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It’s rather unusual for Chuuya to wake up to the sound of a piano.
It’s still dark outside. The only light source in he and Dazai’s shared bedroom is the moon, filtering through the large windows. It casts a blueish glow onto the bed, where Dazai should be.
Where Dazai isn’t.
It’s less unusual for Dazai to not be by his side during the earliest hours of the day. One, two, even three in the morning if Chuuya lets him push it. Dazai lives in a perpetual state of exhaustion, yet he never sleeps.
Chuuya knows why, of course. He’s been a witness to Dazai’s nightmares since they were teenagers. He used to wake up in the middle of the night, panic shooting through his veins while his partner thrashed and screamed until his throat was raw. Now, he’s more or less numb to it.
Numb to some parts of it, at least. Years later, the need to take away Dazai’s pain still lingers. Chuuya’s sure that it won’t ever go away.
But Chuuya hadn’t woken up to the yelling tonight. There were no pleas to make it stop, no choked sobs of pain. Which means that Dazai has yet to sleep tonight, and when Chuuya had walked into their bedroom to see his figure curled up on his side of the bed, breathing even, Dazai had been faking.
Chuuya shouldn’t be surprised, really. Feigning sleep was practically second nature to him after all of his years at the Port Mafia. He would remain awake for days on end, unbeknownst to anyone else. Lie through his teeth when asked about his sleeping patterns. But it’s very unlike him to do it now, when there’s no one around but Chuuya, who he loves. Who he trusts .
Chuuya pulls himself out of bed, spares a glance at the stars through the window, and heads towards the sounds of the piano.
Chuuya remembers when they had first moved into this apartment together, when Dazai had seen the size of their living room and gasped with delight, when he’d pulled on the sleeve of Chuuya’s sweater and exclaimed, “We could fit a piano in here!”
And they could. To be fair, with the money Chuuya had, they’d moved into less of an apartment and more of a penthouse. They’d had a seemingly infinite amount of space to fill. So they filled it. They built a home.
They moved in couches, and a coffee table, and a chair and a television, and all the while Dazai whined and complained about the lack of a piano within their items of furniture. Chuuya insisted it would come soon.
He had lied. There was no piano in their home until about a year later, when Chuuya hit the jackpot. A stunning white grand piano, and just in time for Christmas. He’d bought it and had it moved into their apartment for Christmas Day, and Dazai had just about fainted at the sight of it.
So there it sits, Dazai’s beautiful grand piano, placed in the far corner of their living room. A few potted plants reside on top of it, all fake at Dazai’s insistence to keep any real dirt and leaves away from his piano.
And there it is now, Dazai’s piano. Chuuya stands in the doorframe that separates their hallway and their living room, leaning against it and watching. Dazai is on the bench, donning a white t-shirt and sweatpants, bandages discarded. Chuuya can see the scars that line his arms, can recount exactly what event led to which one.
The deepest one, just near his shoulder, skin still tender looking despite the injury being years old. A knife is thrown at Dazai when they’re sixteen. It cuts all the way through his arm and pins him to a wall. The longest one that snakes down and around his upper arm. Torture from an enemy when they were seventeen. Chuuya finds Dazai bleeding out and whispering his name like a prayer that would save him.
The ones he hates the most are the countless white dots on both of his arms. Simple, small, circular. Like stars. Sick and twisted stars, the kind that make Chuuya want to drive Port Mafia headquarters into the ground. Because as loyal as he is to his job, to his friends , there’s a name that rings out through his head when he sees those scars. Mori . Mori’s shots. Mori’s pain. Dazai’s suffering.
They’re hardly visible now, though. They’re minuscule, and Dazai’s shirt sleeve covers most of them. The few that remain within Chuuya’s view are blanketed by the night, but Chuuya can still picture them in his mind. They still make him angry.
He’s pulled out of his thoughts when Dazai stops playing, the final chord of a song that Chuuya doesn’t know echoing through the room. Chuuya thinks, for a moment, that Dazai is finished playing, that maybe now he’ll come to bed, but Dazai picks up again and Chuuya recognizes the tune immediately.
Un Sospiro . A Sigh.
Chuuya remembers the day he first heard Dazai play it. He was sitting at the piano in a music shop they’d broken into after hours for their own entertainment. Chuuya was admiring their collection of electric guitars when Dazai had started playing.
It was calculated, and perfect, and hauntingly beautiful, but it lacked feeling. Chuuya had never heard Dazai play before. He’d wanted to know where Dazai had learned to play like that, but he’d refrained from asking. At best, Dazai’s answer would be vague. At worst, an outright lie. So he just sat and listened.
Chuuya knows now, of course, where Dazai learned to play. His parents had forced him into piano lessons when he was three, he’d told Chuuya one night. At first, Dazai had protested, but he’d ended up taking to it immediately. It was a distraction from his father, from humanity, from a world that could never understand the brilliant way in which his mind worked.
They never spoke about it after that. But Chuuya was always grateful to hear him play.
Tonight is unlike any other, though, and Chuuya is hyper aware of it all the very moment Un Sospiro begins. It’s raw in a way that it never was before, so full of emotion that it’s almost daunting to listen to. But Chuuya doesn’t leave. He stays rooted in place, watching quietly as Dazai’s fingers dance across the keys with a speed and desperation that was never there before.
The piece drags on, agonizingly so. Occasionally, when Dazai seems to slam the keys too hard, Chuuya wonders if he should step in, bring Dazai back to reality, take him to bed. But for Dazai, this seems almost therapeutic. So Chuuya relents every time.
When the song is over, the final chord rings out in the room, empty and longing and sad. A long silence follows. Dazai slumps against the piano, head in hands. Quiet. Unmoving.
Chuuya finally wills himself to move. He sits down on the bench next to Dazai without a word. Dazai does not acknowledge his presence. Chuuya’s okay with that.
The quiet drags on. Eventually, Chuuya pulls Dazai into his arms. Dazai makes no move to stop him, letting his head come to rest against Chuuya’s shoulder. Allowing Chuuya to wrap his arms around his waist.
“It was beautiful,” Chuuya whispers into Dazai’s hair, barely audible.
“You always say that,” Dazai argues back.
He feels Chuuya huff out a quiet laugh against him. “Because it’s always true,” he says, and the silence falls again. Chuuya won’t pry. He never does. If Dazai wants to tell him something, he’ll tell him. Chuuya knows this better than anyone.
Hesitantly, Dazai reaches for Chuuya’s hands, intertwining them with his own. “He died,” he breathes out, “Seven years ago today.”
Then the pieces fit together for Chuuya. No names need to be uttered. He already knows exactly who this is about. Oda Sakunosuke. “I know,” he says, and he doesn’t have to see Dazai’s face to know that the tears are ever-present. He’s always been a silent crier.
“I miss him,” Dazai continues, voice wavering only slightly, “I can still see his face, sometimes. When he told me to save people. And sometimes I still feel his blood. On my hands.”
“I know,” Chuuya says again, because he does know. He sees it through empty eyes in the middle of the night, through washing hands until they’re red and raw, through the stares at the Bar Lupin sign every time they pass the alleyway.
Chuuya didn’t know Oda very well. He was nameless when his death was first announced, just a low level Port Mafia grunt, and he looks back on that moment and thinks about how fucked up it all was. How Oda was so easily replaceable to Mori, but so very irreplaceable to Dazai. He knows what Oda was to his partner, even if Dazai’s never uttered the words aloud.
Family .
Dazai looked up to him, followed his lead. Oda took his eccentrics in stride. He calmly listened to his ranting, his infodumping, every new hyperfixation. He fell so easily into the role of an older brother, and Chuuya knows that when he died, a part of Dazai died with him.
“Sometimes,” Dazai continues, “I think maybe it’ll get easier. Living without him. But it still hurts.”
Chuuya nods slowly. “It does hurt,” he agrees quietly. A few images flash through his mind. A billiards bar. Champagne. A game of pool. A motorcycle. Half of a body. That’s the Albatross I know. You should be proud.
Brothers of his own, who came and went.
“He never heard me play.”
Somehow, this is what makes Chuuya’s heart squeeze the most. Dazai wasn’t the kind of person who wanted to show people the things he’d learned to play. Even now, he jokes that the piano in their living room is just for decoration, and that neither of them actually know how to play it.
There are only two people he’s ever wanted to play for. One of them is sitting on the piano bench with him, holding him close.
The other is dead.
“He would have loved it,” Chuuya assures him. He’s gotten to know Oda through the stories Dazai tells, and from what he’s heard, he knows that what he said is true.
Dazai nods in agreement. He’s playing absentmindedly with the ring on Chuuya’s finger, the one that he, too, wears. The one that symbolizes their love, their trust, their devotion.
Chuuya presses a barely-there kiss to the top of Dazai’s head and gently untangles his hands from Dazai’s own. “You want to come back to bed?”
Dazai chews at his bottom lip, a nervous tic that Chuuya’s learned to pick up on. “I don’t—,” he hesitates, voice growing quieter before he continues. “I don’t want to have nightmares. About what happened that day.”
Chuuya nods in understanding. “I know,” he offers for a third time, and the rest of his sentence remains unsaid. I’d take them away for you if I could. If you could give them to me, I’d endure them all.
“I’m sorry,” Dazai whispers.
“Osamu. You have nothing to apologize for.”
Dazai doesn’t resemble the person one sees in everyday life, the eccentric Osamu Dazai, always with a skip in his step, always with a smile plastered on his face. Right now, in the dim light of the moon, he is a broken man. And as much as Chuuya would like to put him back together, he knows that he can’t. Some wounds can simply never be healed.
But eventually, they can start to hurt less. And that is what Chuuya promises Dazai while he waits patiently for Dazai to agree to come back to bed. It’s what he swears to promise when Dazai inevitably wakes up tonight, trembling and crying. It’s what he’s going to promise each morning and each evening from now on.
Because no, Nakahara Chuuya will never be able to fix what Oda left behind. But he swears to take some of the pain, to make it hurt a little less each day. Because he loves Osamu Dazai, dammit.
And for the man who sits before him now on the piano bench, the one he met at fifteen, the one he grew with, matured with, the one he trusts more than anyone else, he’d give everything.
His heart.
His soul.
The world.