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Double Black has been formed just shy of a year so Dazai was now used to working together more than he wasn’t, which was why he was so surprised when he was called to Mori’s office, unaccompanied and alone.
His fingers are ghastly; bone-thin with wide knuckles and pointed fingertips, sliding the manila folder across the desk with such delicacy Dazai is less inclined to believe it’s just a folder but rather something precious, with how he was touching it. But Mori always did exaggerate the details, and more often than not it was solely to get a rise out of the recipient, which Dazai refuses to give. Mori peels his fingers away when it sits at the rim of the desk, curling them to press his fingertips into a steeple. Dazai looks up questioningly, curiously.
“What is this?”
“Mizuha Finance is one of our main brokers. One of the executives there is skimming off a small portion of the money we send to put in offshore accounts. I assume you know where this is going.”
“Alone?” He questions.
The side of Mori’s mouth twitches in a poor imitation of a smile. “A one-off, Dazai. Consider it more of a weekend retreat than that of a job. I know how much you enjoy your time alone. Or, at the very least used to.”
He does. He did, anyway. The thing is that Mori should have been right, but Dazai has grown so used to having someone else fill the silence and someone else keeping him on his toes that when the weekend came where he has to cross the country in order to do business, Dazai feels like he’d left something behind. The evening away is uneventful. When morning comes there are no clicks of heels in the hotel’s foyer, nor the fixing of Dazai’s hideous necktie; no fingers to fix his fringe or comb it, words to berate it.
Dazai doesn’t have friends. There is no time to build companionship when your hands are constantly preoccupied catching the knifes trying to stab you in the back. Still, the dull ache of loneliness lingers like a broken bone behind his ribs. Dazai hates knowing why there’s a cold pit in his stomach just as much as the feeling itself.
He knows he’s always been lonely. It was unavoidable given the nature of his character but also the nature of the situation itself: no one ever willingly stuck around for too long unless they wanted something. Chuuya sticks around due to the nature of his job, but nothing requires him to linger on the fringe of Dazai’s life. He adds a strange humanity to the cesspool the Port Mafia provides as living quality. In no mean, shape, or form does he consider Chuuya a friend, but Dazai fears he might have been so preoccupied trying to stop the progression of their relationship that he hadn’t realised he’d been growing attached in ways that didn’t require friendship. He banishes the thought immediately and tells himself that he’s merely readjusting to the silence after suffering with companionship over the past year.
Yokohama was a welcome sight on the return flight home. Despite his own apartment being sparsely furnished and hardly lived-in, Dazai finds that his knees give way at the foot of his bed as soon as he draws close enough. Trepidation leaks from his joints and evaporates into the air around him, seeping out like blood being drawn, cleansing him. Equanimity overpowers anxiety, and suddenly, he realises just how exhausted he is. He breaths in the smell of the linen, grips the cotton of the overthrow so tight he feels his fingernails dig past the material and into the palm of his hand, and sleeps.
∴
Morning is quiet. Afternoon role-call is barren save for a few higher-ranking members and executives. Mori drawls on about something at the head of the table, sounding far-away and muffled to Dazai’s ears, like he’s speaking above water and Dazai is the one drowning. There is no Chuuya. Dazai tries not to let the surprise show on his face.
He hasn’t the stomach for lunch. The cafeteria’s bathrooms are barren, cold, and silent, save for Dazai’s lonely figure. He scrutinizes himself in the mirror, trying to decipher what the look in his eye means and why his body is reacting so violently to a situation he doesn’t want to deal with, let alone care about.
The following day holds the same routine. His morning bleeds into evening, spent having to sort out business in a local gambling pool. Something about debts being rectified. It all feels the same to Dazai. He enters with a cleanup crew and leaves after killing the man, resigning himself to smoke outside on the curb. Dazai watches the sun set in a puddle’s reflection, bubbling out of an overflowing drain. He stubs his cigarette out in the wetness and listens to the ashes hiss into silence.
Dusk migrates the unsettling churning of his gut to his skin, itching under the surface like a swarm of ants. No matter how much he scratches, the pain won’t go away. He hasn’t the stomach for dinner again, either. It’s bordering on two whole days since he’s seen Chuuya and wonders if he’s being avoided. Dazai scratches until his palms bleed and decides enough is enough.
The elevator ride is spent in silence between him and Mori’s guards. He hopes how unsettled he feels doesn’t show in his features. The guards leave him alone in the office. Dazai wonders if it’s by a prior request, and that Mori was expecting him. “Mori.”
Crayons scatter his desk. Elise watches Dazai from her perch in his lap, gazing up with those hollow, empty eyes. “Yes?”
“Where…” Something lodges in his throat. Dazai swallows, working over the impossible, sudden tightness, “Where is Chuuya?”
Mori hums in thought as his fingers steeple, chin coming to rest upon the tips of his fingers. He mulls over his thoughts in deafening silence before his eyes find Dazai’s, peering at him in the dim lighting with curiosity, like a snake in the grass. “Missing your compatriot?”
“Merely curious,” Dazai says, “He is my partner, as much as I loathe to admit.”
“I see. Well, unfortunately, he had a nasty run-in with an enemy gang but a few days ago. I hesitated to tell you because I hadn’t thought you’d be interested.”
His words twist the knife into Dazai’s gut further. “That’s ambiguous,” He comments, carefully masking his surprise, “How long before he’s to return?”
“Oh, that’s not up to me,” Mori says, gesturing his hand dismissively, as if this is a trivial issue, “Kouyou is overseeing him; you know how she is.”
“Would you happen to know where she is?”
“Most likely the infirmary.”
Elise scribbles furiously with a red crayon. When Dazai looks down he can see she’s colouring in a children’s drawing of what looks like a dog mauling another dog. Mori meets his eyes with interest shining unbidden behind his lashes. They narrow just a fracture before he joins Elise in her colouring. Just as Dazai is a breath away from leaving, Mori speaks up, somewhere over his shoulder. “Dazai.”
“Yes?”
“Try not to grow attached. Not with this nature of the job.”
“I’m not.” He says. “I’m not attached.”
“I’d like to think so. Send Chuuya my best wishes.”
∴
The infirmary sitting beneath Port Mafia’s main base of operation is a long, narrow corridor stretching one hundred meters, branching off into twin operating theatres and four hospital rooms. The strip of hallway is blindingly white and sterile, completely laminate, save for the duck-egg blue of the doors. A single doctor crosses one operating theatre into the next. Dazai peers through the thin windows on each door as he walks down the hall, reaching halfway before spotting Kouyou. She’s a blemish of colour on the otherwise spotless vision, exiting from a room to her and Dazai’s right.
Dazai approaches her evenly, for she does not move, watching him down the slope of her nose with precaution. He draws closer until they’re scarcely a meter apart. Dazai opens his mouth to speak but she cuts him off with the raise of her palm and the coolness rejection.
“No,” She says, simple, no question nor leniency in her tone.
“‘No’?” Dazai echoes.
“No, Dazai.” Kouyou’s mouth twists into a frown. She regards the door to her right, her hand still lingering on the handle, before fixing Dazai in a stare.
He can feel his pulse in his jaw. The itch from earlier burns under his skin hotter than a thousand suns. “What do you mean?”
“I’m not going to go into details. Chuuya isn’t ready to have visitors,” Her tone is pure finality. It’s clear to Dazai that she’s not willing to compromise, “So, please. Go.”
He wets his lips in trepidation, unfamiliar with the hardness in Kouyou’s tone. She is cutthroat and ruthless, but never dismissal of someone of the same status as her.
“I don’t understand what’s preventing me from knowing why my partner is currently out of commission.”
Chuuya can handle himself, he wants to say, but the words die in his mouth. What proved to be so difficult this time that’s rendered him immobile? Why won’t anyone tell me what’s going on?
“You couldn’t understand.”
“I can’t understand if no one bothers to explain to me what the problem is.”
A pause. A sigh. The softness that had shone through the clouds of her gaze vanishes. Her eyes harden on Dazai. “Please. Give him a few more days.”
∴
Underneath tonnes of reinforced steel and concrete Dazai loses signal on phone. As he walks down the corridor he wonders if Kouyou knows he’s here. He hadn’t bothered checking whether or not she’d even left the infirmary earlier.
The door opens with a quiet click. The room is small and sparsely furnished. There’s a short entryway and a door to the left that leads into a bathroom. The main room follows on from the entryway, empty. There’s a cot pushed into one of the corners, pristine and white like the rest of the ward, and there are curtains hung on brick wall to give the illusion of a closed window. A single lamp in the corner of the room is switched on. Chuuya’s jacket and Rimbaud’s hat sit on a small side table next to the lamp. The rooms are utterly silent save for the faint drip-drip of water.
He doesn’t need to turn much to see Chuuya. He’s sat in the ensuite in nothing but a white robe and pyjamas, wet hair hanging limp around his face and neck, eyes fixated somewhere on the wall. When Dazai lets the door behind him shut he whips his head around, water droplets splattering on the mirror behind him, and regards Dazai with cloudy, terrified eyes. “Dazai.”
As soon as the words leave his mouth Dazai knows he shouldn’t be here. He’d expected a broken leg and arm, maybe; worst-case scenario a coma, but not this. There’s a hollowness to his face Dazai had only witnessed when he still lived in the slums. The way he says his name is less like a greeting and more of a plead or a warning. Despite all reason he takes a tentative step further into the doorway, boot clicking against the tiles.
“Don’t--” Chuuya breathes, eyes wide despite the puffiness underneath them, “please, just--stay there. Why are you here?”
“You weren’t…” Dazai fumbles, searching for words he usually never has to look for, “there, at roll-call, or around. I thought…”
Chuuya’s mouth closes. He brings the heels of his palms up to his eyes to screw into their sockets, letting out a shaky exhale through his teeth. Dazai is wholly rooted in his place. He watches Chuuya hike the robe higher up his torso where it had slipped before he steps off of the stool and stands, barefoot, in the bathroom. “Well, here I am.” His hands gesture to his figure, as if to say viola, but it’s lacklustre and falls flat.
“But why aren’t you…” Dazai trails off. He pauses to think, taking in the heavy purple underneath the blue of Chuuya’s eyes and the pallidness of his skin, “Why are you here? Why won’t anyone tell me anything?”
Chuuya’s lips press into a grim line. He looks like he might take pity on Dazai for a split second before it vanishes. Chuuya shifts, moving with little to no surety about him, gliding like a ghost. Dazai watches him cross the small distance from room to room, treading dampness behind him. He pauses in front of the curtain and pulls it open before shutting it, laughing hollowly. “I keep forgetting there’s no window here.”
Silence follows. Dazai shifts forward but pauses when he sees Chuuya’s shoulders stiffen at the sound.
He’s never done this before. Chuuya’s always been a sure force in Dazai’s life and hardly ever shows vulnerability. Now, he’s but a shell of his usual character standing in the hospital room, looking like a lost boy. Dazai doesn’t know what to think of it.
“Can I do anything?” Dazai blurts. A pause. “Please.”
Chuuya worries at the peeling skin of his lower lip before casting a glance to the bed. In the dim light of the room it’s cold and unwelcoming. Chuuya pulls the robe closer around his body. “Can you…” He trails off. Dazai watches the tension build in his shoulders and his jaw sharpen, like what he’s about to say is physically difficult to spit out. “Could you just pull the covers back for me?”
Dazai nods once, taking careful steps to the bed, as to not alert Chuuya. The other is rooted in his spot, cuticles between his teeth, watching Dazai wearily as he pulls back the pristine bedding until the top folds and is drawn halfway down the mattress. He stands back to survey the job, searching for Chuuya’s approval. “Is this okay?”
“Yes, that’s fine,” Chuuya says. His posture gives a few inches. Then, he’s crossing the room and sitting on the edge of the bed, contemplative, eyes stormy and distant, like he’s trying to figure out what his next move should be, before he swinging his legs up and lying back onto the bed. The dampness of his hair, matted and cold, splays out across the pillow as he lays his head down. “Could you just...sit here, too? I know this is weird. I’d never usually ask this--”
“It’s fine,” Dazai says, quickly. In his haste to drag the stool tucked under the desk over it grates against the tiles with a groan. He sits down a scarce meter away from Chuuya, who’s resigned to merely staring up at the ceiling with an empty look in his eyes.
The white-noise of the bulb’s hum fills the room. Chuuya breathes out in controlled breaths. Dazai can see that his lips are blue. “Aren’t you cold?” He asks. Even he can feel the chill past the tight wrap of bandages and the heaviness of his trenchcoat.
Chuuya draws in a breath through his nose and lets it out through his teeth. “I’m fine.”
I’m lying, he wants to say. His skin was on fire, oversensitive and burning. The blankets beneath his body were too invasive, too rough, touching everywhere that desperately didn’t want to be touched. Chuuya could feel Dazai’s gaze on him, strangling the air from his lungs and pinning him under an unbearable weight. The only thing worse than the burning underneath his skin was the silence; stifling, drowning, gagging him of any air he breathed in.
“Can you speak?” Chuuya asks, tripping over his own voice.
“Speak?”
“About something, anything.” Chuuya elaborates. His throat tightens around his words. He has to momentarily silence himself before drawing in a shuddering breath, eyes turning to meet Dazai’s, despite keeping his body still.
“You’ll have to be more specific.”
“One of your most fondest memories, then.”
I don’t have many nice stories , Dazai wants to say. He watches Chuuya flit his eyes back up to the ceiling to focus on the nothingness up there. Desperate to keep that hollow, dull look from his eyes Dazai sweeps his memory of something appropriate. All memories before finding Mori are just as painful as the ones after it. Childhood was practically nonexistent for him. He can’t even remember his mother’s face.
Dazai shifts in the chair to better accommodate the length of his legs, crossing them at the ankle. “I used to live at a boarding house,” He says, looking to the drawn curtains as he dregs up memories buried beneath shit and filth of recent years, “in a town miles and miles away from here for a couple of months during the summer, maybe...five years ago. I don’t really remember where exactly it was located, but it was nowhere near the sea.”
Chuuya links his fingers together over his stomach. The skin around his fingernails and knuckles are red from cold. Dazai doesn’t ask why Chuuya doesn’t draw the blanket over himself and continues on as if he hadn’t paused in the first place, “I was hitchhiking in my early teens and wound up in this settlement in the back end of nowhere. It was only small, maybe two hundred people or so, and they only spoke in Russian. Old settlers from Sakhalin, I think. I needed somewhere to sleep, so I booked a night in at this boarding house. It was brick; you know, the old type of red brick, and it had no central heating. The stairs were half-rotten and there were two bathrooms through the entire building.
“An old woman called Babushka ran the place. I don’t know if that was her real name or if that’s just what people called her. She always used to smell like ground teabags because she’d have me dye her hair for her with them, and she had this silken red scarf covering her head. I’m not sure why she was so adamant on dyeing it, seeing as her hair was always covered. Anyways, my first night there, I had a room on the furthest wall in the house. It was damp because the sun never reached it, and the cheapest. It was only a few meters wide as it was long. When I set my bags down and pulled back the covers, do you know what I found?”
“What?”
“A dead cat and her litter.”
Chuuya drew quiet. Dazai realises what he said was a little too morbid for the lighthearted buildup and is quick to cover his tracks. “There were four of them. The runt had already passed on with the mother from the cold, so I buried them in the garden, but the other three were fine. I remember being so cold in that room, with the thin blankets and the draft in the floorboards, so I held those three tiny little kittens on top of my chest so they would keep warm. They were so small; the same size as crabapples, but it felt like they provided more heat than a fire ever could.”
Chuuya was watching him out of the corner of his eye. Then, instead of lying supine he rolls over just slightly towards Dazai. The dim light of the lamp casts an unearthly glow across his silverkinned face; slightly stunned, tired, but curious. The outermost layer of his hair has begun to dry, now, blending from copper to fiery orange.
“There was a strict ‘no-pet’ policy in the building; Babushka was allergic to most furs. I snuck some milk from her pantry to feed the three. Did you know how hard it is to feed little kittens? I had to dip my finger in a small portion of milk and they used to drink it off of it. I hadn’t meant to stay as long as I did. I paid my fees by helping around her farm; milking goats and collecting eggs. When those kittens were old enough to fetch their own food, I let them go, and left the village along with it.”
Dazai hadn’t realised he’d been staring off into the blankness of the curtains. He turns his gaze to Chuuya, who’s watching him, chin in hand, with open, sad eyes. He isn’t crying but looks like he wants to. Dazai feels like skinned flesh; afraid to be touched and sensitive to any attention. He wants to flinch with how intense Chuuya’s gaze is.
“Did you ever see them again?” He asks.
A small smile twitches at the corner of Dazai’s lips. “Not yet. I still don’t know where the place was. It truly was in the middle of nowhere; still running on dirt paths and horse-with-carriages to transport goods.”
“You should,” Chuuya takes his chin from his hands and curls both to his chest, cupped in one another, for warmth. He’s still on his side and watching Dazai, only shifting so the pillow better accommodate his head. When he speaks his voice is quiet, like he’s afraid he’ll break whatever tone that has settled between them. “You should visit them. I bet they’ll be waiting for you.”
“Maybe.”
Chuuya drifts off soon after that, so still and quiet Dazai isn’t even sure whether or not h’s even sleeping. Every breath he draws pulls one from Dazai. He finds himself matching their breathing pattern after a while, and it helps loosen the knot in his chest. He watches Chuuya’s hair dry in the faint lighting. He listens to the faint pitter-patter of rain on the tarmac above them. Not once does Dazai find himself wishing for sleep.
A few hours later the door creaks open. Kouyou steps in with a tray, dressed down to just a raspberry pink yukata, three cups, three saucers, and a steaming pot of tea balanced on top. She sets down the tray quietly on the sideboard and takes filling two teacups. Dazai’s is left untouched while she tends to her own to make it milky and sweet. He offers her his chair, which she takes. He has no concept of what time it is. When he blinks his eyes burn. Chuuya doesn’t move for his entire duration inside hospital.
“What happened?”
Koyuou adjusts the teacup on her saucer by the handle until they sit flush with one another. There’s a soft furrow in her brow, painting faint distress across her often expressionless features. “I think Mori wanted to see how you’d both faire alone. Two pairs of hands dealing with two problems is more efficient than two dealing with one.”
She continues, “He sent him back down to Cone Street to collect unpaid dues in a gambling ring. Everything was fine. The second day, the day you came back, he returned. Maybe something happened during business, I’m not sure, but he went there of his own volition, and…”
Dazai purses his lips together so he doesn’t breathe or make a sound. She’s watching Chuuya, now, tea untouched and growing cold.
“You often find that when you come across a gift as uncommon as yours, Dazai, that many people tend to forget you aren’t an anomaly, but just a rarity.”
Dazai mulls over that. She holds out her cup for him to refill. He takes it from her, refilling it before replacing it on the saucer. She turns the cup so the handle faces her right hand, hooking her finger through it, and raising it to her lips carefully. “One of the members of the gang involved with importing illegal goods we deal with happened to have an ability very similar to yours. And, well, I suppose it all caught him by surprise and he didn’t have time to react or defend himself.”
Kouyou takes a sip of her tea, unflinching against the burning heat of it, before lowering it back to her saucer. A print of pomegranate-red lipstick stains the china from where she’d sipped. “I suppose I needn’t say anymore."
Dazai nods. The tea Kouyou had brought churns like acid in his stomach and the back of his throat. He leaves no longer than an hour later, wandering lost along the halls, unsure of what to do with himself or the information he had.
∴
There’s a burn along the curve of his thigh. Dazai finds himself stumbling before dropping to the asphalt in a crumpled heap. His gaze swims in and out of focus. The pain registers after the ringing in his ears subsides, and he realises he’s been shot.
“Dazai!” Chuuya drops to his side and places both hands on his shoulders to hold him up against an oil tanker. There’s fierce panic twisting his features. Dazai follows the line of his gaze and watches as the bandages underneath his work trousers run red, blood soaking into the polyester before pooling next to his hand where he keeps himself propped up. Chuuya fumbles desperately, barely hesitating before he tugs Dazai’s arm out and makes quick do of unwrapping his bandages up to the elbow, tearing the fabric with his teeth, and tying it as many times as it’ll go over the wound. A spray of bullets wash over the top of them, hitting the warehouse’s steel doors, puckering holes into the walls.
Dazai feels hands at his jaw, tilting his head up so he can look Chuuya in the eye. He has blood smeared up his wrists from where he’d patched Dazai up and is printing it across his neck and jaw. “Dazai.”
“Mm?”
“Fuck, okay, okay,” He draws in a deep breath, spares a look over his shoulder, before pinning Dazai with a look of fierce determination. It sobers him up a little. Chuuya’s mouth sets into a grim line. “I’m going to need you to hang on for a few more minutes for me.”
“Mm.” He can barely discern what is right and left, feeling the world tip beneath his body like he’s being thrashed around by a higher force. His right hand flies out to stop himself from tipping over onto his side. “Lost a lot of blood.”
“I know, I know. You’ll be okay.”
“It hurts.”
“I know it does,” Chuuya’s thumbs sweep across his jaw, once, and draws Dazai’s head straight so they’re eye-to-eye, “I’m going to need you to do this for me, okay?” Chuuya brings him back up to sit straight, propping him up against a wooden crate big enough to shield them both. “Can you do this?”
Dazai squints past the blurriness seeping into his vision. He hones in on Chuuya’s sour expression and nods. “Good,” He says, giving his jaw a little pat, “don’t die on me, Mackerel. Keep breathing through your nose and out your mouth.”
Chuuya pushes himself away, then, shuffling a few feet back before rising to his full height. Another spray of bullets wash past them. He casts a bleak look at the grisly sight of their party of men bleeding out in the centre of the warehouse before carefully peeling each finger of his glove off one by one. Dazai’s eyes widen despite his lucidity. He can’t hear Chuuya but knows the words well enough that his voice rings in his head from a memory.
Chuuya takes a step into the spitfire, catching the bullets with his forcefield, crunching concrete underneath his boots. He twitches, goes rigid, before a strange coolness sweeps across the room as he exhales. Unsightly red curls and spirals down his arms, carving into his skin like a brand, bleeding up past his neck and coiling against his jaw; a venomous snake, more dangerous than anything else Dazai has ever come into contact with.
He shoots out a pit of darkness against the mob and wipes half out clean in one fell swoop. The ground beneath him crumbles like dust as he walks, trailing death, blindly tossing a black hole into a quickly scattering group of men as if it were mere marbles he was throwing. It takes less than three minutes not only to wipe out the group of offenders but the surrounding walls, too. Dazai hears the beams groan above, barely supporting the roof, threatening to collapse. He pushes to stand, stumbles onto his hands, before rising once again.
The grounds tilts beneath Dazai. He feels like he’s walking on a capsizing ship with little to no grasp of where gravity was pulling him, simply following the path of destruction Chuuya left behind. He builds density in his fists and tosses another sphere at a neighboring building. Dazai catches his wrist on as it swings back down. Chuuya coughs blood, turns rigid, and dives spectacularly from his high of power to pure exhaustion. The unsightly red shifts above his skin before slithering back under his sleeves. Dazai can barely maintain their weight. They both collapse in a heap on the ground, Chuuya choking for air and Dazai loosely supporting their weight.
He realises just before he passes out that this is the first time Chuuya’s used Corruption in months. He hasn’t let Dazai touch him since the incident. It makes the grimness of his expression earlier make all the more sense.
∴
Doctor Nishikino shines the beam of a penlight in his eye before pulling back and clicking it off. “All good. No concussion, just a nasty gunshot wound.”
“I said I hadn’t had a concussion.”
“Yes, well, most concussed people do have a habit of saying that.” He pushes to stand, pocketing the penlight and checking Dazai’s vitals on the monitor. “The morphine should take its course shortly. And this time, Mr. Dazai, I don’t want to see you leave before you’ve been discharged. An infection will cost more time and pain than it’s worth.”
“Yes,” He grumbles, adjusting the pillow behind his back to better support his head. Doctor Nishikino says it like he knows Dazai will do it, anyway, and he’s not wrong about it.
“Well, I’ll leave you here to recover. I’ll be back in a few hours to check up on you and I hope I don’t see that bed empty.”
Silence fell across the room as Dazai was left to his own devices. The morphine trickles down his bloodstream and warms him from the inside out like honey. Dazai exhales and puts his entire weight into the mattress, content to doze off and catch up on the lost sleep he’s missed out on for the past seventeen years.
It’s twenty minutes later that the door open. Curiously, Chuuya peeks his head around the corner. Dazai stares, dumbfounded, and blurts: “You cut your hair.”
Chuuya jumps at the loudness of the voice. He retreats very briefly before coming into the room properly, this time, letting the weight of the door carry it shut behind him. He’d forgone regular haircuts and let it grow over the past year and a half. Now, when he looks at Dazai, it’s trimmed just below his ears, and just barely trimmed around his face, cut mere centimeters shorter. “Uh, yeah. Ane-san did it for me. She said it was getting long.”
“Look’s nice,” Dazai says, propping himself up a little. His body is numb from the morphine and he feels like he’s taken one too many shots of vodka with how his head feels ten pounds heavier.
Chuuya narrows his eyes, and marches forward, fingers slipping into the pockets of his jacket. “Is that some sort of backhanded insult?”
“Nope,” Dazai pops the p, turning his head ever so slightly to take in Chuuya’s suspicious expression. He wiggles his fingers where they rest above the bed sheets and can barely feel the linen of the throw, just the weight of it. “Morphine.”
“Ah,” Chuuya raises his chin in a short nod. He looks awkward, like he isn’t sure what to do with himself. A hand comes up to pull a small curl of fringe from his eyes. “You really think it looks nice?”
Dazai grins slow and sly, like a cat. “What, are you bashful all of a sudden?”
“No! God, I wish I never asked.”
“Stop being so sensitive. Hey, drag that chair over here.”
“Don’t tell me what to do,” Chuuya demands, bringing the chair over.
He sits down on it and leans his elbow on his thigh, looking at Dazai with narrowed eyes, like he’s trying to suss something out about him. Dazai shifts and matches the look, frowning, too. Chuuya still has that temporary scarring he always gets after using Corruption across his arms and face: the faintest outlines of jagged curls. He’s wearing clean clothes, and his hands and nails are scrubbed dry of blood. Dazai is in considerably worse condition. He can feel the hardened strands of the tips of his hair poke him in the back of his neck, stiff with dried blood. Without a clock in the room he gathers it must be just gone sunset.
“Hey, you know what you should do?” Dazai says, words slurring slightly.
“Is this going to be another backhanded insult?”
“No. Unless you want one.”
“You’re so generous.”
“It’s in my nature.” A pause. “You should tell me a story. Like I did to you, ages ago.”
“Ages ago, huh?” Chuuya says, though he looks like he knows what Dazai means. He always does. “What sort of story?"
“Something nice. Got any bedtime stories?”
“All my memories are of the past ten years. Just...give me a minute to think.”
Dazai thinks he could give Chuuya a million years. The hollow, terribly painful pit of loneliness Dazai carries around with him like a heavy weight has vanished with the aid of morphine, leaving him feeling strangely buzzed. He thinks it might have something to do with the situation at hand, too. Dazai lolls his head to the side to better watch Chuuya think, feeling the phantom coldness ease just the slightest.
Dazai had insisted he wasn’t attached. He was a spectacular liar on most days and a good one on bad days, but now, he can’t deny the assumption, even to himself. Something flickers in Chuuya’s gaze. He crosses his leg over the other and reaches to tuck his hair behind his ear, momentarily surprising himself with how short it is, before letting it hang just next to his eyes and begins telling Dazai about his first time driving a car.
Inside the quietness of this room and with the excuse of being high off of medication Dazai lets his walls of emotional defense lower. He finds himself listening less to the story and more to the sound of Chuuya’s voice, focused dumbly on the blink of his eyes. His eyelashes are darker than his hair; a deep rust instead of bright fire. There are freckles peppering just beneath the hollow of his eyes, and when he turns at a certain angle, his eyelashes cast shadows along his cheeks.
“Dazai? Are you listening?”
“No,” He says. Chuuya’s eyelids lower in clear annoyance, but even he’s unable to hide the twinkle of fondness shining unbidden in his eyes. “I mean, yes.”
“I think it’s time for you to go to sleep.”
“No,” He whines, mouth twisting into a frown when Chuuya rises to his feet, fingers tucking back into his pockets, “You’ve ruined it now.”
“Ruined what?"
“It.”
“That’s vague,” He points out. Chuuya crosses the room to turn the main light out, submerging them both in darkness, before flicking on the bedside table’s smaller, dimmer light. This close Dazai can smell the soft warmth of whatever shampoo he’s using, and it’s comforting. He thinks he wants his pillows to smell like this, too. “Stop looking at me like that. I’m going to be sick.”
“Can’t help it,” Dazai says, reaching out to hold onto the tip of Chuuya’s shorter hair, scrutinising the colour before letting it fall from his grasp and ultimately dropping his hand back to the bed. Chuuya scowls at him and straightens himself out, fighting against the flush on his neck, before drawing Dazai’s blankets up to his chin.
“Not one word, Mackerel.”
“Wasn’t going to say anything.”
“Liar,” He says, tucking them just tight enough next to his shoulders. “You have bags underneath your eyes heavy enough to carry my entire wardrobe.”
“That is a lot…”
“Exactly. Now, sleep.” Dazai opens his mouth to complain, but Chuuya merely sits back in his seat. “I’m not going anywhere.”
He closes his mouth. He watches Chuuya over the edge of the covers before closing his eyes. Dazai doesn’t think he’s ever felt safer than this. His fingers twitch above the bedsheets. A warm hand settles atop of his, thumb sweeping at the hem of his bandages. He sleeps.