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It’s not something that he’s sought out—not at first, at least.
The first time’s been pure accident.
…Well, fine, it’s not a complete accident, not the very first time, at least. Dazai’s movements are always deliberate, because he’s the type of bastard who likes to plan shitty things such as how to wrap his stinky hands around someone’s neck on their first meeting.
But it’s the first time.
Something simultaneously cool and hot on his skin. Body heat from someone with eyes like a rotting corpse’s, soothing coldness from an Ability pulsing into him like a mountain spring.
It’s a bit later that he learns the name of that nullification Ability: No Longer Human.
It’s ironic, because the way it douses the fires licking his insides is a stark reminder that he’s human, human, human, and he’s not the rage of catastrophic violence that seethes with wicked whispers of dark disgrace.
That’s how it begins: an innocuous touch.
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Using Corruption means calling upon the black-red fires that raze in constant simmer underneath his veins, to fan them into an unstoppable fire that will devour everything until there is nothing left to devour—and perhaps not even then. It means surrendering his control over where he points his violence towards, means allowing himself to be flung in a wild dance that cared nothing for things such as bones and joints.
It’s the last resort, but when it becomes the only resort, it’s something that he doesn’t run away from.
“It’s the only thing we can do,” Dazai says, solemn despite the twinkle in his mackerel-eyed gaze that is inexplicably excited at seeing something that he deems interesting.
Interesting, as though the possibility of everything in sight being swallowed in destructive black holes is primetime entertainment. Interesting and not absolutely terrifying, interesting and not unforgivably monstrous. Interesting.
To him, who is utterly bored by the world, he’s interesting.
Chuuya tells himself that he’s not pleased by that.
It’s the last coherent thought that he has, slipping off his gloves from his hands, stalking towards the target. He recedes inside his consciousness, curling into himself as black fire radiates outward, licks bruising flames into his skin, incinerates the air until it’s reduced to nothingness. The heat and electricity it generates too powerful that it warps the space and forms black holes constantly hungering for more.
He recedes into a singular point inside himself – a tiny, lonely island with its shores made of black sand, slowly getting eaten by the ocean made of boiling, dark flames. He’s but one inside Arahabaki’s enormous ocean of consciousness, that he marvels sometimes, just how he’s able to keep the god compressed and bottled up inside him, as though he himself is a black hole that has consumed Arahabaki.
And then, the ocean of darkness recedes, a low tide. There is no moon on the sky, there is only him, his tiny island and the ocean. But there is a sudden tide, pulling back Arahabaki’s claws off him.
No Longer Human douses the flames, the cold immensely comforting. It must be icy, because Dazai is a cold bastard, but maybe its contact with the hellfire of Arahabaki’s consciousness has tempered it, for it feels rather lukewarm against his soul when it curls around him, when it washes over him, cleansing him of the tainted wails of a god that wishes to continue destroying everything as its always been meant to do.
The next coherent thought he registers is that: oh, he likes the sensation of Dazai touching him.
He’s pulled away from the depths of Corruption and instead of waking up, he’s bludgeoned over with the full-force of exhaustion, of the physical toll of his human body attempting to exceed its limits. He’s exhausted, too exhausted, and also unbearably sleepy.
Dazai’s fingertips on his cheeks feel nice.
Oh, I really like this, Chuuya thinks, and falls into slumber before he can add, gross, in his thoughts.
-
Corruption is the last resort, so he rarely uses that.
Still, the times that he uses it are more than enough to impress upon him the vivid memory of… relief, that he feels, whenever he’s pulled back from Arahabaki’s clutches. To the point that he almost thinks that even Arahabaki itself is starting to like it, being submerged in the cool comfort of No Longer Human, offered a brief respite from the unending burn of catastrophic fire.
It’s almost like a heady drug, that he doesn’t even think about the downsides to using it—that he’s going to be utterly destroyed, crushed into ashes, if Arahabaki continues to come out and pour his godly rage using a human vessel.
-
It’s really like a heady drug, Chuuya thinks with a frown as he finds himself unable to sleep for the fourth night in a row. A mafioso being awake at night doesn’t sound so dire, but his work as an Executive and with his squad is more focused on daytime businesses. He’s supposed to be awake and alert for early morning meetings.
He sighs and turns over, keeps on tossing and turning again.
He’s bleary-eyed the next day and he slinks off during his lunch break and does a maddening swirl through the mall in search for different mattresses.
-
Seventh night in a row that he’s unable to sleep more than a wink. He’s tempted to punch himself to slumber, and also because there’s an idea that has needled itself into his brain. He tries to keep his eyes closed for ten more minutes, but Dazai’s stupid mug is stitched into the insides of his eyelids.
With a gusty exhale, he jumps off the fifteenth mattress he’s bought, and decides that if he’s going to suffer through images of Dazai’s smug face, might as well see the real deal. And if all else fails, he can always just punch the bastard instead.
-
He may be sorely lacking in sleep, but he has enough sense and coherence in him to know that alerting anyone else in the Port Mafia is an extremely inadvisable idea. So he sneaks off, avoids the security cameras on his mafia-funded apartment’s hallways, and does not tell anybody.
He… actually does not know where Dazai is, at the moment. Where do Port Mafia traitors go, when not buried six feet underground? Something itches inside him, but his scratches on his skin can’t chase it away. It’s almost as if Arahabaki is clawing at him from inside his gut.
Oh.
As soon as he’s a few blocks away from his apartment, he jumps on top of a residential building’s rooftop, and closes his eyes. The clawing inside his gut is tugging at a certain direction. The salty sea-breeze, the faint haze of pollution, the stardust from the sky. The cries of cicadas, the rustles of tree leaves, the steady heartbeats of a city mostly-asleep.
A certain heartbeat of a certain person.
Dazai.
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By the time he reopens his eyes, he’s floating in front of a half-open window. There’s a thin sheet of dust coating the outside, not out of disuse, but just of a general lack of interest in cleaning. There’s an inviting scent that wafts from the one-room apartment; he doesn’t need to open the lights to know that it’s sparsely furnished with cupboards probably in a pathetic state.
Dazai’s scent.
He’s not sure how to properly describe it; he’d like to say it smells like a stinky mackerel, but it’s something beyond that. Something that reminds him of dense trees huddled together in a forest alcove, of the undercurrent of the rivers as it erodes the riverbank, the earth splintering open as the tectonic plates shift. Not exactly in the same category of catastrophe as Arahabaki, but something similar, something that cannot be fully put into words, something inescapable.
But then, he falters out of this trance when Dazai—both eyes awake and alert—blinks at him from his lumpy-looking single futon in the middle of the room. There is no trace of terror in Dazai’s body, even if Chuuya’s a Port Mafia Executive, someone who’s required to exterminate traitors to the organization.
Before he can ponder further into whether this is simply a facet of Dazai’s suicidal tendencies (not knowing any self-preservation traits) or just part of his usual bastard shtick, Dazai blinks at him again and says, with a tone heavy with sleep: “Seems like I’ve been visited by a little fairy, huh?”
For a moment, Chuuya thinks that the betrayal is simply part of an enemy’s illusion Ability. Then, he wrinkles his nose. He quite likes Dazai being out of the organization, he’s been so sick of seeing that stupid face around his workplace.
He hasn’t devoted a considerable amount of time, well, considering, what to say to Dazai in the aftermath of his betrayal. A yelled, I can finally kill you without having to fill out paperwork after!, has been his first choice. It’s an excellent choice, so he hasn’t bothered thinking of a runner-up.
But then, Dazai calls him a little fairy and doesn’t even have the gall to act tense or worried that Chuuya’s here to lop off his head and it’s—
“A little fairy wearing strange, tiny pajamas,” Dazai adds, sniggering a bit when Chuuya finds himself rooted to the spot, his shoes on the windowsill.
“It’s not a pajama! It’s proper sleepwear, damn it!”
“So? Sleepwalking all across the city isn’t such a good look for… someone of your stature.”
Chuuya blinks. Is that how it is, then? They’re going to be civil with each other and pretend that they’re not who they are?
“You are much too small to risk losing more sleep,” Dazai then says, and Chuuya bares his teeth in a snarl and cannonballs across the room and lands knees-first on the now-confirmed-to-be-lumpy futon.
He’s been planning something, like crushing Dazai like a bug underneath his weight, or punching off his two eyes out of his skull. Something, something that’s not crumpling like a ragdoll against Dazai’s chest, the moment familiar fingertips brushes against the jut of his cheekbones.
The steady pulse of No Longer Human caresses his skin and he immediately falls asleep on top of Dazai, like a giant idiot.
-
He feels like a giant idiot still, but a well-rested one, the following morning.
Dazai’s generously spent an hour in the bath, loudly singing a made-up song about double-suicides, while Chuuya’s blinked himself into wakefulness and eventually out of the window.
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Boss Mori praises him for his efficient work that day, comments about how he’s easily cleared three days’ worth of work in one inspired day.
Chuuya keeps his face blank, not entirely unlike the way he does when Dazai tries to read him during poker.
He does not let out a sigh of relief when Boss Mori doesn’t seem to have read his face to say, I have literally slept with a traitor and I did not think about being the Port Mafia’s Executive at all.
Still, he comes out of that short meeting thinking that Dazai really is one-of-a-kind, when it comes to reading him inside-out.
-
…Really one-of-a-kind, in that he’s already apparently predicted Chuuya’s return to his current safehouse, in a bid to chase better sleep.
But he hasn’t found it fit to get an extra futon, he notices.
This time, he doesn’t quite leap from the window in one go. He makes the concession of floating his shoes off his feet and towards the floor mat by the doorway. Dazai doesn’t comment about his refusal to use the front door; instead he only lets out a singsong of, “A little fairy found his way here again~”
Chuuya’s approach is slower, this time, the padding of his feet over the tatami mats silent as an assassin. Both of Dazai’s eyes are steadily watching him, but there’s no wariness there. His confidence that Chuuya is not about shank him or throw him to the wolves… it’s almost comforting, despite how annoying it is.
Last time, he’s conked out as soon as their skin have touched, so he makes sure to balance himself properly this time. He gently sinks to his knees, keeping them anchored on both sides of a bandage-covered torso. The blanket is tossed to the side, the bridge between spring and summer keeping the air tethering between warmth and cold. Dazai’s arms are splayed out on his sides, a bit further away from his body, almost as though he’s stretching out wings for impending flight. The loop of bandages along with boxers serve as Dazai’s first layer of armory over his skin, skin that feels both warm and cold to the touch.
Chuuya’s planned to take it even slower, but then the promise of blissful rest presents a strong temptation. He curls forward, ear thumping against answering thumps, steady and alive. Chuuya won’t put it past Dazai to learn about how to control his heartbeat to send odd Morse Code messages to him this way, maybe some awful quip about his height. But for now, all he can hear is serenity.
Dazai’s arms take flight and wrap around him, snatching him from the tumbling free-fall of his gravity manipulation Ability, allowing him to rest without crashing to the ground. No Longer Human soothes him like a cool blanket, and Dazai’s sleepy warmth drags him towards something that he can call peace.
“Rest, Chuuya,” his partner murmurs and so he does.
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end