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The end of the world begins with a very anticlimactic start. Maybe you read it in the papers. Maybe you saw a tweet on it. Maybe you heard it on the radio. However you found out, it doesn’t matter. The world is ending.
Some people go jump off a building. Some people write love letters. Some people pool all their money together to buy pasta, intent on becoming internet stars in their last few hours.
Dazai does none of that. He leans against the brick wall of some nondescript building, watches the sky tide over in waves of peach and strawberry, hands in his pocket.
Across the street, someone breaks down screaming. He leaves. He doesn’t need to hear desperate wails of someone who cannot be saved. He’s heard enough of those in his lifetime, some from his victims, more from his own throat.
He feels the pavement beneath his shoes, hears the wind rustling through the trees.
Funny, he’s going to die, yet he’s never felt something so close to being alive.
He gets back to his apartment, and packs everything up. Orderly cardboard boxes that Kunikida would be proud of. Drags them onto the balcony, slowly burns each box. (There isn’t much to burn. There isn’t much he owns. Still, the flames accept it, swallow whatever he can give.)
Smoke curls around him, before swaying into the evening sky, gone.
Smoke is constant. The burning of his orphanage. The pop of Odasaku’s gun. The kiss of Chuuya’s cigarettes. And now, the reassuring caress of his burning possessions.
He considers these. The timeless countdown of hours before he ceases to exist as it wraps its arms around him, Death finally content with being caught after he’s chased it for so many years.
There are many things he wants to say, to many people he will not say them to. Everyone has plans, and he is certain he is none of them. Better to wander, let fate pull her strings and do what she wants with what’s left of his life.
So he does exactly that. He walks by the beach and spots Atsushi and Akutagawa glaring at each other with some complicated mixture of love and anger in their eyes. Listens to the hum of the wind as Kyouka and Kouyou drink tea in the silence of a garden that Dazai isn’t allowed in, but enters anyway. Catches Fukuzawa kneeling before Mori’s grave, contemplating over a scalpel.
He doesn’t interrupt them. They have their lives to lead, their final words to say, and Dazai doesn’t deserve to steal their precious time.
He pops by a bar in a hidden little alley, orders two whiskeys and a Golden Fizz. He doesn’t get angry. Doesn’t tear up. He leaves the drinks in the bar, untouched. A small tribute to what they could have been. Dazai has never been a forgiving person, but he thinks he might start now.
He lets fate guide him, so it's really no surprise she led him here, on the steps of the slums, waiting for something- someone he can’t let himself wait for.
He can’t let himself wait, yet he still does. Waits on some fleeting hope that the someone will be here, with the freshly risen stars a witness to his idiocy.
Quietly, he wonders if this is their last night as well. If they cease to exist when there's no one left to watch them. Such self-centered thought is natural for humans, the belief that the meaning of everything in the universe is dependent solely on us. (For this first time since he can remember, he doesn’t correct himself. He lets himself entertain the idea of being human, it's a small guilty pleasure he rewards himself with on his last day.)
Dazai is a fool to wait. But he supposes Chuuya is a bigger fool for coming.
Maybe Chuuya knew Dazai would be here. Maybe he didn’t. The world around them has always been so easy for Dazai to predict, the people and events nothing but little puppets for him to play with, but it’s never been like that with Chuuya. He hates to admit it, but he can’t see through Chuuya. He knows what to say to make Chuuya hit him, to make Chuuya mad, but he’s lost the moment Chuuya looks into his soul with that hadal gaze.
He doesn’t turn to look at Chuuya, continues to stare up at the stars. Distantly he notes the slight blurriness in his right eye from the eye patch he had been wearing the last time he was here. Maybe he should have considered the impacts of wearing an eye patch over a perfectly healthy eye for years, but he hadn’t expected to live this long. It’s alright though, poor vision in one eye is nothing when you’ll be dead in less than a day.
Chuuya sits on the step behind him, the same height as Dazai for once in his life. He offers him a juice box. Dazai ponders the impact it will have on his image, a lovestruck detective sharing an apple juice with a mafioso, before he realises he doesn’t care. He takes the small carton from Chuuya’s hands and sips.
“So. End of the world.” It’s so rare for Chuuya to start a conversation that isn’t just yelled threats.
“Mn. How are you feeling?” It’s a simple phrase that asks so many questions, from are you ready to die? to is there anything you want to say to me? Please?
Chuuya responds simply.
“Well, kinda like shit.”
Dazai chuckles.
“So many things to do… yet… no one to do them with. You’d think with so many people around me, I’d be throwing a party or drinking myself to death. But well…” Chuuya pauses. It’s so unlike him to say his deeper thoughts. But then again it's so unlike Dazai to wait for him, so unlike him to accept a juice box and make soft conversation. Maybe in this small world between them, they could have been different, could have been friends. (Maybe more, Dazai thinks, but it will never happen, because this isn’t Soukoku, isn’t their trademark Angry-Idiot-Snarky-Asshole dynamic, and Dazai doesn’t know how to let them exist outside of Soukoku)
“But well?” Dazai prods.
“... It feels like… a disrespect. To waste your last day in some dazed hell, to let everything disappear while you’re busy singing your lungs out.” Chuuya finishes.
“Ah… Well I just so happen to have nothing to do.” Dazai smirks at him, the offer dangling from the Dazai’s outstretched hand.
Chuuya looks at him for a moment, eyes flickering with indecision, and takes it.
Chuuya’s list of things to do is nothing fancy. It's full of ordinary things, things not worth making a big deal of (if you weren’t a walking science experiment and a traumatised murderer).
Dazai loves it.
(Dazai loves more than just the list, but he can’t say it or it will become true.)
“Ah! Vending machine! Right there! That's our number 4!” Dazai bounces on his heels and points at the glowing box down the road. Simple happiness is a good look on him, Chuuya decides.
Dazai grabs his hand and skips down the road, dragging a squawking Chuuya with him.
They stand there for five minutes, carefully selecting their drinks, before they realise.
“Hey… Do you have any money?”
“... Not enough.”
“Oh.”
Then they get the most devious look on their faces.
Dazai pulls a pen out of his pocket, tears the corner of his bandages, and with eight hours left, two grown men crouch over the sidewalk, plotting.
Ultimately, their plan ends in ruins. The vending machine blows up, leaving them covered in cold syrup , and the only two drinks left are the worst ones.
They still drink them, bickering over who’s fault it was.
(Dazai thinks that he might hate melon milk, but at this moment it’s his favourite drink.)
They work their way through the list, a small taste of everything they missed out on the moment the world decided they weren’t worth a normal life. They rediscover Yokohama, learn what it means to be a person. Chuuya is horrifyingly brilliant at scissors-paper-stone, and Dazai is allergic to rabbits. The wind tastes of something distinctly Home, and the glow of the streetlights is peaceful.
The world is beautiful, and for a second, Dazai wishes it wasn’t going to end.
The idea that small apartments are always cozier than expansive penthouses is absolute bullshit, Dazai thinks, because Chuuya’s penthouse is full of such warmth and life that’s always absent from Dazai’s shoddy two-room flat. But perhaps it's just Chuuya, that his tiny body can’t contain all the bursting vitality so it spills into the space and people around him, unbiased and ever-generous.
Chuuya pours himself a glass, Dazai rummaging around until he finds Chuuya’s hidden stash of capri-sun. He’d throw back a whiskey, but what’s the point of drinking something you hate just to remember someone you’ll probably see in a few hours? (He doesn’t let himself consider the fact that heaven and hell will split them, that he may never see Odasaku again.)
They clamber up to the roof, concrete floor and rusty red railings lined with plants that Chuuya never bothered taking care of. Dazai used to do it for him, to feel like he was paying back some of that warmth Chuuya so freely gave, but it’s been years since they’ve properly talked, much less taken care of each other's rooftop gardens..
Spiels of purple and pink bleed across the sky, a testament to the shortening of their time.
There are many things Dazai wants to say, to many people he will not say them to, but he thinks there may be an exception to that rule.
It’s been building up to this for the past hours, whispering in the back of both their minds as the seconds tick by.
It’s been building up since he left, the ache in both their chests begging them to do something that would be treason to their respective organisations.
It’s been building up since they met each other, fate tying together two broken boys and promising them you’re meant to be together.
Dazai turns to Chuuya, eyes lighted with a certain spark that's rarely there.
He leans in, and Chuuya doesn’t wait, meets him in the middle.
“I love you.” He says, in the centimeters between them.
“I love you.” He’s said in a million ways, from the cool touch of No Longer Human against Corruption, to the waiting beside his hospital bed after every mission.
“I love you.” He’s never said, too clogged up with the acrid petrol in his head to properly admit it.
“I love you,” he says, and he feels his answer against his lips.
In the end, the way it happened doesn't matter. The world could have been ripped apart instantly, or dissolved into meringue smoke. Ultimately, it's inconsequential. What matters was that they have each other, and not even the end of the world can change that.