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Chuuya wakes to utter darkness. No moonlight, no clock, no reflections, just a blindfold of night. His futon sinks down beneath him, like he’s heavier than he should be. He feels it flattening, only a thin layer between him and the floor, and rising around his limbs. He moves his arm to see if he can, and it moves slowly, as if through cold water.
He wraps his hand around the gun next to his bed.
There’s a slow, cold pressure against the back of his hand, holding it with the same strength with which he holds the gun. There’s the faintest movement along the line of his thumb.
Chuuya surges to his feet, nearly toppling as the blankets tangle around him, and as he skids back against the wall, the illusion fractures. Tiny lights flood back into the room—moonlight, clock, phone charger, security panel. Barely anything, but the ordinary darkness seems like daylight after the—
Dream. His hand trembles as he lowers the gun. It was a dream. His room is empty; he’s the only monster in it.
Chuuya counts his breaths, wide awake, until morning.
***
Chuuya breathes out clouds in the winter night. The cold cuts through his clothes, finding his wrist between glove and sleeve, and freezing his ass against the concrete bench. He wishes he was anywhere besides a rundown city park watching Mori and Fukuzawa pretend to cooperate. They’ve been doing that a lot since the Shibusawa incident. Chuuya wouldn’t mind, necessarily, except that asshole won’t stop staring at him from the fucking jungle gym.
The empty swings sway, creaking gently. Chuuya watches them. Back and forth, back and forth. He touches his flask through his coat. Back and forth. He hasn’t gotten nearly enough sleep this week to tolerate Dazai.
He flinches awake when someone gets too close to him. Before he can think better of it, he’s looking up—too far up—at Dazai.
“You look tired,” Dazai says, weirdly quiet. He’s been weird ever since the incident, but this takes the fucking cake. Who the fuck is he to look concerned like that? It’s insulting.
“Yeah, I’m tired of you,” Chuuya snaps, and jumps to his feet. Dazai barely gets out of his way, and for one sickening moment Chuuya thinks they might touch.
But they don’t. Dazai leans away just in time, and Chuuya crushes his hat on his head, and they don’t say anything else.
***
There’s dried blood on Chuuya’s wall. A red-brown half handprint next to the kitchen door. Barely awake, he peels himself off the couch and rubs his eyes—his hand feels cold, clean—but the blood’s still there when he looks again. The blood must be his, or his job from the night before, even if he wasn’t bleeding, even if the blood looks far too old. The handprint must be his, even if the fingers stretch too far apart. Even if Chuuya would need to reach up to wash it away.
His head feels stuffed with cotton, and his stomach twists cold with nausea. It’s a hell of a hangover, considering he didn’t drink last night. He meant to. There’s a bottle on the table, and a glass he may or may not have intended to use. But he passed out on the couch before he could open it.
Hell of a job, last night. Easy. The power’s coming too easy, these days. Tainted Sorrow lingers longer than it should in his veins, stronger. The wavering touch of chaos feels better than it should. Almost enough to make him hate working alone, with no hand on his arm, no voice in his ear whispering, “Come back.”
Plaster bursts around his fist. It doesn’t hurt, and Chuuya barely hears it, but there’s a hole in the wall, right below—
Right below nothing. The handprint is gone.
***
He wakes up to his phone buzzing. He blinks into the light sliding in through the blinds, tries to register where he was, what he was doing. His own couch. Reading the newspaper. He rubs his eyes and grabs his phone, sees it’s 14:00 in the afternoon and he has a text from an unknown number.
I’m in the neighborhood, want to get a drink? (♡⸃ ◡ ⸂♡)
He wants to reply. He knows it’s fucking dumb, but he wants to reply. Something sensible like fuck off, or die in a fire, or how the fuck do you know my neighborhood. Something insane like sure, or how about my place.
A chill wind rustles through the open window, raking its fingers through Chuuya’s hair. Weird. He doesn’t usually leave the window open.
He closes the app without replying and staggers upright. It’s 14:05 in the afternoon and the day is bright, but the windowpane is foggy. His fingertips leave marks on the cold, damp glass.
***
The next job’s even easier. No collateral damage to civilians or property; Chuuya won’t even have to assign a subordinate to check if damaged buildings are ones the Port Mafia cares about. Just one mark in a dark alleyway, crumpled into too many angles. A man’s legs are only supposed to bend so many directions.
Chuuya doesn’t bother curb-stomping him. Not enough of a jaw left to bother with the Port Mafia’s signature.
He dusts the dirt off his jacket and wipes a drop of blood from his shoe with a handkerchief. Immaculate, he leaves the scene of the job and blends into Yokohama’s evening crowds. The air is crisp with winter and loud with human voices. As he walks, Chuuya feels his gift settling down into the deep recesses of his soul, where it belongs.
It stays there as he finds his car and drives home. It stays there as he gets in the elevator and shrugs off his jacket because the building is warm after the outside chill.
It stays there until he enters his apartment and uncorks a bottle of wine, and an icy touch slides along his forearm.
“Fuck,” he yells. He doesn’t drop the bottle, but his hand clenches in an involuntary fist, and the bottle shatters in his grasp. He doesn’t realize until the heat of pain slices through his palm, up his arm.
The moment of cold is gone, chased away by stupid pain and the wine sticking his shirt and trousers to his skin. He swears some more, dropping the bottle, and stares at his hand. Shards of black glass gleam darkly against torn gloves and torn skin.
Darker still is the surge of corruption stirring behind his ribs. His power is drawn to the blood and pain. Humans can only bend in so many directions before they break.
“Fuck,” he whispers, suddenly dizzy. He staggers backwards, so he collapses on his couch and not the pile of glass, and watches the blood pour from his hand. He isn’t used to going slowly crazy. He’s used to it happening fast.
***
He fumbles with his phone in his bandaged hand and tries to think of an excuse to contact Dazai. He knows he needs to. He’s not fifteen and stupid anymore—he can hear Kouyou’s voice concurring, “Yes, you’re twenty-one and stupid now”—and he knows it’s worse if he waits until it’s too late.
He’s learned the hard way that he can rely on Dazai when it counts. He’s just not always sure what counts or not.
But he’s desperate enough to risk disappointment this time. He opens the conversation from—yesterday? A week ago? Time’s starting to run together—and replies, gritting his teeth:
ok whatever
Then throws the phone to the end of the couch.
Then swears and dives for it. He curls up in the corner of the couch and watches the screen for five minutes, until a new message appears with a time, a place, and another hideous kaomoji.
***
Dazai’s outside the bar already when Chuuya gets there, fucking around on his phone. He doesn’t look up at Chuuya’s approach, and Chuuya’s half a breath from turning around and leaving. But retreating means Dazai wins. He thinks. It’s been harder to tell what game Dazai’s playing with him exactly, lately.
He barely knows what he wants anymore either. He can’t remember the last time he slept more than three hours straight, and his eyes feel rough and red inside their sockets.
So he stomps past Dazai without looking at him either. It’s too loud inside the bar, grating his every nerve. He has time to order a glass of wine and drink it, then order a second, before Dazai slumps on the stool next to him.
“You’re grumpier than usual tonight, short stuff,” Dazai tells him. “What’s wrong?”
Dazai’s a dick, but Chuuya feels a weird sense of satisfaction that he broke the silence first. He pushes his sleeve up to his elbow and sticks his arm out. There’s a bare stretch of wrist above his glove. “Touch me.”
There’s a deafening pause. Then, because he’s an asshole, “Right here in public? Chuuya, how forward.”
Chuuya doesn’t answer. Just waits until Dazai reaches out. There’s another pause, electric, that might just be in Chuuya’s imagination, might be the tendrils of magic and exhaustion beneath his skin humming in response to Dazai’s presence. Then Dazai’s fingertips barely brush his wrist, and Chuuya stops breathing.
Dazai closes his hand around Chuuya’s wrist, skin on skin and bone on bone, and the tension shudders from Chuuya’s shoulders. His stitched-up palm stops hurting. He exhales shakily and closes his eyes so he doesn’t have to look at Dazai. Doesn’t have to acknowledge that this the safest he’s felt in months.
Since the Shibusawa incident. Since he had to punch Dazai back to life. Since he fell exhausted in the rubble with Dazai’s fingers carding through his hair.
He’d rather stay silent like this, just savoring the clarity of Dazai’s touch, but of course Dazai can’t shut up for long. When he speaks, at least it’s quiet: “You shouldn’t be using your ability this much without training wheels.”
He sounds obnoxious as ever, but also worried. A year ago, Chuuya wouldn’t have believed it. The noise of the bar slowly filters back in, and he opens his eyes. He pulls his arm away from Dazai’s grasp, quick, like ripping off a bandage. He drinks. “I haven’t used Corruption. Barely used the rest.”
“That doesn’t make sense.” Dazai’s fingers drum on the bar top. “You didn’t used to have side effects unless—”
The blissed-out emptiness is fading to far more familiar annoyance. “Stop that. This isn’t one of your dumb detective cases, and I’m not paying you. You don’t have to figure it out.”
“I can work pro bono,” Dazai says, as if that’s the issue. “Tell me your symptoms.”
Chuuya is about to pay his bill and leave. He has what he wanted. But there’s something so stupidly reassuring about Dazai’s stupid voice and stupid questions and the relief of quiet beneath his skin. With Dazai here, he can’t fall to pieces.
He doesn’t answer Dazai, but he orders another glass of wine, and a whiskey for Dazai, on his tab. He’s halfway through the wine when Dazai touches his wrist again, then his thigh. Warmth washes through his veins, and he’s dizzy with life instead of nightmares.
And when Dazai says, “Let me walk you home,” he swears at him, but doesn’t say no.
***
Chuuya can barely get his key out of his pocket. He’s drunker than he should be—so what if he’d had a few before leaving to meet Dazai—so what if he doesn’t remember what he ate today—and Dazai is clinging to him as closely as a second pair of gloves. It’s distracting.
“Let me get that for you,” Dazai murmurs, and suddenly his hand is in Chuuya’s vest pocket. The angle is terrible. He tugs at Chuuya’s jacket with his hand still inside.
“Are you stuck,” Chuuya says.
Dazai tugs his jacket again, more forcefully. “I’m not stuck.”
“You’re stuck.”
“I meant to do that.” Dazai’s really close, and Chuuya is suddenly aware of that. He looks up, at the fraying edge of bandage against his neck, the soft hair curling over his ears, the dagger-sharp glint in his eyes.
“You’re an idiot,” Chuuya breathes, before Dazai kisses him.
He’s an idiot too, of course. He kisses back.
He tries to be rough, tries to bite, but Dazai is ruthlessly tender. There’s a hand at the base of his skull, fingers in his hair and palm against his neck. Heat crawls down Chuuya’s spine, so sweet it makes him dizzy. He steps back and grabs Dazai by the wrists, presses his thumbs into the bandages, and Dazai doesn’t flinch. No injuries, or nothing that hurts.
Keys dangle from Dazai’s fingers. “I wasn’t stuck,” he claims again. Kind of breathlessly, and that’s gratifying.
Chuuya snatches the keys and reaches for the door. It swings open at his touch. The air inside feels far, far colder than it should.
A shiver of fear chases the heat through Chuuya’s veins. This shouldn’t be happening. Dazai touched him. He’s supposed to be okay now. He grabs Dazai’s coat and drags him inside, grabs his neck and feels the heat of him through his gloves. Dazai starts to say something, but Chuuya drags him down and muffles his mouth with his, because he needs this to stay sane.
The worst part is, it works. When Dazai’s kissing him, when Dazai’s shoving the coat from his shoulders and pushing him towards the couch, he feels alive. He feels real.
Except, while he’s fumbling with Dazai’s stupid bolo tie, Dazai pauses. “Are you broke or something? Why is it so cold in here?”
Chuuya’s hands fall to the couch. “You can feel that?”
“It’s fucking freezing,” Dazai says against Chuuya’s neck. He kisses beneath his jaw, then tests his teeth against the skin. They’re very definitely touching, and Chuuya’s ability is held at bay. Everything’s supposed to be fine.
“Fuck.” Chuuya shoves Dazai away. “Something’s wrong, this shouldn’t—”
A loud crack splits through the air. They turn to see a fracture across the windowpane, a single jagged line like a streak of lightning. The lights flicker. Fog curls in the corners of the apartment, and something dark seeps from the corners of the ceiling. To Chuuya’s experienced eyes, it looks like blood.
Dazai has a hand on his gun. “This isn’t Corruption,” he says. “Your apartment’s fucking haunted.”
“Fuck my life,” mutters Chuuya, just before a pale white figure with spidery legs appears outside the window.
Then inside.
There’s a frozen breath of silence. “Eyes that open doubtfully?” Dazai then suggests, which is their ancient special mission code for let’s get the fuck out of here.
Chuuya doesn’t bother agreeing. He just dives for the door.
***
They end up at the playground, and Chuuya slumps down on the bench. He’s too stunned and exhausted to move when Dazai slumps down next to him. He grumbles a bit when Dazai slings an arm around his shoulders, but he doesn’t push him off.
“You can stay at my place,” Dazai says. “While we find an exorcist.”
“You live in a dorm room,” Chuuya protests. But he doesn’t say no. He just leans back against Dazai’s shoulder and closes his eyes. Pretends he doesn’t notice Dazai playing with his hair.