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A pump somewhere underneath the wooden floorboards rumbled as the rumpling water made its way up the pipes, pouring all over Chuuya’s aching, sticky fingers and the sleeves of his messy shirt.
The infinitely stretching silence between him and his partner who was standing in the bathroom door – a silence that lingered on for minutes – left his still fuzzy brain wondering what the ongoing quiet truly retained. That’s what speechless moments between individuals in such close proximity usually did though, didn’t they? They always left behind a glimmer of much to be imagined, especially when they came after big, raging storms like the one they’ve just been caught in.
Chuuya felt the shift in atmosphere – from their usual adolescent bickering, to a more solemn sided omen – a long while ago already. It creeped into his pores along with the ever freezing air of their current geographical location. Being in close proximity of the Arctic Circle was truly an experience of strange proportions.
Once the delicately coated words were out though, there was no denying that all cards were laid bare on the table. All the metaphorical hoax painted masks that are usually hiding Dazai’s true sentiments we[re discarded by that one, fondly placed, simple question, disclosing a fragment of his so rarely bestowed benevolence.
“Well, you haven't changed, have you?”
Chuuya previously imagined the suicidal mummy to be casually leaning against the doorway with a stupid smugness that could genuinely never suit anyone else but Chuuya himself, but such an image was torn away from his mind when he heard exactly how openly un-mocking Dazai truly sounded.
Humanity was something this lanky asshole was so full of, yet something he always tried so hard to supress.
Chuuya smirked gently at the thought, not turning to face the source of the voice that came from close behind him.
What good would that do in his current circumstance, anyway?
“No delusions of grandeur here, I’m afraid. I’m still just as good as ever.”
Undeniably cocky as Chuuya’s response was, his tone remained hushed and appreciative. Dazai wasn’t much of a rational conversationalist, so Chuuya made sure to never take moments of mediocre normalcy for granted.
Although Chuuya’s spoke with light-heartedness, in all actuality, a lot did change in the past month.
Five days and four nights. That’s how long the two of them spent in North of Sweden now. In a little village, the name of which Dazai most purposefully always butchered to pronounce. On this not-so-secret, secret mission.
Wandering the vast icy wilderness just a mere hour ago, they were finally met with a clue. An ability user, who without a shred of a doubt worked for the enemy, and whose powers remained as discreetly complex to comprehend as the ones of this man’s boss – the one they were actually looking for – emerged from the peripherals of the frozen lake they were patrolling.
Chuuya’s by now very well attuned ears perceived the intrusive energy way before he could ever hope to see the man coming. Knowing the blow would come way before it actually landed was also a verdict of will. It was a demonstration of excellence in the strange new ways in which he taught himself to use his powers. Although he never imagined he would have to push the boundaries of his gravity to such extents, this test made him realize he was passing his trials with flying colours.
Since the encountered enemy didn’t seem to be offering any tokens of welcoming them to his homeland warmly, it was Chuuya who ended up leaving him with a lection in manners, instead. A token of his own making – a kiss of gravity itself that the bastard will not likely get rid of all too soon.
The guy who went by the name of Hans probably thought him defenceless and weak in the wake of Chuuya’s most inconvenient hindrance.
Little did Hans know though, that Chuuya always kept an Ace up his sleeve. One unlike Hans has probably ever seen before. One that carried the name of a God of Calamity.
Yes. A lot has changed. But Chuuya had his ways. He was raised by the streets of Suribachi City, after all.
Chuuya supposed it was due time someone from the opposite fraction would take notice, honestly. He anticipated the enemy would get to them sooner even. Still, the bitch they sought after – the woman he needed to get to - was nowhere to be found. Somehow, Chuuya thought she would be easier to locate, especially with Dazai’s brilliant mind in tow (although that much he thought of sarcastically, for it was too annoying to admit). Then again, toying around with people seemed to be in her innate nature – otherwise they wouldn’t be caught in the situation they were in. A game of hide and seek was totally within reason of being expected.
In Chuuya’s professional experience, an enemy with a clear vindictive resolve has much less intimidation factor than one that seems carelessly enigmatic.
It is nonchalance that makes people all the more dangerous.
Luckily, he had an idiotic destructive partner to always up the bets and raise the stakes when it came to this particular issue.
No matter how radically indifferent the enemy might be, Dazai would always make that mentality a sort of competition, and make sure to come out of a nihilistic battle of wits the crowning king.
In that sense at least, unpredictable behaviour was sort of familiar.
Still, Chuuya couldn’t help but remember those piercing blue eyes – the last thing he saw before she became his personal vendetta. Unlike with Dostoevsky, there was no calming craze in them. Dare he say… it was exactly the opposite. She stood there, with her two long strawberry Dutch braids, smiling softly with an innocence so raw it left him petrified.
Now that he thought back on it, he should have been suspicious of her from the second he saw her.
Those foreign features, her overwhelming presence…
“Do you think he wants to see the Light of Nangilima, Mr. Nilsson?” he remembered she almost sang the nonsensical question, speaking over her shoulder as though there was something invisible just sitting there in its inconceivable state of being.
As soon as those words left her mouth, Chuuya’s head spun, and his sight blurred up like shattering glass.
“He needs to prove himself worthy, first,” echoed the words of her strange accent.
Chuuya passed out before he had a chance to react. When he woke up, he woke up to a smell of disinfectant and to a surrounding of darkness. He didn’t even realize he was awake for a full half an hour.
Even now, they knew surprisingly little about what her goals – or the goals of whatever group she might have belonged to – were. She wasn’t very talkative – spoke only in childish riddles that Chuuya could vaguely translate into a realization that she was in dire need of incapacitating him for a while in the name of a supposedly bigger goal, and that she was somehow connected to the Order of the Clock Tower.
First an Agatha, now an Astrid.
Chuuya could sense a pattern.
“Earth to midget, hello?” noticed Dazai Chuuya’s wandering trail of thought then.
Tsk. Chuuya should have known that the bandaged bastard being a decent human being would be short lived.
“What?” responded Chuuya, with only half the intended irritation to his tone.
“What?” mimicked Dazai phonily right back like an annoying cockatoo.
Convinced Dazai had said something more when Chuuya was out and daydreaming about the past occurences of the previous month that brought them here, Chuuya tried hard remembering what he must have just overheard, but gave up on the idea of asking. A part of him regretted letting his mind wonder like that, making him think it was his unresponsiveness that made Dazai snap back into his normal shitty self when he could have had it last for a while longer. Alas, it was strangely easy to just detach his trail of thought in his current state of being.
Weary from the recent use of Corruption, it almost felt like the unavoidably adamant hyperawareness of his surroundings from the weeks past finally caught up to him, and corroded at the very last reserves of his energy, finally taking its proper toll.
Chuuya was exhausted. What’s more – he was exhausted of pretending he wasn’t exhausted.
Using Corruption was the only way for a clear escape though. Whatever fuckery Hans had unleashed upon them would have left them in the bottom of that frozen lake, dragged down below by the gruesome creatures he summoned into reality from a realm of his abilities that was beyond their current understanding.
“Shit for brains,” muttered Chuuya through his teeth finally. But it didn’t address the thought of a, as Dazai described him, ‘manic long nosed guy’ they’ve fought in the everlasting twilight. Instead it was made for Dazai, and Dazai alone. And the insult’s ferocity was lukewarm at best.
Just like the water pouring over his fingers.
Wordlessly then, shifting behind him, Dazai made his presence clearer with pressing his chest to Chuuya’s back, somehow conveying with his body language alone that he was there to stay. Approaching slowly, Dazai’s fingers left a feather light touch on Chuuya’s shoulders to announce their intentions, then made their way down on both sides of Chuuya’s body, brushing his arms until he reached Chuuya’s wrists. There they fondled with Chuuya’s presumably bloody but definitely bloody shirt. Undoing the buttons, the long fingers worked on folding back the soaked material ever so tenderly, making Chuuya’s mouth part in an unspoken perplexity.
It was weird, because this was Dazai, and Dazai was heartless, and Dazai wouldn’t and shouldn’t care. At the same time though, the situation somehow also managed to not feel humiliating, even where some amount of shame was something Chuuya expected would creep into his chest with the events unfolding.
“Hey…”
Chuuya was the one who spoke first in an uninspired protest over the sound of a squeaky old soap dispenser.
When Dazai went in to cradle his digits, there was a very particular sort of soft fondness behind it. Chuuya thought it reminded him of how mothers would hold their children in empty idleness when doing mundane things, like riding a train, or looking at prices of items on the shelf of a convenience store.
How they’d sway from side to side gently, without even noticing the lulling, just being nurturing by the power of nature alone.
Chuuya wanted to tell Dazai to just leave him to his own devices – that Dazai didn’t have to do this. More than that, he wanted to tell Dazai he didn’t need any pity. Such should be the script for the current situation. Chuuya’s seen it in drama movies, and read about such perspectives in books, time and time again.
The weird thing was though, Chuuya didn’t really feel any pity oozing from Dazai.
Camaraderie at worst, perhaps.
And at best…
Dazai’s chin came to rest on Chuuya’s shoulder softly, making Chuuya’s face turn to it slightly in unexpectedness and some sort of deep rooted expectation. He bilnked emptily.
“Hm?” lulled Dazai as mindlessly as he always did, soaping up the crevices of Chuuya’s fingers, rubbing gently at the life lines of his palms, scraping off the already half dried blood of the enemy.
“What colour is it?” asked Chuuya without reservations then, voice unwavering yet brittle.
“Hm…”
It sounded like Dazai was contemplating something more than just what the question entailed. Maybe he was looking for the very root of its motive. And honestly, who was Chuuya to blame him? Even Chuuya himself didn’t exactly know where the thought came from. It could very well be that the Beast within him still held some semblance of control over him, extending its animalistic urges beyond the use of Corruption, desperately wanting for him to just be functional again in order to avoid potential threats.
Whereas Arahabaki wasn’t tied down by the senses of mortal men, that’s where Chuuya felt flat as of late. Maybe it knew its host was deprived of a surviving mechanism, and pushed for him to ask, even if the question was stupid to its core.
Chuuya could still smell and taste the blood that clung to him like he was baptized by demise itself. He could still feel the thickness of the life fluid when he nestled his stained, trembling hands to his chest when he came off his high earlier, lying in a three feet high fence of snow.
But the Agent of North left him with a significant drawback.
He opened his mouth to further elaborate, suddenly overwhelmed with the realization of how foolish he must have sounded, when Dazai mumbled out in a half whisper.
“A ’45 Rothschild, I’d say.”
Chuuya blinked at nothingness with the accuracy of the presented suggestion, and took a deeper breath. He fought against grinning like an idiot, so when his lips turned up into a gentle, almost thankful smile, the corners of his mouth quivered.
“Exotic. I like the sound of that,” he managed adamantly, but knew Dazai would hear the quivering yearning in his voice all the same. He conjured in his brain a picture of the fine vintage swirling around in one of his crystal wine glasses.
“Or a nice 1951 Penfolds Grange Hermitage. Depends on how the light hits it.”
Chuuya’s fingers wrapped firmly around the slippery knuckles that tended to his own. Whenever Dazai’s hands were on him, the kindle of the chaos’ flames of Chuuya’s insides flickered into a dull crackling. Now more than ever, he was thankful for that. Gravity was what substituted his eyes in the many days that have passed since the incident at the Port where he first met Astrid, who started a new wave of battles, just shortly after the demise of the Decay of Angels. Only being able to see with the power of gravity has quickly became second nature. Chuuya didn’t just do it because he didn’t want any help. He did it because he absolutely had to. But it was burdening and taxing.
And by god was he exhilarated when he just simply couldn’t do it.
Ironically enough, it was as though Dazai was the only one who could turn off the switch of the light that was out of his reach, preventing him from getting any sleep.
That said. It was also scary.
It was confounding and terrible, because it left him completely vulnerable.
“What if touching her doesn’t work?”
Chuuya knew it was his paranoia speaking. When he realized he woke up to a world void of sight, the first thing he wordlessly tried to do was to when Dazai made his presence clear, was to reach out and grasp at the fucker’s wrist that was resting on the bedside. The consequence of that was the old familiar overwhelming calmness inside of his chest that dwindled his immortal entity into a slumber with a physical lullaby.
But that was all it did. He blinked ferociously, but the wold never manifested itself before him.
Dazai’s ability still worked. But in order to recover what was lost, Chuuya needed to find the Sense Thief.
The voice that gently mumbled against his left ear darkened severely, yet managed to remain playful and sweet. Chuuya could visualize that mad look in Dazai’s dark pools of honey he’s seen so many times before as he spoke.
“Then I’ll just have to fuck her raw, in case I’ve missed a spot.”
The underlying message of the spoken words was comforting.
I’ll do what I have to do, no matter what it takes.
On the other hand, Chuuya knew Dazai wasn’t exaggerating.
The devotion in his sick predicament was frightening.
Dazai’s nose nuzzled against Chuuya’s cheek in a calming mannerism – a duality to the atrocities he’d be willing to commit for his, no, for Chuuya’s cause.
Then, without a further word from any of them, Dazai hummed a stupid, text-less melody, undoubtedly of his own making. The speechless moments were suddenly wrapped in a blanket of comfortability unlike any Chuuya ever imagined. Ferocity of Dazai’s words that clung to the humid air still resonated within his eardrums.
There was a hidden promise behind that sentence– something Dazai always wrapped up in a shiny layer of either violence or carelessness, because he could never bring himself to speak of it up front. It was something that lay heavily upon his conscious – so heavy, in fact that Chuuya figured he might never truly speak of it directly at all. Like a scab that he didn’t dare poke in fear it might never crust up again if he opened it anew.
I’m not leaving you behind this time, it whispered.
Chuuya leaned his head on the side, his temple against Dazai’s forehead, letting him know he understood. Dazai’s hold on him ceased the kneading of his palm muscles for a split second of surprising acceptance, before he continued to add more generic, lavender scented soap to Chuuya’s stained hands.
Imagining the current of the ’45 Rothschild shade creating a vortex of crimson in the rusty sink of their hideaway cabin, Chuuya sighed contently.
“Oi, mummy bastard,” he said barely above a whisper with higher spirits and an affectionate tone.
“You need to shave. If the first thing I see after a month of nothing is your ugly ass bearded face, I’ll tell the bitch to blind me again.”