Work Text:
It all started as a joke.
Which is definitely a stupid and overused way to start telling a story. But Chuuya couldn’t find any other way to start the narrative, no matter how hard he tried. And he tried, he really did.
"I'm used to your stupid tricks, Osamu" Chuuya had said, Saturday morning made of sounds coming from the TV they had left on in the background, washing dishes that had been abandoned for way too long in the sink and dry, warm light soaking their living room.
Lying next to him, Dazai was all brown locks scattered over the pillow, eyelids lazily closed and a pout painted on his lips. It was already late, the two clock hands almost held each other at the top of the mechanic clock that hung in their room, but no one seemed to want to get up from the cozy blankets of their bed. Even if Chuuya was a morning person -God only knew how much he hated waking up later than ten- he allowed himself a little delay on his daily routine if it meant having the privilege of watching his boyfriend just be, a peaceful look that had only recently started to paint itself spreading all over his face. It was a new sight, a new creation he and he only could witness. He didn’t want to lose a single glimpse of it.
"You're not," Dazai replied, his eyebrows now in a frown.
"I am," he insisted. He let his hand reach for soft brown hair, tucking rebellious strands behind his boyfriend’s ear.
"No"
"Yes"
The man suddenly turned his face towards him, pressing his cheek against the palm of his hand “Bet?”
And he shouldn’t have agreed. Or at least, that’s what he thought as he, three weeks later, sat in the middle of a restaurant with all kinds of eyes pointed towards him, while Dazai kneeled painfully slowly in front of him, pulling out of his jacket a little red, velvet box. A little kid was grabbing his dad’s sleeve, pointing at them with curiosity in his little mind. A few people took out their phones, giggling from the excitement that was spreading like wildfire through the room.
And him? Chuuya hoped for the ground to split in half and let him fall for eternity into a pitch-black hole, or for the ceiling to give in and bury all of them alive. Everything to save him from the embarrassment he was heading towards without any sight of the brakes.
However, cursed his bad luck, none of the helplessly craved calamities happened. He just stared In silence, a killer smile that he knew way too well the intention behind, paired with brown eyes that promised nothing but trouble.
“Chuuya” he said, strawberry tree honey tainting his voice.
“Don’t even…” Chuuya hissed in a whisper.
In response he got a wider smile. “I’ve been thinking about this for a while…”
“Osamu please get up, you win.” He whispered with his hand covering his mouth in fake commotion, as all the people in the room were staring at them.
“Will you marry me?”
He said yes. He said yes and made sure to step painfully on his foot as the taller man stood up to kiss him, as all the stupid witnesses clapped their dirty hands at what probably the most entertaining thing they’d seen in the past weeks.
“I’m going to kill you” Chuuya grunted, watching Osamu sit back on his chair, the smile not leaving his face even when he kicked his leg under the table.
“I’d like to see you try.”
“Uh… excuse me” a voice interrupted them. It was a young girl, hair up in a ponytail and various colorful hair pins keeping her bangs still. She was wearing a black apron over a white shirt.
A waiter. Chuuya sighed. Maybe the restaurant had a “no-marriage proposal” policy he didn’t know about. “We’re sorry for causing…” he started, sending a stinging gaze to Osamu.
But the waiter interrupted him before he could continue any further. “Oh, there’s nothing to be sorry about! The manager sent me to say congratulations to both of you, and to inform you the meal is on the house! Enjoy yourselves” she said, greeted them with a bow and ran back to serving other customers.
Chuuya glanced at Dazai, ready to be greeted with an evil smirk. His chin was leaned on his thumbs, the rest of his finger covered his mouth in a pose Chuuya had seen him wear on many occasions, usually when facing a rather annoying paperwork for the agency.
But this time, there was no grimace painted on his lips and carefully hidden by slender fingers, nor the evil smirk he had bet he would have found. Osamu was smiling, and it was for real. It didn’t last for long, since he got back to his usual and unbothered, slightly sarcastic expression as soon as he met Chuuya’s eyes, but the redhead could’ve sworn it was there.
Osamu had a singular smile. If Chuuya was used, and irked, by his usually insolent and snarky facade, the one he pulled off every time he knew it would’ve annoyed him to death, he wasn’t so sure he could’ve gotten tired of him if he skipped the turn and for once let his guard down, playing the secret card of sincerity.
“You knew this would happen”
He stared at the table, the bottle of expensive wine Dazai had ordered despite his protests suddenly making sense, along with the stubbornness about choosing the place and ordering, which he usually didn’t care about.
“Of course. I wouldn’t have gone to such lengths for the sole purpose of bothering you. I could do that with way less effort.” He spoke. And he could have sounded convincing, if it wasn’t for the corner of his mouth, once again folded in a faint, lopsided smile.
Somehow, it became a habit. A stupid, probably illegal in some way, habit, but still a habit, that at the end of the night always got them laughing like little kids, to the point where once Chuuya almost drove both of them off the road. If it was Dazai the one getting down on his knee, he composed nauseating proposals that once ended up making multiple of the women sitting at the nearby tables tear up. Chuuya teared up too, but his tears were a titanic effort to hold back laughter, as he listened to his boyfriend spit out complete nonsense.
If it was Chuuya, he always managed to get his revenge, by formulating the most badly done and embarrassing confessions. Once, a lady interrupted them and politely asked Dazai to refuse, as “he deserved better”. Or at least that what she claimed after hearing his terrible proposals where he narrated his boyfriend’s most embarrassing -and completely made up- moments.
“You deserve better, huh?” Chuuya laughed, starting the red car that had driven them through empty roads on way too many nights.
“She was looking at you like she had just seen a demon rise straight out of hell”, they laughed.
Then, held by a traffic light, Dazai spoke again “I feel sorry for her.”
“Huh?”
“Not all that shimmers is gold, and i suppose it goes the other way too. Some people just fail to understand it”
The light turned green, and Chuuya stared at the thousands of reflections in his hair with question marks in his eyes. Little bump on his nose from breaking it one too many times, long eyelashes, three moles that formed a small triangle next to his ear, messy hair from the race they had, a spur of the moment that caught them as they got out of the restaurant. He had memorized every glimpse of his face, yet, just as he thought that he had him in the palm of his hand, he escaped, and once again he found himself not completely understanding whatever was going on behind his beloved hazel eyes.
“Was that a compliment?” he asked.
“The light is green,” Dazai answered.
Even after all those fake marriage proposals, which always guaranteed them free food -not bad for two broke college students-, Chuuya never actually thought about getting married.
Osamu never seemed to be the type for marriages. They made fun of newly wedded couples doing their wacky photoshoots in the park as they sat under blooming trees and cursed towards the textbooks that they kept in their hands. “They look so stupid” the taller man had said, with a yawn. Chuuya couldn’t help but agree, as the bride accidentally fell down the stone steps that lead to the riverside.
They had been living together for three years now, been together for five and known each other for seven, not without complications and chaotic ups and downs, but still seven years of which he now didn’t regret a single day. They even had a cat together. “You do not adopt a cat with someone you’re going to break up with,” or at least that’s what Dazai had said after a particularly rough argument they had the month before. But he never once mentioned marriage without quickly changing the topic to something extremely stupid, like the weather or one of his new suicide methods he had read in one of his books.
Chuuya didn’t mind. He found the calico cat lazily sleeping into his lap, a way better promise than a ring on their ring finger. Especially because Dazai insisted about adopting it.
He quietly reached for the blanket they kept on the couch and pulled it on himself, as the freezing January rain hit the windows, soaking them in water and cold afternoon light.
“Osamu, don’t forget to water the plants, or they’ll die like the last time” he called, hoping his boyfriend hadn’t fallen asleep for the third time in a day.
To his surprise, the answer quickly came from right behind him, making him almost drop his phone on the cat’s head.
“Already done”
“You piece of shit! Don’t scare me like that”
“Request denied. Could you get up?”
“Why?”
“Just get up,” Osamu said. He sounded impatient. Chuuya carefully lifted the calico cat from his lap and did what he was asked. A knot started tying in his throat.
“Is something wro- what are you doing?” the redhead asked. As he had gotten up, the other man had kneeled down in front of him. ‘Ah, so he just wanted to…’ he thought for an instant, but was forced to change his expectations as the man pulled out a little blue box from the pocket of his sweatpants. He felt his heart beating a little too loudly against his ear drums.
Dazai stayed silent, not answering his question yet posing another, quiet one.
“Is this a joke?” Chuuya demanded.
“If you want it to be”
“Don’t give me that nonsense!”
Silence. The rain kept downpouring against the window, his heart intensified the solo it was playing against his chest. The little box was open showing a simple, silver band, with subtle engravings of something that looked really similar to the camellias they had planted on their balcony. It was simple, but definitely not the old plastic ring stolen from Kouyou they had used for their many fake proposals. The taller man was silent, but what he was doing spoke for him.
“The ring is real,” Osamu said, but Chuuya couldn’t hear him anymore over the dull sounds of his own turmoil of thoughts. He grabbed him by the collar of his sweater and pulled him up, enough to get his face on the same level. Which meant a painful pose half standing up and half sitting mid-air for Dazai, but Chuuya decided he deserved it.
“Is it a no?” he heard his voice creak a little, a reinforced concrete building that creaked for the first time while facing neither a storm nor an explosion. Instead, it had found friends in the enemies, the big roots of time that had infiltrated into his bones when he wasn’t looking, and now they were tearing him apart from the inside, slowly and beautifully. Flowers would’ve one day bloomed all over the old but never forgotten ruins that once scared everyone away. People would’ve stopped and stared.
“Did you hit your head? Of fucking course not!” Chuuya said, almost a scream to overcome the roaring sound of his ears. And he kissed him.
He wondered what would’ve said his fifteen-year-old self, seeing him kiss the classmate he hated so much like it was the only thing he had been made for.
It took him a while for him to hear the sound of the rain against the windows.
Suddenly, something wet hit his face, right below his eyes. He pulled away.
“Are you crying?” he asked, like he couldn’t see the painfully obvious tears rolling down his boyfriend's cheeks.
“’m not,” he muttered. Dazai didn’t like crying. It took him three years to let a single tear shed out of hazel eyes in front of Chuuya, another two to let himself fully cry, another one to not avoid the redhead after it happened. However, this time his eyes weren’t overfilled with shame and the tone of his voice wasn’t sad, nor angry. His voice felt like a whisper of spring wind caressing Chuuya’s face.
And it always rains during spring.
“Shouldn’t I be the one crying?” Chuuya chuckled as he wiped away the tears with his thumb, just as new ones fell out of his eyes. Dazai tightened his arms around the shortest man's waist, pulling him closer.
“Since when do you like stereotypes so much?”
“Since you like weddings.”
“I still don’t like them” he whispered, “but I thought I could’ve made an… exception, I suppose.”
“He supposes” Chuuya remarked sarcastically, looking at the calico cat that was now staring at them with sharp yellow eyes from the back of the couch. As he could understand him, the cat meowed back.
“See, he agrees with me.”
And they stood in the middle of the living room, rocking softly each other’s arms like two idiots stuck in the first few seconds of a hug that now had been going on for way too long.
There would've been time to pull away, to wipe the last of the tears from Osamu’s face. Time to run to the phone and tell Kouyou the news, which meant that everyone would’ve known, from the librarian of their university to the cashier at their regular grocery store. Time to hear the thousands calls incoming, time to turn off their phones and go to sleep an hour earlier than usual, just to spend the night watch stupid movies that had been sitting in the dust for way too long.
There would’ve been time for summer to come, painting warmer tones in Dazai’s eyes and freckles all over Chuuya’s face, arms, shoulders. But now it was Winter, and Chuuya found the cold weather not so threatening anymore.
There was time for everything, Chuuya had learnt it. Or at least, for almost everything. He was sure there woul've never come a day where he would’ve stopped loving him.
Neither one where Dazai Osamu would’ve stopped surprising him. Losing didn't look so bad, for once.