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Chuuya’s apartment is in a state of mild disarray. An empty bottle of wine sits discarded at one end of the dining table. Another, this one a sake bottle, has rolled underneath the couch. Wine and shot glasses alike litter the coffee table, all empty aside from a pretty crystalline whiskey cup.
The gold liquid inside it sloshes when long, graceful fingers reach out to wrap around the glass. The man they belong to, tall and thin as a blade and wrapped in bandages like some fragile artefact from a lost era, lifts the drink lazily to his lips and takes a gulp, not even shifting from his sprawl across the expensive leather couch he occupies.
“Admit it,” he says around the burn of liquor flaring in his throat. “I’m just better at Mario Kart than you, Chuuya.”
“Dumbass bastard,” shoots back at him immediately. “You literally didn’t even win the majority of our games.”
“You can think whatever you want,” Dazai sing-songs, shamelessly ignoring facts.
Chuuya is facedown on the kitchen table. Like Dazai, he’s out of his usual formalwear and is instead swathed in a pair of sweatpants and a hoodie that is at least a size too large on him. Dazai is dressed much the same, an oversized sweater hanging off his bony shoulders.
“Chuuya,” he says. It sounds all garbled up.
Chuuya doesn’t move. “Mmm.”
“Chuuya,” Dazai tries again. “You’re being uninteresting.”
“Fuck you,” Chuuya mumbles into mahogany.
Dazai’s getting bored. He’s drunk, though not as far gone as Chuuya, and he stopped having fun whenever they decided they were done screaming at each other over video games. Slowly, he drags himself up into a sitting position and then to his feet. The room spins, but that stopped being an obstacle for him years ago. He keeps making towards his (now-drooling) partner.
“Slug,” he accuses. “Uninteresting, lazy slug.”
“Shitty mackerel,” Chuuya shoots back instantly, probably on instinct.
Dazai gets close enough to touch him, finally. He reaches down and jabs Chuuya in the ribs. Chuuya jerks so hard he smacks his forehead on the table.
“Move, slug,” Dazai demands.
He watches the focus bleed back into Chuuya’s bleary eyes.
“Why’d you do that?”
“Wanted to,” says Dazai, and then pokes him again.
“Stop that,” Chuuya barks.
“What if I, for instance, do not?” Dazai needles, jabbing repeatedly now.
And then Chuuya snarls and is suddenly out of his seat with his hands sliding in Dazai shirtfront, like he can’t quite get a good enough grip to shake the infuriating mummy until his bones rattle but would very much like to.
Then he wobbles and kicks the back of one of his own feet.
“Fuck –” he manages, before he trips in earnest, flinging Dazai away from him with his own unintentional momentum. His knees clack as they hit the floor and Dazai slams into something very uncomfortable.
And suddenly classical music is wafting through the room and Dazai realises he’s been thrown into a radio. He must have managed to hit the on switch accidentally. Also, Chuuya is glowering at him from the floor. Just to rub it in, Dazai starts shuffling about and swaying his arms in time with the music.
“This is a waltz, no?” he muses.
“Hope you aren’t referring to your shitty dancing, there,” Chuuya grumbles as he picks himself back up off the floor.
“I don’t really know how to dance,” Dazai admits. “I suppose that wasn’t something required of me.”
Instead he ended up with deft fingers, the shape of a tool in his hands, and feet only as neat as they would ever need to be to keep him alive.
“I learnt,” Chuuya says. “Kouyou considered it important.”
“That doesn’t surprise me. Always one for elegance, our Kouyou.”
Chuuya walks up to him. Dazai keeps swaying absently to the melody.
“Going to dance with me, Chuuya?” he says, low and velvety.
“Maybe,” answers Chuuya. “I could just as easily kick you from this distance.”
Dazai isn’t sure what point he’s trying to make, but it doesn’t matter much because hands are sliding around his waist, up his sides.
“Wait, no,” he protests. “No, no, no, absolutely not.”
“Dazai,” Chuuya growls. “For once in your fucking life, let me lead.”
Dazai looks at him. There’s a tinge of raspberry under his skin, glowing on the high points of his face. His eyes are wild and stubborn and bits of hair float around his face like threads of molten gold in the low light.
“Fine,” Dazai finds himself breathing.
Chuuya curls a hand, gloveless and burning hot through layers of cloth, on his hip. He uses the other to cradle Dazai’s right hand, so gentle he feels he might shatter from how sweet it is, and raises their clasped hands up to shoulder height. Dazai lets his free hand drop onto Chuuya’s shoulder.
“You don’t have to follow me,” he murmurs. “You know how I move. Match me.”
It’s an acceptance of some of that thorny meaningfulness between them as much as it is a challenge, and if that doesn’t prickle down Dazai’s spine in all the right ways...
He turns liquid and lets go as the current starts pushing.
Chuuya steps forward. Dazai knows him well enough that he feels it in his shoulder and his leg is moving back to accomodate his partner almost instantaneously. There it is, then; no matter what happens between them, this trust – the stupid, unreasonably sturdy rope lashing both of them together – is not so easily broken. Despite everything, something of each of them will always be so unfathomably known to the other.
Chuuya is like a magnet like this. As much as Dazai can match his steps, and as much as that natural catlike grace of his lets him keep up with his partner, the way Chuuya moves is still so starkly different. His body flows with the surety of hours upon hours of practice, fluid but solid, liquid steel against Dazai’s frame. It’s so much like the way he fights, and Dazai – though he wouldn’t admit it even under pains of death – has always been entranced by the sight of Chuuya fighting.
They finish the waltz much closer to each other than when they began. Chuuya drops his head so that his forehead rests against Dazai’s collarbone and his breath ghosts in fleeting warmth down the other’s chest. Dazai allows his own to lower, cheek coming to fit against soft hair. Chuuya is still around his waist, comfortable atop his hip, and Dazai is still about his shoulders, their free hands still clasped but now shifted to fit between warm chests. They are both drunk and dizzy and will never speak of this when it is over, but the haze of alcohol allows for this to last a few minutes more, standing close and listening to each other breathe even as the next song begins filling the room.