Will you think about that?”
He didn’t ask please yet the question had a sleek begging shade that made Chuuya’s skin crawl.
Pretending that Dazai’s constant hesitation didn’t hurt was an exercise in self-destruction, one Chuuya loved to bet against. A bet he never won, of course. His partner had his very own pace in things, especially domestic ones. Sometimes life suffocated him.
Dazai needed space to remind himself that time had passed, that he was out of the mafia.
With every probability, living with someone who had Mori on speed dial wasn’t on a traitor’s bucket list.
Still, they were married.
Dazai, being his own, very complicated, alluring self, needed many things. Any other day Chuuya would have gladly granted his partner the world.
But Dazai’s half of the bed was getting cold so fast.
It was getting lonely.
Can’t promise anything.
Instead, Dazai chose silence. At least, Chuuya could appreciate the honesty.
He closed his eyes and pressed his forehead against the pillow, burying a scoff of exhausted disappointment in the warm fabric. Dazai was reaching for his tan coat, now. Chuuya heard the detective hum that stupid suicide song, as the sounds painted a well-known scene behind the executive’s closed eyes.
Next, Dazai was going to stroll to the kitchen to pour himself the cup of coffee Chuuya prepared the evening before for both of them, combing his hair with his hands. It made his brown locks only messier. Dazai didn’t mind.
Chuuya secretly thought it suited him, therefore he complained about the mackerel’s messy mop of hair only half-heartedly.
The world’s edges and its sounds seemed blurred. Heavy. A cupboard opened with a screech and closed with a muffled thud, sounding like they were universes away and not on the other side of a penthouse with basically nothing but arches.
Maybe Dazai didn’t want to move in; maybe Dazai regretted not cutting all the ties with the Mafia.
Water, running in the basin.
Chuuya shut his eyes, bracing himself for the sound of the front door closing in a matter of minutes. But then, instead of hearing Dazai’s soft footsteps disappearing out of the door without much of a goodbye, Chuuya’s breath caught in his lungs. For a moment he thought he’d been crushed.
As if gravity had revolted against his moping and sulking.
It took the redhead a second too long to realize that something — someone — had downright thrown himself over him. The executive’s eyes snapped open. He oofed under the unexpected weight over his back and at the lanky noodle arms enveloping him in an embrace.
“Wh—” he tried, wheezing halfway through the protest.
The more he wriggled, the tighter the hug secured him in place.
“I love you, Chuuya.” Dazai’s voice whispered against his ear, pressing a kiss on his husband’s temple. Even though his heart was pounding in his rib cage, Chuuya distinguished with painful precision the muscle skipping a beat.
A moment of nothing, like falling down the stairs, like dying, before it reprised rabbit-fast.
To say that Chuuya melt into the confession would have been unfair. He molded his soul around it, allowed it to mend the wounds from earlier.
He sensed those words, that embrace, spreading over his cracked self-confidence like a balm.
They didn’t trade ‘I love yous’, they didn’t vocalize what they already knew. It seemed strange, and sometimes cheap, when they both realized that something as simple as a string of sounds could never explain their relationship.
More often than not, they were too distracted getting in each other’s pants or Chuuya was busy throwing knives at his smartass spouse.
Even so, Dazai rarely lowered the mask. On those rare occasions, he always acted like he was walking on eggshell. Raw, crystal-clear, fearless love was so rare, it felt more rewarding than a million dollars masterpiece.
When Chuuya spun to give Dazai a gentle kiss, mostly to hide the crazy beam stretching his cheeks, the other man leaned into the contact as if the world depended on it.
“Love you too. Have a good day at the stupid Agency, mackerel,” the executive muttered, a yawn catching him by surprise before he could finish the sentence.
Dazai was already up and making his way to the door, wriggling his fingers.
“I’ll be home soon,” he promised.
Home.
Chuuya fell back face-first in the pillow with a huff.
As he said, Dazai really could not wait to move in with him. It was just a matter of being patient.