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"It's difficult to know what to do with so much happiness
With sadness there is always something to rub against
A wound to tend with lotion and cloth
When the world falls around you, you have pieces to pick up
Something to hold in your hands like ticket stubs or change..."
Chuuya's touch was gentle.
His fingers slid through his messy hair, tracing the sharp curve of his jaw, dancing across the soft flesh of his cheeks with immense delicacy. The touches were fairy kisses on the skin, they were little prayers that painted the dermis in messages that only they understood. They lay curled around each other, an empty wine bottle somewhere on the bedroom floor and a silent but endless night stretching over them and Chuuya had the time and patience of the whole world to memorize it under his fingerprints.
Dazai had always loved –and hated- Chuuya's hands on his body when they were doing something other than hurting, when the fire that raced through his nerves didn't spark with pain, when the gentle caresses didn't paint screams but:
"Stay here."
"Do not go away."
"I love you" "I love you" "I love you" "I love you"
Over and over, without fail or hesitation, a promise of safety, a quiet haven, a place to return, a space where Dazai's cells could fit perfectly into Chuuya's and rest and stop marching soldier, stop marching.
Dazai once read about trauma, not in the mildly interested way someone walks past a bookstore and oops! he bumps into the principles of the human psyche and decides it's a good read like any other, not in the way of passing interest.
Dazai once read about trauma the way an unloved child compulsively reads about gentle parenting, parental love, and secure parenting: Allowing yourself to hurt, allowing yourself to feel sorry for you in the way no one else could, eternally mourning the person who had died when he was born, the person he almost could have been.
Dazai found that traumas were curious things, especially those that happened during childhood, when the brain is very young and still developing. This particular type of trauma remained forever, sticking underneath the neurons and turning the perception of reality upside down, making the dangerous sound comfortable and the safe seem dangerous.
And maybe, maybe, that was why the man felt so loved as a teenager, when Chuuya punched him between the lips, leaving his teeth stained with blood, because this, this, this sounded like love: Gutting someone open and taking by force what you want from them until there's nothing left but an empty, withered carcass. Loving someone until the person dries up. To love someone until they died. Loving someone so much they killed themself.
Maybe, maybe, that was why when Chuuya was gentle, when he was loving, when he leaned in and kissed his bruises, his ugly parts, his disgusting things and muttered that oh god he was perfect, Dazai was always scared. Always shuddered, always coiled in tension, because why was love without pain?
What was love without bruises? No bite marks? Without peeling your skin?
Was it really love if at the end of the night he was still whole?
Chuuya hugged him tightly and Dazai buried his face in the crook of his neck, feeling the warm contraction of the arms around him that would never squeeze him hard enough to break his ribs.
"Poor boy" Chuuya muttered softly close to his ear and Dazai shivered as if he had been burned "You desperately crave love, but you can't even take a bite without throwing up, can you?"
Dazai nodded, because it was true.
Love was an indigestible meal, equal happiness.
(Dazai, it would be good to point out now, had also read about trauma the way unloved children read about happy childhoods: because he wanted to heal).
*
“But happiness floats
It doesn't need you to hold it down
It doesn't need anything
Happiness lands on the roof of the next house, singing
And disappear when it wants to
You are happy either way
Even the fact that you once lived in peaceful tree house
And now live over a quarry of noise and dust
Cannot make you unhappy..."
Sometimes the ADA would get together so they could all have dinner. It happened every fortnight and it was no big deal.
Nothing too fancy or expensive, no incredible wines, no dress codes or the correct order of cutlery (always inside out, if in doubt).
It was always the same corner restaurant with the same slightly greasy menu and the same table that would have to creak if you rested your arms on it.
Dazai tried not to miss these small meetings.
(It doesn't mean he didn't miss occasionally, doesn't mean that the light often didn't blind his eyes, that there wasn't a dull discomfort in his chest, blood-and-gunpowder-scented reminder of exactly what always happened when he dared to think he could love something, when he had the audacity to want).
(But Dazai struggled, Dazai bet on the statistical impossibility of “this time will be different”, he trusted, he closed his eyes, he remembered (he remembered) how desperate he was for attention, even if he also despised it) .
"You are not going to heal a wound by building an altar around it, Osamu."
And he loved Chuuya so much, didn't he? He wanted Chuuya so much and the man was still there, right?
Dazai continued to bet on the impossible improbability because he himself was an impossible improbability. Because the entire Agency was one, because what were the chances that a bunch of pain-filled dysfunctionals would all end up squished together on a little table in a corner restaurant, talking under the yellow light of a half-burned lightbulb and finding something like home in each other?
Dazai tried hard, he tried not to miss, he tried not to think about what happened to dreams that were too long exposed to sunlight.
Dazai, however, did not beg fate or God or the Universe or Chance to be merciful to him or let him have just this little thing, just this smooth epilogue, a respite from the war lost, but well fought that he was. No, he was just content to bathe in the warm light, hot enough to burn, but he always tended to remember the heat more than the burn marks.
On those nights, the man hardly spoke.
He would just watch Kunikida complains about deadlines, Ranpo embarrasses the waiters with some inconvenient deduction, and Yosano gets a little drunk. The kids would laugh and Fukuzawa would give that kind little smile of his.
It was no big deal, but Dazai would always come home feeling drained and wasn't it ironic that he could be equally mutilated by both lack of love and love itself?
"I'll want one curry, very spicy, thank you."
Anyway, it was always worth it.
*
“Everything has a life of its own
It could wake up full of possibilities
Of coffee cake and ripe peaches
And love even the floor which needs to be swept,
The soiled linens and scratched records..."
He arrived early from work and Akutagawa was at the apartment door, waiting for Chuuya to hand him some reports. There was a cosmic joke there: If Dazai had arrived at his usual time or Chuuya hadn't been late, they wouldn't have met.
Akutagawa swallowed and looked away from him, and a part of Daazai ached because he was a boy.
(Dazai, at the time, had seen himself in the boy he found and treated him as kindly as he had been treated).
(At the time, he already knew it wasn't tenderness, but it seemed like the closest thing he was going to get and leave a body deprived of touch long enough and it'll willingly lean in even for a punch).
(At the time, Dazai knew that what he did to Akutagawa wasn't tenderness, but it felt like the closest thing he was able to produce).
"I should go away" Akutagawa muttered, not looking up "And come back tomorrow."
Dazai wanted to say: "I have confused your blood with mine."
He wanted to say: "I too was just a kid born of violence, holding back my tears, left in the dark for too long and no one ever picked me up, no one ever calmed my sobs."
He wanted to say: "I was only fluent in cruelty, that shouldn't be anyone's first tongue and I regret it being the only language I taught you."
He wanted to say: "I was just a kid too!"
He wanted to say, "I wish the world had been kinder to both of us."
He wanted to say: "In a softer world, I would have held you in my arms, I would have taken care of every scrape on your knee, I would have filled your soul with just butterfly flights and sunlight."
He wanted to say: "I'm so sorry, you were just a kid."
However, he said:
"No, you can go in and wait inside."
The man opened the door and Akutagawa followed him into the apartment, holding the documents to his chest.
There was a strange glint in his eyes as the path of their gazes met.
"You look better, Dazai-san"
It was too much.
"Atsushi-kun had someone who was to him like I was to you.” He looked deep into his eyes, not allowing escape. “When I die, I hope you don't cry for me.”
Akutagawa stared at him in complete silence for a moment, then smiled. It was small and sad.
"Dazai-san is in all my nightmares" he confided, his voice barely above a whisper "Dazai-san haunts me in every act, thought and sigh as if I were his personal graveyard."
The boy sighed with a shrug, crushed by too severe a weight.
“But what would be left of me without this ghost? The opposite of being "haunted by" seems very lonely”
"Loving me must be so fucking hard and I'm so fucking sorry."
Akutagawa nodded as if in agreement.
“But maybe, one day, Dazai-san is in my dreams too, as he is and not as the person he could have been. And then, when Dazai-san dies, I'll be able to cry for him.”
Akutagawa dropped the documents onto the coffee table in the room and eyed him with cutting mildness.
"Cry for him the way a son cries for his father."
Akutagawa left the apartment and Dazai laughed, laughed, laughed, laughed and when Chuuya got home, he found him laughing between sobs in the middle of the room, choking with an emotion he didn't even know what it was.
*
"Since there is no place large enough
To contain so much happiness
You shrug, you raise your hands and it flows out of you
Into everything you touch. You are not responsible.
You don't take credit, like the night sky doesn't take any credit
By the moon, but still holding it and sharing it
And in that way be known.”
-Naomi Shihab Nye
Dazai sat with Atsushi at the bar and ordered a whiskey with ice, watching Atsushi scramble to formulate his own order before dropping the first menu item that came to mind: A Martini.
The old bartender smiled indulgently and Dazai chuckled making the boy blush to his ears.
Dazai then leaned over and patiently explained: “You see, Atsushi-kun, “just” a martini is a drink for those who don't know how to drink because there are several ways to prepare one of these. It can be on rocks with ice, it can be dry, classic, dirty, it can have lemon zest or cinnamon, don't leave the poor bartender struggling with what you mean by “just a martini”... Oh? Do you want it with lemon? Yes, yes, ice?”.
In the end, there was a double shot of whiskey for Dazai and a Cosmopolitan Martini for Atsushi which got a smile from the older man because he used to drink his Martini like that too, before developing a tendency towards the bitter and stronger tastes.
Atsushi took a hesitant sip, disguised his grimace and smiled at him, a little flushed at the thought of drinking alcohol even though he wasn't of legal age.
Just a harmless teenage getaway under the watchful eyes of a guardian - an older and mentor - Dazai had forgotten that things could be like this, because it had never been like this for him.
It was bittersweet comfort to know that he could be the person he wished had been there for him, someone older, more experienced, a mother, a father, somebody in whom he could cry on the shoulder and trust the knowledge. Someone who had seen him grow and made sure he was doing it the right way, not missing important pieces along the way.
Dazai raised his hand and Atsushi fit beneath it without a second thought with blind, uninhibited confidence. The man stroked the soft hair affectionately and the boy chuckled appreciatively.
He was sharing a secret there, even though Atsushi didn't know that yet.
For the boy, that bar would always be painted with the rosy light of a first drink, the gentle affection of a caring mentor, and the sweet taste of youth mixed with olives.
For Atsushi, Lupin would forever be infected with simple, uncomplicated happiness, he would bleed his joy from every pore and contaminate other people with it.
If Dazai allowed himself to dream, perhaps in the far future, too far away for him to contemplate, that little bar would eventually become a meeting place only for happy memories, laughter and jokes.
No one to remember blood and betrayal and pain. All these demons silently dying with him.
And it felt so fair in the way the world rarely was.
"Dazai-san?”
"Yes, Atsushi-kun?"
"Can I try another one?" Atsushi put both palms together in prayer, his face reddened on his cheeks "Please?"
God.
Atsushi looked like the child Dazai had never been.
Dazai’s heart was uncomfortably heavy, but in a good way.
Maybe it was happiness.
"Just one more."