Archive of Our Own

It rarely snows in Yokohama, but today it is, and the air around them is silent except for the pained gasps of the man in the snow. Fyodor is bleeding out, the snow, his coat, all slowly turning red. It’s fitting, Dazai thinks. Fyodor might not have been sentimental, but he was a traditional Russian, and dedicated to his country of birth, it seems only fair for him to die in the cold, even if the snow in Yokohama is wrong compared to what it had been in Moscow, or Siberia. 

Dazai has never seen Siberia, but he’d spent nearly two years in Moscow.

Fyodor Dostoevsky does not die as a god, he dies as a man. Blood red, turning from the oxygenated crimson to the slow, dark wine colour of the dead. He is many, many miles from his homeland, and the city in which they met. 

In the end, all that matters is the fact that they have always both been too dedicated to their causes, rather than to each other, than to themselves. Fyodor could never stop searching for the book and his ideals of a perfect world, and Dazai, good man or not, had been driven to stop him. Their care for each other had never come before that fundamental fact of their existence.

Dazai sits down at Fyodor’s head, pulling it into his lap, and running his fingers through Fyodor’s hair. “Fedya.” he says, leaning down to press a kiss to Fyodor’s lips. Fyodor lets out a breathy laugh. He was going to die, what matter was it if someone overheard the diminutive?

“You were right,” Fyodor says, keeping his eyes fixed on Dazai’s face, even as the desire to close them grows stronger. “At least one of us would kill the other before thirty.” This time it’s Dazai’s turn to let out a laugh, even if it edges on strained.

“And now I shall wait forever to find a better opponent.”

“It’s your checkmate I believe,” Fyodor says, and Dazai is reminded of a chess game left unfinished. Never to be finished now he supposes.

“White king takes black king, impossible move, white wins.” A brief summary of the fight that had led them to this point, a brief summary of the entire fight from the very first day. He wants to find it funny. In a board with only two kings, and somehow, there is a victor between them. It's not supposed to be possible, two kings could never get that close to each other, but then again, that was only if they were the kings. 

“You were magnificent.”

“And you were running out of pieces.” Dazai says, thinking about the people that had been part of the game and had been left behind in turn: there had been the Rats— dead and dispersed, the Guild— gone back to America, and even they had betrayed Fyodor before the end, the Decay of Angels— fractured and dead again, the Agency— framed and whole, the Port Mafia— bruised but ready to reclaim their city. To think that now there would be something new to fill that void, a new organization that had never heard of Fyodor Dostoyevsky. It was a strange thought.

“Come now, we both know that you would never have let me win.”

Dazai brushes Fyodor’s hair out of his eyes. “If only you’d been on the side of angels.” It’s a fool's dream, but he feels allowed this one instance of fantasy. Not all abilities were made for the light, some people would never be able to reconcile the two ideas of what they were and what they could be. He’s the only person that can touch Fyodor without fear; what a terrible toxicity to carry with you always. Death was a heavy burden to carry when you are a child, Dazai knows it, and Fyodor knows it too.

“If only I’d been a beautiful woman.” Fyodor says, blinking his eyes open. Dazai can feel the snow beneath them melting, and soaking into his coat but he doesn't make any move to shift from his position.The blood is immaterial.

“A lovers suicide with you? You would never.”

“Right again, lyubimyy. And had you only been mine earlier than perhaps the world would bow at our feet.” Dazai smiles fondly at him. Had he met Fyodor before Oda, or had there not been the promise of the Agency after two years, had there been a lot of different versions of history, then maybe it would be him dying in the snow instead of Fyodor or beside him. Or perhaps the world really would be bowing at their feet and they could be unstoppable.

“What terrible timing it is then.” And it is, tragedy and inevitability had always been their constant bedfellows, in Moscow and Yokohama both. Though perhaps, they had always been too much alike and not enough alike at the same time to have made it succeed. 

They lapse into silence for a few seconds, both absorbed in their thoughts. Dazai continues to run his hands through Fyodor’s hair, and make calming noises even as Fyodor uneven breaths around the pain and the blood. “I think I would have liked a version of us where we ended differently,” Fyodor says, a surprisingly sweet confession.

“How do you know this wasn’t pre-determined?”

“Nothing is ever certain, you should know that,” he says, and Dazai can’t help but agree, though he’s never been very good at not teasing Fyodor. They were too alike for that. In a way, it had been protection— Fyodor saw the hidden layers of truth that no one else did, at least in the light mocking it had been easier to disguise what it meant to be seen for who you really were.

“We are nothing if not pillars of coincidence.” Dazai says, and cups a handful of snow, pressing it into a closed fist, watching as the drops of water squeeze out from between his fingers. It’s cold, and the water collects in the creases of his palm. He’d almost describe it as grounding if this whole scenario didn’t feel quite so surreal.

“Pillars of salt, ready to be washed away.”

Dazai watches Fyodor’s face for signs of discomfort. This had been necessary, but that didn’t mean it was easy, that didn’t mean he wanted it to hurt. He would have destroyed them all. Fyodor had never been able to kill him, and Dazai had never been able to outdo him. Perfectly matched in that regard, as in so many others. 

“Tell the world of your deicide, it will make for better headlines.” Fyodor says.

What would the papers say anyways? “I rather think I like you better as a man.” Nothing important, nothing true or accurate, at least not enough to describe the strange runnings in Fyodor’s mind, always so brilliant and cruel in equal measures. Like his. 

Except Fyodor had craved a level of deification— had fashioned himself a crown of thorns, and recited the scripture for a god he did not believe in. Dazai thinks he must have once, might even still, in some cynical, broken way of a man who’d seen the world for its flaws. It’s the version of Fyodor Dostoyevsky that the world knows; but it’s not ‘Fedya’, the man who’d played him the cello, or the one who took jam in his tea. That version of Fyodor lives in Dazai’s memories of the Moscow streets, and the apartment with its empty cupboards, and narrow stairwells that he’d lived in for nearly two years. Fyodor had made himself into a god, but he had not always been such.

“Well at least someone does.”

Dazai laughs, and presses a chaste kiss to Fyodor’s forehead. “Sleep now, Fedya. It won’t hurt when you wake up.”

“Come now, lyubimyy, we’re the same, the least you could do is offer me the honesty of death.” He’s never been a good liar when it comes to Fyodor, but neither had Fyodor been any good at lying to him. They were too alike, saw too much of each other for the deception to ever really work between them. Mirrors until the last moment it seemed. 

“Tell me how it is when I arrive.”

“Only if you live to see thirty. I want you to be proved wrong at the end of things.” And there of course, was the part of Fyodor he had always adored. Not a calculating God, or man obsessed, but the one that had played card games against men far less intelligent than himself, and lived in the novostroika apartments. Dazai isn’t certain if he’d loved Fyodor in Moscow, or if he’d been too sad and too confused to, but he’d loved something about the city with it’s frozen river and it’s unfamiliar language. It had never been home, not like Yokohama, but it had been something like it.

“Clever; planning so many moves ahead.” Dazai says, and brushes a hand over Fyodor’s hair, watching the isolated snowflakes melt against his palm. “I make no promises.”

“Spite me my dying wish?”

“I live to be contrary.” Dazai says, and Fyodor catches his wrist in his hand. 

“Yes. You do.” He says, with a sort of hidden intensity that Dazai figures is meant to mask his real emotions. Or perhaps just to try and convey something he doesn't know how to, or want to say aloud. They were nothing if not matched in their unwillingness to open emotionally. The fact that they’d ever seen so much of each other was coincidence born of something shared in them. Fyodor drops his wrist.

“So cruel!” Dazai says, and it’s exuberant and fake . Nothing new in that, he’d always been talented at making the world forget about the darkness that had never stopped resting just a layer beneath his skin. The world didn’t need Dazai Osamu- Executive. They needed Dazai Osamu- detective, and in a lot of ways, that's what he became. 

“What better time for honesty than my deathbed?”

“You’re not in a bed.” Dazai bites his tongue and doesn't say “and you’ve never been honest” , because he knows it isn’t true. Fyodor had been deceptive, and spoke in smoke screens and mirrors, but he’d rarely outright lied, and it’s not like he hadn’t done the same.

“Maybe not, but the snow will suffice.” Fyodor says, and he drags his hand along the layer of snow, leaving the imprint of his fingers in it. He lifts his hand to his eyes, rubbing his fingers together and watching as the snow beads into a drop. “It’s different than it is in Moscow.” He says, and Dazai thinks that there’s something almost nostalgic in the tone. 

“Close your eyes, Fedya. I'd hate for the message of your tenderness to taint your final piece of art.” Dazai says, using the edge of his coat sleeve to dry Fyodor’s hand. It’s a paltry action when they’re both lying in the snow, and Fyodor is bleeding, but it feels like the thing he should do. 

“I suppose I can give you this one thing.” Fyodor says, but he doesn't close his eyes, even if Dazai can see the sluggish way his pupils follow the falling snow. Dazai has been stabbed before, has been on the verge of dying, and he knows how tired it can make you feel, the way your body starts to feel detached and too present all at once. 

If he didn’t know better he would almost be able to guess that Fyodor is going to survive— he’s present and awake, and makes himself sound like this is any normal conversation over tea. Only the occasional harsh intakes of breath, and hisses of pain tell any different unless you know what to look for.

“It was always going to be us at the end of things wasn’t it?” Dazai says, and brushes a hand across Fyodor’s face, closing his eyes. He doesn't open them again, which Dazai thinks is more telling than anything else. 

“Doubtless, lyubimyy. Everyone else were just amusing pawns in a game we started years ago.” Again, Dazai finds his thoughts straying to everyone that had been used and discarded between the two of them. There were the obvious people of course, but then there were people older than that, the ones that had been in the orbit of the two of them at nineteen, when the world was falling apart and open in simultaneously contradictory natures. Like the priest that had helped to break something in Fyodor, and the man that had run the gambling den where they had met.

None of them mattered here, at the end of all things. 

“Checkmate, Fedya.”

Fyodor hums in agreement. “Only on the board of our own creation.” 

Dazai nods, though Fyodor can't see it. If it were a normal board, the moves would have been impossible, the game a stalemate or have required more pieces, but they'd always played with their own rules, headless of the rest of the world. “A step apart.”

“A different set of rules.” Neither of them say anything after.

The silence feels like it should be awkward, but it’s not. There's the sounds of birds, and Fyodor’s quieted breathing. There is nothing salvageable in this, but that doesn't change the fact that it had to happen. They’d always been two extremes, but those extremes had never allowed for each other, and yes, they’d broken the rules, but even then, they couldn't change the fact that it was all always going to come down to this same point. 

If he were still Dazai Osamu- Executive, he thinks he would let the world burn, but he isn't and there are more important things. The greater good for which he’d sworn to protect. “You would have destroyed us all. I’m sorry.” Dazai Osamu- detective, tried to save people, Dazai Osamu- detective, was a man who understood grief and the emotions that turned men into what they were, and he knew that this needed to happen. He could not damn the world, He wasn’t that sort of person anymore, but perhaps it would be easier if he was, perhaps it would not hurt.

“For playing the opposite?” Fyodor asks, and grabs Dazai’s hand, pressing a kiss to the back of his palm. “Come now, lyubimyy, we both knew there was no other way this could end if the world were to survive.” He continues. 

“Look at us, Fedya, you’re right again, we keep winning. We’ve won again.” There’s just a touch of cynicism in the words, some sense of lingering disbelief. It’s the same thing he’d said months after they met, when he’d been leaning against Fyodor’s chair in the gambling dens of Moscow, watching the table of cards fold to their victory. Back then, it had been amused and affectionate. 

“Thank you,” Fyodor says suddenly, and Dazai can feel the restrained desperation to get this out. He had always avoided pain, perhaps he should have tried harder to give Fyodor that last dignity, but then he wouldn’t have been able to have this conversation. And he’d always been selfish, why would this have been any different? “I die seen, by at least one person.”

Fyodor Dostoevsky dies in his lover’s arms. This is the second great love that Dazai Osamu watches die, and grow cold in his embrace. The snow falls in gentle flakes around them, and for several minutes, Dazai just stares before he stands up and moves on with what he must. Fyodor Dostoevsky is dead, and so the world is saved for now. 

There is a small, hollow part of Dazai he can’t quite place. Some carved-out piece that has been left in the snow.

~

There was only supposed to be one of them— he’d been expecting John O’Hara and his Appointment in Samarra , with the ability to ‘reschedule’ whatever day you were fated to die on. Powerful, yes, but power had never mattered to Dazai, it always fell apart under his fingers. It’s why he’s here, because he knew that O’Hara wouldn’t be able to beat him in hand to hand combat, and his abilities would be useless.

He’s not expecting a second person, but it doesn't matter what he’s expecting. Salinger grabs his arm, and for a moment, Dazai feels No Longer Human curl around his flesh, the same prickling cold feeling he’d heard it described as, until it seems to stop and stutter with electric shocks. The boy holding his arm looks just as surprised, the two nullifications imploding until they collide with the point of connection and explode outwards in a burst of life. He’d always wanted to know what would happen if he met someone with the same powers. He remembers the singularity of events that had happened when Oda fought Gide, Flawless meeting Strait is the Gate , No Longer Human meeting Catcher in the Rye , how much difference was there really?

O’Hara looks alarmed when his own ability fails to work, even as Salinger steps away from Dazai, looking dazed and unsteady on his feet. Dazai can’t blame him, that was... “A double negative becoming a positive?” a voice in the back of his head says, and it sounds like Fyodor. Dazai ignores it and tries to readjust his tactics to account for the sudden change of events. 

“So is this Dazai Osamu’s last trick?” Salinger says, and he still looks a little shaky, but infinitely less so. Suddenly Dazai is struck by how young he is, he and O’Hara both. Like he was, like Akutagawa was, like Chuuya was. None of them were young anymore. Not in this world of false gods and fear that made them grow up too fast. 

“You know, I think it really might be,” The echo of Fyodor’s voice says in the back of his mind.

“You could say something helpful.” Dazai thinks loudly back, but the voice doesn’t say anything because even if it sounds like Fyodor, it’s just a figment of his own imagination, and he doesn’t know how he’s going to escape this.

He takes a step to the left, and then there's a ringing in his ears and a pain in his chest. ‘A shot’ , he mind fills in, ‘point blank range’ , he should have accounted for this.

Dazai Osamu is more than twice as old as he thought he’d live to, and the few hours separating twenty-nine and thirty seem increasingly small. He is bleeding out on the floor of a warehouse, and he doesn't need to be brilliant to know that the other Agency members won’t get here in time. He thinks about a conversation he’d had once with Fyodor— “Fedya, if we see thirty, I’ll be surprised. So kiss me, we have nothing to lose”. In the end, he’d been right, he supposes. He almost always was. 

Fyodor will be displeased. ‘I’m sorry, I tried.’. It seems like a lot of his thoughts regarding Fyodor included apologies. He’d been on his mind more in the last several months as Dazai grew closer to thirty.

He never thought he’d make it even this close. 

The warehouse is cold, and outside, there’s a thin layer of snow on the ground. It seems only fitting that he and Fyodor will both die with the snow falling. 

O’Hara and Salinger have both left, and it leaves Dazai alone in the warehouse, coat slowly soaking through with blood. It hurts, but not as much as it could or should, probably shock, at least it won't take long. Small mercies. 

The room starts to lighten, and Dazai knows that it’s far, far too early for dawn. In front of him, a silhouette starts to take shape, and then he sees Fyodor. He looks like he had when they met, nineteen, and not yet exhausted, not yet a God, not yet a great threat to the world. Dazai thinks it might have been when he was happiest, at least as happy as he’d ever been after his mother’s death.

“You know, I've always thought you’d die like this.” he says, and steps closer to Dazai. 

Dazai lets out a pained laugh, his breath creating a small cloud in front of him for a second before dissipating. “Seeing ghosts and bleeding out?”

“Hubris.” Fyodor corrects, and crosses his arms over his chest; the motion is stiff, but almost languid and graceful in a way that Fyodor had never been in life. The thought makes Dazai grin. Only Fyodor would do better in death than life. It’s this version of Fydor Dazai remembers best, the one that had never been afraid of him, or made of delicately minced words. 

“Really? I figured I’d have found some way out before this.” He says, and it's only half a joke. He doesn't remember the first time he tried to kill himself, eventually they’d all faded together until only a few memorable ones remained unblurred. There was when he met Atsushi of course, and the next morning in the oil drum, and then there's been the more serious ones, like when he was 15, and only half dead on Mori’s floor from a failed overdose. 

“You always thought you were the smartest person in the room. Did you really never meet someone else who understood?”

Dazai shrugs as best as he can. “Two of a kind Fedya, no one was ever like you.” There'd been ones he thought could be of course, challenges that had made him think, organizations that had been more difficult to dispose of, but never once had there been another Fyodor, another person who got under his skin and made a game of their own creation. Fyodor had been special in that way.

They lapse into silence, as the glow around them gets a little brighter. It all seems a little cliche, but who is he to disparage the dramatics, especially now. It wasn’t like his death would come with anything more exciting. Mostly, he just hopes that this doesn't last much longer, otherwise he’ll have to accept that he was wrong, and he had made it to thirty after all.

“You’re early.” Fyodor says, and it’s enough to make Dazai laugh.

“Fedya, have you ever known me to be wrong?” Dazai says lightly, even as he presses a hand to the bleeding wound. “I said before thirty, and it’s nearly there now.” Pulling his fingers away, damp with his blood, Dazai frowns. 

“I’ve been waiting.” Fyodor says, stepping closer, and Dazai can see a few more details a little further in front of the light. The soft way his hair falls over his eyes, and the gloves that he’d gotten rid of by the time he’d arrived in Japan. Relics of a past they shared, vestiges of the person he used to be.

“I do hope not for me.”

“Who else?” For a minute, Dazai wonders how death feels. After a lifetime of searching for it, he’s not afraid of it, not really. Wary yes, but he’s been tired in parts of his soul as long as he could remember. His hands are covered in blood, some of it his, some of it other peoples, and if he’s very, very honest, the idea of an eternal sleep sounds peaceful. Yokohama will survive.

“I always thought you were smart enough not to wait for Godot,” Dazai says. They’d seen a performance of it before, and he thinks that Fyodor will appreciate the reference. “he never arrives you know.” Fyodor had said to him to cast himself as the saviour, as the man who killed a God, perhaps it was only fair in the end to meet him again beyond the world of men. 

“More like waiting for the train.” 

“You mean to say I’m not Godot?” Dazai says with faux innocence and a tilt of his head. 

“Hardly.” The reply is dry, and leaves no room for doubt. 

The circle of light grows to eclipse the room they’re in. He’s not quite dead yet, if he had to guess, he can still feel the slight chill on his skin, and the sharp pain from the wound. Several more minutes and Fyodor will be right.

“Twenty-nine is too young to die.” Fyodor says, and comes to stand beside Dazai, who’s looking up at him. 

“Old enough. You were even younger.”

Dazai lets himself go limp, the pain from the wound vanishing. His heart has stopped, he figures, he thought it would hurt more than this. 

And then Fyodor kneels down beside him with the look of a man who’s been expecting this, and there are hands on his chest, and the compressions of CPR. One, two, three, one, two, three, one, two, three. The light recedes around the edges, and his head rushes.

“Twenty none is too young to die, but thirty is old enough, lyubimyy.” Fyodor says, and Dazai, dead and resuscitated by a ghost for a final, petty victory, laughs. 

This time, when Fyodor stands, he offers him a hand. “Can you not bear me winning?” Dazai questions, and takes the offered hand. He stands up with none of the expected pain.

He looks at their joined hands, and up at Fyodor. “You are a study in contradictions Fedya. You kill those you touch, and now that you’re dead, you bring me back to life.” Not for long, but then again, he and Fyodor both knew the power of seconds. It didn't have to be long, just enough for Dazai Osamu to live to see midnight.

Fyodor looks at him with a fond expression, and doesn’t let go of his hand. Sentimental, part of Dazai thinks, but they’re dead, and it no longer matters. Perhaps it is, or perhaps it’s just like everything else between the two of them, twisted games of affection, and love, and hate. A lie— they never hated each other, they’d been too similar, too achingly comfortable around each other. It would have been easier if they had hated each other. 

“I have waited for years— what are a few extra minutes in order to prove you wrong?”

“Not quite, Fedya. I did die.” And neither of them were thirty. And now he is thirty, in some nebulous seconds past, barely skirting the line way. Dazai Osamu doesn’t die in someone’s arms or the snow. His blood is red, and he is human. Maybe that is the biggest surprise. Dazai Osamu dies, and he’s simultaneously right and wrong. It is, perhaps, the only way for this story to end for them.

The warehouse vanishes in the light but neither of them are paying attention. “You did, you did. Contrary to the last.”

“You don’t get the credit for that realization, Fedya.” Dazai says, and presses a teasing kiss to Fyodor’s cheek. There is something warm in his chest, and it fills the hole that had been gnawing on tendons for years that he hadn’t realized had existed. He thinks he might call it love, but that would require an acknowledgement of what had been between them, but staring at Fyodor in the light of a place between things, and he thinks that maybe, that’s what it’s alway been.

“Maybe not lyubimyy, but we’ve won again.”

“Everything but our names in history.”

Fyodor hums, and his expression squints into consideration for a few seconds. “They never would have understood.”

Dazai nods, and he turns to look into the featureless glow around them. “They never saw what we did.”

“Blindness must be a gift sometimes, lyubimyy.” Fyodor looks at him through the corner of his eye, and they drift in silence for a handful of peaceful seconds.

“We should go.” Dazai says finally, and slips his hand into Fyodor’s pocket, like they were still walking along the Moskva river in winter. 

Outside a warehouse by the docks, the snow swirls in the orange light of the streetlamps.