Archive of Our Own ^beta

“We should go on a date.”

That was what Nikolai decided, sat on a wheelie chair with his arms wrapped around a very-focused-on-writing Fyodor, chin propped on his shoulder (and, honestly, buzzing with ecstasy that he’d agreed to sit on his lap at all).

Dazai didn’t even look up from his phone. He had his feet kicked up on the arm of the sofa, scrolling aimlessly through Instagram—which, for some reason, had come to the conclusion that he was incredibly interested in baking, and continuously gave him recipes for various types of cakes. “Where? I think we’ve exhausted every place in the area.” A quick and easy recipe for chocolate cake caught his eye. He saved it. “Ice skating was pretty funny though. Maybe we should do that again.”

“Doing the same things again and again is boring,” said Nikolai, wrapping his arms tighter around Fyodor and digging his chin pointedly into his shoulder. “We should be more adventurous.”

“Find something fun for us to do if you’re so bothered,” Dazai said. (He saved a recipe for something called a pineapple upside down cake. Perpetuating the algorithm was a bad—yet addictive—habit.) “Fedya, darling, how do you feel about pineapples?”

“We’re not buying any. You’ll never eat them.”

“I didn’t even ask if we could.”

“Your tone of voice implied you wanted some. The answer is no.”

Woefully—think ignored puppy—Nikolai sighed, spinning the chair on its wheels. “Guys . . .” Unamused, Fyodor waited for the chair to complete its spin before gripping solidly onto the desk and dragging himself closer to continue typing at his novel. Distractions like this were just what he’d learned to live with. “You’re no fun.”

Neither of them responded.

It was only a couple hours later when Nikolai jumped into the living room with his phone screen held proudly out in front of him. “I found the perfect spot!”

“I can’t see it from here,” Dazai said. He was in a slightly more idea-receptive mood.

Rather unhelpfully, Nikolai zoomed in on the image he had up on his phone. “Here.”

Dazai squinted at what seemed to be a rather generic-looking cluster of trees. “That’s great, Kolya, but what you’re showing me is a blurry, nondescript picture of a forest.” There might have been a crow perched on one of the branches, actually.

“It’s got—squirrels,” Nikolai said, zooming in further as if he might actually find a squirrel hidden among the pixels of the tree leaves, “and some cool birds.”

“All of that can also be accessed by looking out of our living room window,” said Fyodor.

“It also has a river, with steppingstones.”

“There’s somewhere down the road with that.”

“Ice cream.”

“We have that in the freezer.”

“They have more flavours of ice cream than our freezer.”

Dazai had, by now, graciously lifted himself off the couch, beckoning Nikolai to pass him the phone. He scrolled further down the site. “A great walking spot for families with children . . .”

“We have Rodya . . .?”

At his name, the rat curled up on Fyodor’s chest stirred a little. Fyodor moved to give him an affectionate scratch between his ears. “I wouldn’t bring him to a place like that. It’d stress him out.”

“He’d get carried away by a bird,” Dazai muttered, and Nikolai muffled a laugh into his palm. Fyodor glared at the both of them murderously. “What? I’m just telling the truth.”

Rodya moved to hide in the crook of Fyodor’s neck. Dazai debated momentarily if perhaps he should lament that his boyfriend gave more affection to his pet rat than him, but decided not to dwell on it too much.

“A fun day out for the kids . . . that’s basically what they said before.”

“Well, that’s all it is, really, isn’t it?” Nikolai said.

“Apparently, they have a playground,” said Dazai. It did look quite fun, to be fair—Dazai temporarily ignored his own age to admire the swing sets and slides scattered throughout a large, fenced-off clearing. It was all colour-coded appropriately to the nature around it (which was, unfortunately, quite ruined by the obnoxious neon colours of the clothes the children on it were occupying. Children really did ruin most things.)

Nikolai snaked his arms around Dazai’s waist and peered over his shoulder at the screen. “I’d push you on the swing.”

“I’m not sure I’d fit in it.”

“Nonsense, you’re skinny as a magazine model,” Nikolai said, kissing a rather affronted Dazai on the cheek. “That’s a compliment, Osamu.”

Before Dazai could say anything, Fyodor spoke. “Let me have a look.”

Passing the phone to Fyodor almost felt like a plea to royalty. Nikolai was almost tempted to get down on his knees and present it to him on a gold-hemmed cushion or a silver platter or something, for the sake of winning his divine judgement on whether they were allowed to go on a woodland walk.

Thirty-odd seconds passed.

Fyodor became no more impressed as he scrolled through the site. It was just sort of . . . a normal forest. With birds, and squirrels, and an hour’s drive to get there that he would inevitably be behind the wheel for—because Nikolai had given up on getting a licence since getting blocked on iMessage by his driving instructor, and the idea of Dazai in the driver’s seat of anything above a plastic play-gym car was enough to give anyone nightmares.

But when he looked up at Nikolai, looking once again like a puppy left in a cardboard box at the side of a road in a convenient downpour, saying no sort of just felt overly mean. Fyodor was very mean, of course—but trapping a man overflowing with as much strange, excitable energy as Nikolai indoors all day was like locking a dog in a hot car. Or a rat in a cage. Or a kitten in a binbag.

“If we go on this walk . . .” Fyodor began, much to Nikolai’s energised whoop. “Will you leave me undisturbed during writing hours until I have finished the first draft of my novel?”

“It’s a deal!” Nikolai announced.

Dazai chuckled from the doorway.

“I spy with my little eye . . . something beginning with C.”

Dazai sighed. “Car?”

“Yes.”

Dazai stretched out his legs where they were tangled with Nikolai’s—they were lying across the back seats, seatbelts barely even across them in what was definitely safe car-riding practice, heads propped uncomfortably against the doors—and sighed again. Somehow, even as uncomfortable as he was, the sun had him feeling lethargic.

“I spy with my little eye . . .” began Nikolai.

“Wait, it’s my turn!” Dazai protested.

Nikolai huffed. “You were taking too long. Go on.”

“I spy with my little eye . . . something beginning with . . . uh . . . C. Again.”

“Car,” said Nikolai.

“No.”

“Cloud.”

Dazai sighed for the third time. “. . . Yeah.”

(Car journeys didn’t leave much room for I spy. Ironically, thought Dazai, that was where it seemed to be played the most.)

“I spy with my little eye . . .” Nikolai covered one eye—notably his good one?—with his hand, peering around exaggeratedly. “Something beginning with T.”

“Turnips,” Dazai blurted out.

Nikolai stared at him. Fyodor stared at him in spirit.

“What?” they both said.

Dazai grimaced. “Um . . . is it tree?”

“Yeah . . .”

“Okay . . .”

“Were you . . . thinking about turnips?”

“No . . . I don’t know why I said that . . .”

For a moment, there was silence.

“I spy with my . . . actually fairly normally sized eye . . .” Dazai drew invisible circles on the car seat in front of him. To the side of him, actually, with how he was lying—again, very safe vehicle protocol. “Something beginning with R.”

Before Nikolai could speak, Fyodor said, “Please, end this torture. We all know it’s going to be road.”

“What if it wasn’t? What if it was . . .” Dazai fumbled for any other thing in sight that began with R. “Fyodo‘r’ . . . Dostoyevsky,” he ended weakly.

Fyodor, who couldn’t turn to stare at him judgementally, did it through the rear-view mirror instead.

“Fine, it was road,” Dazai said.

“A service station! Can we get food?”

“Kolya, we’ve been in this car for thirty minutes.”

“And I’m hungry.”

Nikolai had sat up now, exhaling onto the glass of the car window and drawing little stick fingers into the fog it left. Unfortunately, they faded too quickly for him to actually admire any of his artistic prowess. Dazai had swivelled round to rest his head on Nikolai’s thighs, long legs extended over the seats. Like a sunbathing stick-bug or something.

 “Service station stuff costs like . . .” Dazai stared at the ceiling. “Fifty . . . uh . . .”

“. . . Years of hard labour to earn enough money for a bottle of water,” Fyodor completed.

Snickering, Dazai said, “Not too far off.”

“I’d do that,” Nikolai said, writing his name onto the window with his fingertip. “For food.”

“Fifty years for a bottle of water,” Dazai said. “For like, a sandwich, it would be . . .”

“To the bone,” Fyodor said.

“Mhm. Until you die,” Dazai said.

“I’d do that too.”

“For a service station sandwich?”

“Yep.”

“Instead of sitting in a car for thirty more minutes?”

“I would,” Nikolai said.

Dazai hummed. “For some reason, I don’t doubt you.”

Both of them watched silently as Fyodor drove past the service station.

The forest was actually quite pretty.

The trees were taller than they had looked on the site; towering and almost overwhelmingly painted in warm colours of orange and yellow, branches thin and outstretching. The path was well-worn and littered with pinecones. Pastel-coloured flowers flourished on bushes spread among the woodland, sometimes with little holes at the bottom where Dazai excitedly pointed out that foxes and rabbits must have passed through. The air was mild and pleasant, carrying the light scent of grass and nature. Sunrays snuck through the gaps in the leaves.

At the office they’d visited for a map—also the place where they’d all mutually agreed that the worker who had received them, a man with quite soft features and long, choppy hair, was very pretty, and had whispered among themselves about him for a bit—Dazai had picked up a wildlife-spotting leaflet and rented out a pair of binoculars.

“Spotted anything?” Nikolai asked, having watched him peer through the lens for a good few minutes (and almost tripping over a couple of the rocks on the path as he did so).

“A pigeon,” said Dazai.

Fyodor sniggered. “How riveting.”

Dazai, eyes still practically glued to his binoculars, swiped out an arm in the vague direction of where he thought Fyodor’s shoulder might be. Fyodor didn’t even have to move for him to miss.

“Two pigeons,” he said.

“Let me see,” Nikolai replied. Dazai reluctantly passed him the binoculars, and he took a brief look around all the wrong places before passing them back. “I can’t find them.”

“They’re pigeons. You’ve seen them before anyway,” Fyodor said.

“Not these ones.”

“They all look exactly the same.”

Suddenly, Dazai smiled peculiarly. “Why don’t you find something more interesting for us, then, Fedya?” he prompted, shoving the binoculars at Fyodor and folding his arms. “Since you’re so willing to be condescending.”

For a moment, Fyodor only stared at him, eyebrows raised—then, he said, “Okay,” putting the binoculars to his eyes and raising them to the trees.

He spotted the pigeons immediately. How Nikolai hadn’t, he didn’t know.

A crow flapped by. Boring.

Another few moments passed, Fyodor’s vision filled with closeups of mottled yellow leaves and pine needles. The only sound was the crunching of leaves under their shoes. Not quite quiet enough to hear a pin drop—mostly because it probably wouldn’t make much of a sound on the spongy mud—but quiet enough that the bubbling of the nearby river was clear to his ears.

Then, he spotted something. The little flecks of white on the wings of a pygmy woodpecker—high up on one of the trees.

“A woodpecker,” he said simply.

“What?” Nikolai exclaimed, grabbing the binoculars from him. “Where?”

Fyodor squinted at the tree. Lower down, its trunk seemed to have been afflicted with one of those typical carvings young lovers had the tendency to make—J + T, in a scrappily knifed heart. “The . . . tree with the bad sappy carvings on it. Higher up.”

“Oh—I see it, I see it!”

Stealing the binoculars from Nikolai, Dazai put them to his face. The bird was flitting about among the branches, pecking at the tree in little bursts. “How cute!”

After a few rambunctious exchanges of the binoculars, the bird flapped away, disappearing into the leaves. Nikolai stared at the empty branch it had perched on for a moment more before pocketing the binoculars.

Dazai pulled the—already crumpled—leaflet out of his pocket, pulling off the cap of his pen with his teeth before making ticks in a few of the boxes. Crow. Pigeon. Woodpecker. Tree. Pinecone.

“Tree?” Fyodor said incredulously.

“Yep.”

“They . . . put ‘tree’ . . . in a woodland spotting leaflet.”

“They did! I’ve spotted quite a lot of those, too.”

Abruptly, Nikolai started laughing. “They—look, look,” he said, pointing further down on the list. “They’ve got ‘person’ on there too.”

Dazai’s laughter joined his in the air. “I think they were running out of stuff.”

His pen hovered over the box for a moment. “Have I seen any people today?” He hummed performatively. “Oh—the guy back at the office.” He ticked it off with a satisfied smile.

Nikolai stared at him. “The only person you’ve seen today, of course.”

“I mean—are you two really people?” Dazai cackled when Nikolai shoved him in the shoulder.

“Squirrel . . . dog, for whatever reason . . . acorn . . .”

“These seem pretty easy.”

“That’s until you get to stuff like fox and badger,” Dazai said, frowning at the leaflet.

Nikolai peered over his shoulder. “Do they expect us to camp out here or something?”

“I bet some people do that.” Dazai’s frown widened. “Coin log?”

“When people hammer coins into fallen trees and stumps, I assume?” Fyodor suggested. “I’ve never quite understood the purpose . . .”

Humming, Nikolai said, “It looks cool?”

“Better reason than any.”

When the winding path finally tapered down towards the river—Dazai paused for a moment in the middle of a step to tick off, river, which was apparently on the list—Nikolai took one look at the steppingstones and made a beeline for them. Dazai scurried down after him.

Fyodor went for the bridge.

“Don’t slip and fall,” he warned, watching Nikolai tentatively try the first stone. “Or do. I can’t do anything about it.”

“You’ll be whisked away by the current if you fall,” Dazai said in a spooky tone, waving his arms ridiculously from where he perched on the banking.

Nikolai grinned back at him. “In ankle-deep water?”

“Maybe that’s an illusion and it’s actually, like, twenty metres deep.”

Once he’d stabilised himself on the first stone, Nikolai hopped onto the next. “That’s a wacky illusion.”

Fyodor leaned against the bridge, taking note of the damp coating of moss on one of the middle stones, and predicting wonderful results.

When Dazai followed behind, holding out his hand in the fashion of a Disney princess, Nikolai grinned and took it. It was arguably less stable like this, Dazai wobbling precariously for a moment and stepping onto the same stone as Nikolai to regain his leverage.

“You—bastard,” Nikolai laughed, almost jumping to the next.

Fyodor smiled. “Such awful balance.”

“Says the coward who isn’t even trying it,” Dazai retorted, yelping when Nikolai practically dragged him to the next stone. “Kolya—”

“I’d prefer to preserve my dignity,” Fyodor said.

“Because you know you’d lose it if you tried this,” Nikolai said, sticking his tongue out.

“I’d do fine. But my outfit might suffer from the river water . . .”

“Mine’s been good so far,” said Nikolai.

Then, he reached the mossy rock.

He was fine at first. Stepping onto it with a ginger slowness that his balance and pride thanked him for. He’d just about managed it—

Until Dazai spotted a frog.

“Oh! That’s on my list!” was all he heard, before Dazai suddenly crouched down on his stone with no mind for the fact he was yanking Nikolai down with him—and Nikolai, hardly able to adjust on a rock covered in wet fucking moss, ended up having to keep himself upright by shoving a foot down into the water.

That was probably the loudest either of them had heard Fyodor laugh in a while.

Nikolai suddenly wanted to hit someone.

“Sorry,” Dazai said sheepishly. He lifted his hand, showing the tiny frog he’d scooped up, river water dripping down his wrist. “Could you hold this while I tick it off my leaflet?”

“I hope you drop that leaflet in the fucking river.”

Dazai just grinned. “Sorry . . .”

“What were you saying earlier, Kolya?” Fyodor said, trying to keep back his laughter at least a little. “About—”

“Ugh,” was all Nikolai said, letting go of Dazai’s hand and hopping over the rest of the stones as if possessed by a gymnast. Fyodor crossed the rest of the bridge to meet him at the bank. “Ugghhh.”

“Are you alright, darling? You sound anguished.”

“Do you want me to wrestle you into the water?”

“I’d like to see you try,” Fyodor teased, skipping further up the bank.

Ominously, Nikolai moved towards him, hopping as if with a broken leg. Fyodor chuckled again and retreated back onto the bridge.

Dazai jumped his way across the rocks—really, he and Nikolai were quite adept at this when apart—and masterfully avoided Nikolai’s attempt to push him into the river before running up to Fyodor.

“Frog,” he said, presenting the frog perched on the edge of his finger.

Fyodor peered at the frog. It was only small: about the size of Dazai’s fingernail. “He’s quite sweet-looking.”

“He is,” Dazai chirped.

From where he was pouring water out of his shoe back into the river, Nikolai yelled, “Wanna come down here and set him free?”

“I think I’ll pass!” Dazai said brightly.

Winking at Fyodor, he took the stance of someone about to throw a frisbee before launching the frog up and away. They all watched it sail gracefully through the air for a moment before swan-diving into the water.

He dusted off his hands. “There we go. Back in its natural habitat.”

Nikolai blinked where he was tapping his shoe against a rock. “Are you supposed to do that?”

“I don’t know. I hope so.”

“It probably survived,” Fyodor said.

“Probably?”

“Nothing in life is certain.”

“How insightful!”

Realising he’d probably gotten as much of the water out of his shoe that he could manage, Nikolai dismally pulled it back on, cringing at the feeling. His sock was wet. His shoe was wet. The bottom of his trouser leg was wet. This was truly the lowest point he’d ever been at in life.

Soggy items of clothing aside, the playground was quite interesting.

Fyodor took up the role of a tired mother, crossing his legs on a bench at the side and turning his attention to his phone. Nikolai and Dazai went for the swings. (If you were to have told Nikolai that he was in the second half of his twenties, he probably would have reacted with genuine surprise.)

“I told you you’d fit on it,” Nikolai said as Dazai settled into it, slim hips slotting right between the chains suspending the seat.

Rolling his eyes, Dazai kicked off the ground. It had been a while since he’d gotten the chance to do this. His college self would have scoffed at it. “And are you sure you can manage it, Mr Thighs?”

“What a creative nickname!” Nikolai said, applauding condescendingly for a moment before hopping seamlessly into the swing next to Dazai’s and choosing pointedly to ignore the light dig of the chains on his skin. “I’m doing very well for myself here, actually.”

“Hope you’re having fun, kids!” came Fyodor’s condescending voice from the bench.

Very deliberately, Nikolai veered his swing to the side, clashing with Dazai and pulling an indignant squawk from him. Nikolai grinned. “Buckets of it!”

Dazai reached over, shoving him back and kicking at his shins, but ended up making another undignified noise and bringing his legs up to the swing when Nikolai rubbed the mud-sogged sole of his river-dipped shoe against Dazai’s trouser leg. Nikolai cackled at Dazai readjusting to crouch on the swing like a frog, wavering and rocking dangerously on it. “You bastard!”

“Maybe you shouldn’t have made me put my foot in the river!” Nikolai said, leaning back on the swing to propel himself forwards.

In a righteous enactment of revenge, Dazai leaned down to scoop up some of the wood chippings on the ground, throwing them straight at Nikolai. Nikolai made a sound that could only really be described as ‘ack’, followed by an outraged stream of Ukrainian swear words.

Dazai ducked to avoid Nikolai’s plait whipping him in the face as he shook off his makeshift confetti like a wet dog. “The river was an accident.”

Nikolai picked a piece of wood out of his hair and threw it at Dazai. “It was your fault.”

Dazai grinned.

When Nikolai leaned down to grab a handful of chippings himself, Dazai hopped quickly off the swing, escaping the spray of wood that tailed him a few metres across the playground before turning around to stick his tongue out—and, simultaneously, his middle finger up.

Nikolai leapt out of his seat on the next downswing to chase him to the fence.

“I’m dizzy.”

“You’re on a roundabout.”

“I know.”

“Then why complain?”

“I wasn’t. I was making a statement.”

Dazai narrowed his eyes at Nikolai. “You.”

Hair loosened around his face with the wind, Nikolai smiled. “What about me?”

“You’re a bastard,” Dazai sighed, gripping at the chipped paint on the metal handlebars as Fyodor spun the roundabout faster.

“Never,” Nikolai said, mock-affronted, letting go of his grip on the roundabout to stretch, before squawking and rushing to regain it when he was almost thrown off after a spin. Fyodor snickered. “Hey, don’t laugh!”

Fyodor was standing beside them, hardly paying attention to anything as he tapped away at his phone. “When are you two going to let go of your primary school days and own up to being adults?”

(On the next spin of the roundabout, Dazai very subtly dropped a handful of wood chippings into Fyodor’s coat pocket. Fyodor turned it inside out without looking up from his phone.)

“When are you going to let go of your teenage days, considering how glued to your phone you are?” Nikolai muttered, leaning up to swipe Fyodor’s phone from him. Fyodor stared at his empty palm with something like exhaustion. “Oh my god—he’s writing! Again! Again! That’s it. I’m deleting Microsoft Word from your phone.”

“You are absolutely not,” Fyodor said, plucking his phone back out of Nikolai’s hand.

He looked down at where he’d previously been tapering off a paragraph.

No man can live without some goal to aspire towards. If he loses his goal, his hope, the resultant anguish will frequently turn him into a monster. Fedya is a stupid idiot who’s only good for pushing roundabouts.

“Wow. I wonder what you added on,” Fyodor said flatly.

“You should keep it.”

“Of course.”

Nikolai took a bottle out of the backpack, sprayed water over the slide, and egged Dazai on.

Dazai did not go down the slide.

“Okay—so, basically, how it goes is, two cannibals—hey, don’t look at me like that.”

The seesaw creaked suspiciously as Dazai pushed off the ground. “Like what?”

Narrowing his eyes, Nikolai said, “Like you think I’m not funny.”

“Because you’re not.”

“If it weren’t for the length of this seesaw between us . . .”

Dazai sighed. “God, you’re so dramatic. Tell your joke.”

Nikolai huffed. “Two cannibals are eating a—hey! Stop laughing!”

“I thought you wanted me to find you funny!”

“I haven’t told the joke yet!”

Rolling his eyes performatively, Dazai kicked off the ground again. Each time the seesaw hit the floor, it bumped both of them uncomfortably. “Right. Go on.”

“Two cannibals are eating a clown . . .” Nikolai narrowed his eyes when Dazai sniggered. “If you have something to say, say it!”

“No, no. Go on.”

“. . . One of them turns to the other and says, ‘Does this taste funny to you?’”

Dazai inhaled deeply at the same time Fyodor exhaled exasperatedly.

“Come on. That was funny,” Nikolai said, watching as Dazai tried to hold back the laugh that threatened to escape him. “It’s alright. You can admit it.”

“It wasn’t funny,” Dazai said, closing his eyes to focus on his breathing.

A smile crept over Nikolai’s expression. “Look at me, then.”

Because he always had to prove a point, Dazai did open them—and as soon as he did, the stupid grin on Nikolai’s face made him snort, nearly falling off the seesaw. Nikolai broke out into victorious laughter. “That isn’t fair—you have to make me laugh with the joke, not your dumb face.”

“It still proves I’m funny.”

“It does not.”

“Sadly, Kolya darling, if you were to tell that joke in a stand-up performance, you’d probably get tomatoes thrown at you,” Fyodor said gravely where he was—once again—standing off to the side on his phone. (He’d been trying—and failing—to get some words down on his novel. Sadly, these two had been getting in a lot of practice recently at being potent distractions.)

Dazai, jumping on the opportunity to distract from his laughing at Nikolai’s frankly awful joke, perked up. “Say—Kolya, aren’t you a circus ringmaster? You should be able to entertain us!”

“There’s a difference between ringmaster and stand-up comedian,” Nikolai mused. His tone turned indignant. “And I just made you laugh!”

“Not enough . . .” Dazai said woefully. Then, he brightened up, hopping all of a sudden off his end of the seesaw and leaving Nikolai to yelp as his end dropped to the ground under his weight. “I know! You can do a balancing act on this seesaw!”

“I’m not an acrobat!”

“Maybe you should be!”

After Nikolai did not do the balancing act, they cleared out of the playground.

Maybe it was the time that had Fyodor so eager for them to leave, or maybe it was the mother with a pair of toddlers who gave Dazai a judgemental look when he grinned at her from the sandpit.

Dazai stretched himself out across the bench.

“Ice cream over there, pointless manor house that every place like this has over there, path to the car that way . . .” Fyodor pointed in various directions over the break area, fully aware of the fact that Dazai was sprawled out over a bench table and absolutely not listening, and simultaneously the fact that Nikolai was crouched down nearby looking at a beetle. “Are either of you listening?” he asked anyway—because saying listen usually just got the answer of I am, and yielded no positive change.

“Absolutely,” Dazai said.

“Uh-huh.” Nikolai said. “Hey, you know that one English rock band?”

Fyodor sighed. “Yes, the inspiration for their name probably was real beetles. Do you want ice cream?”

“Absolutely!” Nikolai said.

“Do they have bubblegum?” Dazai said.

Fyodor sighed again, suddenly getting déjà vu. “I don’t know, Osamu. I’m not clairvoyant.”

“There’s a sign for stuff next to the stand,” Nikolai said.

“What does it say?” asked Dazai.

Covering his worse eye with his hand, Nikolai squinted over the courtyard for a moment before saying, “I don’t know. It’s written in a very poorly chosen colour of chalk.”

“Get closer to it then.”

“Why don’t you?”

“I’m tired.”

“So am I!”

Fyodor didn’t wait to listen for another minute before sighing for a third time and starting off towards the stand.

Nikolai flounced after him. Dazai continued to lay lifelessly on the bench.

The ice cream stand did not have bubblegum. It did, however, have black coffee, baileys (labelled with 18+ for alcohol content), and a rather suspect-looking, relatively untouched green section with the label unhelpfully obscured from view by a glob of raspberry sorbet rolling over the laminate. The sign turned out to be the words, high quality ice cream!, written repeatedly on the blackboard.

Fyodor surveyed his options for a moment before weakly saying, “Vanilla. Please.” He eyed the brown bread flavour with high amounts of suspicion. “In a cup, preferably.”

Nikolai jabbed him sharply in the ribs. “Oh my God, Fedya, they have weed ice cream.”

“Is that your first thought when you see anything green?” Fyodor muttered back. Nikolai huffed. “I don’t think they’d sell that at a children’s walking place.”

The raspberry sorbet slid a little further down. Part of the label was revealed, and a nondescript leaf—was that a tree leaf?—came into view. The name of the flavour itself remained hidden.

Laughing, Nikolai said, “They’re trying to be subtle.”

“Anything else?” came the voice of the man at the stand, sliding the vanilla onto the glass for Fyodor to take. He looked as though he’d endured years of long suffering.

“Two of . . . that, please, on, um, that . . .” Nikolai said in his usual sparse Japanese, pointing to the mysterious green stuff and a sprinkle-covered cone in quick succession. The man raised his brows slightly before taking up the scoop. “And . . . um . . .” Nikolai turned to Fyodor, switching back to Russian. “Osamu likes chocolate, right?”

“He likes almond and pear more. I don’t think they have it here, though.”

“Nowhere ever has almond and pear. I think he might have hallucinated its existence or something.”

Fyodor turned back to the man. “Two scoops of chocolate on a . . . oh, he loves chocolate, why not . . . a chocolate cone . . .” he said flatly. “And chocolate sauce. And a chocolate flake.”

Staring bemusedly at him, Nikolai said, “What sort of monstrous concoction did you just ask for?”

“Something that’ll have him out cold in minutes.”

Nikolai cast a glance at where Dazai was flopped out over the bench. “I think he already is. You’re gonna kill him.”

Fyodor snickered.

The man already had the ice creams held out for them. “Anything else?”

For a moment, Nikolai thought—before he caught sight of the strawberry sauce at the back of the stand, and grinned. As sweetly as he could manage, he turned to Fyodor. “Fedya . . .”

Fyodor eyed him suspiciously.

“Could you ask him for every topping he has? I don’t think I can say it in Japanese.”

For a moment, Fyodor just stared at him, eyes flat. Then, he turned to the man running the stand, and said, “That’s all, thank you.”

From the sluggish manner in which Dazai sat himself up on the bench to receive his ice cream, one might have suspected he were rousing himself from a year-long coma.

“And you didn’t poison it?” he said, taking the cone from Fyodor with a dubious look in his eyes. “Scratch that . . . this amount of chocolate looks lethal anyway . . .”

Fyodor scoffed. “You’ve survived worse.”

Nikolai gave his ice cream a tender lick. He’d settled next to Dazai on the tabletop. “This doesn’t taste like cannabis at all.”

“That’s because it’s green tea,” Dazai said, without missing a beat. Fyodor laughed around the plastic spoon in his mouth.

Dead-eyed, Nikolai said, “You’re kidding me.”

“I would never.”

“You would . . .”

“But I’m not,” Dazai said, on the edge of a laugh. “Not this time.”

Nikolai groaned, and thought back to the leaf. “I hate that I believe you.” He licked at the ice cream again. “I don’t really care about the flavouring . . . I got it for the comedy aspect . . . but it’s embarrassing that you’re right . . .”

Remarkably, the ice cream didn’t even taste that bad. Just sort of plain. Nikolai had to wonder if it might have been nicer with a few toppings—he’d sworn very aggressively at Fyodor when he’d refused to get him any; if the man at the stand knew what he was saying, he didn’t lose the disturbingly blank look in his eyes when Nikolai called Fyodor a motherfucking bastard fucker in Russian—but it was . . . edible, even if it really tasted like nothing. He wondered philosophically if he should try drinking green tea more often.

“I doubt marijuana-flavoured ice cream would taste particularly good anyway,” Fyodor commented, watching as his mental case of a boyfriend started eating the cone from the bottom up.

“I’ve had candy floss of it before. Entirely fabricated flavouring, nothing actually in it.” Dazai scrunched his nose up at the memory. “Tasted like rotten grass . . .”

“Oh, so not too unrealistic,” said Fyodor.

“What does that stuff taste like?” asked Dazai.

Nikolai hummed. “Kind of like if someone got vanilla ice cream and put it in the same room as a mug of green tea for half an hour, then dyed it green and pretended it was flavoured.”

“Let me try some.”

Before Nikolai could respond with something dismissive, like, get your own, an idea invaded his mind. He grinned. “Sure,” he drawled, watching the fractional narrow of Dazai’s eyes before scooping up a little of the ice cream on his tongue and leaning towards him. “Come here, then.”

Despite the roll of his eyes, Dazai smiled and kissed him. He thought he heard Fyodor groan and mutter something in the background, but was quickly distracted by the jarring contrast between the cold of the ice cream and the warmth of Nikolai’s mouth. He allowed himself to indulge for a moment, teasing their tongues together until he thought Fyodor might hit him for being a public embarrassment.

He licked away the green tea ice cream, pulled away, wiped the spit off his lips and said, “It tastes like chocolate.”

“No, your mouth just already tastes like chocolate because that’s what you’ve been eating,” Nikolai muttered.

Dazai pulled the cone in Nikolai’s hand towards him, licking some off the top (and arguably rendering the kiss pointless). “Ok. Now it just tastes like nothing.”

“Exactly my point.”

Curious, Fyodor leaned forwards, taking a bite. Dazai and his sensitive teeth winced. “Tastes like . . .” He spent a moment in thought. “Vanilla, with a hint of . . . something.”

“Thank you for your insight. Please stop stealing my ice cream.”

“Lunch. Before we leave.”

In an attempt to get Dazai to express his thoughts in any way other than vague, one-word commands, Fyodor said, “What about it?”

“I want it,” Dazai said.

“This is why we should have gotten sandwiches at that service station,” Nikolai said, tapping his head. “I think of everything.”

“That was at 9AM,” replied Fyodor.

“Do they have sandwiches here?” Dazai said, sprawling out over the table and playing with the strands of Fyodor’s hair for no particular reason.

Fyodor sighed. “Do not mess up my hair.”

“Sandwich,” Dazai said. “Sandwich,” he said again, in Japanese. “Sandwich,” in English. He paused unsurely. “Sofa . . .” he said, in Polish. “No, wait . . . I think I pronounced that wrong . . .”

Resisting a smile, Fyodor just said, “It got the message across.”

“You missed one,” Nikolai said. “Sandwich.”

“I already did Russian.”

Nikolai huffed. “That was Ukrainian.”

Dazai stared at him with narrowed eyes. “That’s the—”

“Oh, would look at that,” Fyodor said, loudly and unashamedly cutting him off. He pointed to a sandwich stall across the yard. “Looks like they do sell . . .” He paused, then smiled. “Sofas.”

“Okay, I have to tell this joke in English,” Nikolai said, leaning against a dead birch tree. Mercifully, his shoe was finally dry.

Fyodor had designated Dazai the task of laying out the picnic blanket while he had the first bites of his turkey sandwich. The spot they’d picked was nice—an area that strayed a little from the walking path, the ground cloaked in leaves and pine needles. The river wasn’t audible from here; all that filled the air were the chirps of passing birds and the crunch of leaves under their shoes.

“How about you don’t bother telling it at all?” Dazai said sweetly, flopping down onto the picnic blanket with a sigh and unwrapping his sandwich. “Ah, I’ve barely eaten all day . . .”

Nikolai barrelled ahead. “Does anyone need an ark?”

“I don’t spend much time in the sea, personally,” said Fyodor.

“Sounds like a hassle,” said Dazai.

With a sigh, Nikolai just said, “I Noah guy.”

Eventually, they ended up in relative quiet. Nikolai was peaceful for once, head leaned on Fyodor’s shoulder as he attempted to watch birds through the binoculars—that all of them had finally remembered the existence of—and eat a cheese sandwich at the same time. Dazai was barely awake where he’d settled his head on Fyodor’s lap, food finished long ago.

“A squirrel,” Nikolai said absentmindedly, as a bushy-tailed squirrel skipped across a high branch on a nearby oak.

Fyodor smiled. “We’ve seen one of those already.”

“This is a different one.”

“How remarkable,” Dazai murmured, eyes closed. He refolded his legs for what felt like the fifteenth time. It was difficult to get comfortable on a picnic blanket that was laid over a bunch of fucking twigs. “How about you point out every crow you see, while you’re at it?”

Pinching a generous amount of grated cheese from his sandwich, Nikolai sprinkled it onto Dazai’s face. Dazai made a displeased noise and swiped it off before rolling over and snaking his arms around Fyodor’s hips.

Fyodor stroked a bit of Dazai’s hair behind his ear. “Tired?”

“I’m not built for going on walks,” he mumbled. “Not like this weirdo.” He reached in the vague direction of Nikolai, poking him in the chest for a moment before getting a hold of his plait and tugging it repeatedly like a church bell rope.

“Stop,” said Nikolai. Dazai pulled it again. “Fuck you.”

“I will admit that it has been somewhat refreshing to leave the house,” Fyodor said.

Nikolai sighed when Dazai let go of his plait and went back to clinging to Fyodor. “And as soon as we get home, you’ll go back to tapping mindlessly at your computer, I take it?”

“I wouldn’t say it’s mindless,” Fyodor muttered, somewhat indignantly.

“And you’ll inevitably hole yourself up away from the window in the process, too, I take it, my deathly pale sweetheart?” said Nikolai with a laugh, pecking Fyodor’s cheek. “Ah, skin white and cold as snow . . . I feel you could die at any minute . . .”

“That’s just my natural . . .” Fyodor trailed off. “Oh.”

“What is it?”

Fyodor stared intently down at the path. “A deer.”

As soon as he’d said it, Dazai sat bolt upright.

Traipsing the path further down the hill, there was a doe. She paused to look around herself, tail and ears twitching. The deer’s fur was sleek and mostly auburn, white sections spotted on her hind legs and the stump of her tail. She was scrawny—in that way most deer were.

Nikolai made an excited noise and brought the binoculars back up to his face. “Gorgeous . . . so elegant.”

Dazai reached over, prying the binoculars from Nikolai’s hands to get himself a better view. The deer brought her head down to nose at the leaves. He smiled.

It was only a moment later that a wood pigeon flapped across the path, startling her; she bounded off into the woods, tail flicking behind her, and Dazai lowered the binoculars.

“Did that make the trip worth it, then, Osamu?” Nikolai said, smiling softly.

From where he was pulling his rumpled leaflet from his pocket, Dazai just said, “Eh.” He ticked off deer. “It made it alright.”

Nikolai took the last of the turkey from Fyodor’s sandwich and laid it lovingly over Dazai’s forehead.

The drive home was quite easy with a quite tired Dazai content to sprawl across the back seat, having stolen Fyodor’s coat to cover his head with against the devastating offence of the sun in his eyes. Nikolai sat in the front seat and reclined it until it hit Dazai’s legs, then ignored his protests and fell asleep in an impressively short amount of time. Fyodor, grateful for the tinted windows to mostly obscure the inside of the car from view of any irritating police that might have been hanging around, turned on the classical radio station and immediately turned it back off again when he was greeted with a cheerful advertisement for an electric mop.

Typically, these types of trips weren’t Fyodor’s cup of tea. The house was sufficient for him. A computer for writing, entertainment in the form of Nikolai’s horrible jokes and Dazai’s habitual fridge-leaving-open, and his rat for company whenever the two of them were at work. If he had it his way, he’d never see the sun again.

Nevertheless . . . maybe this wasn’t so bad, once in a while.

Nikolai, barely awake, reached over, hand finding Fyodor’s thigh and poking it. “Fedya . . .”

“Hm?”

“Have you ever tried to eat a clock?”

Fyodor let out a sigh of long suffering.

Nikolai snickered. “It’s very time-consuming,” he said—and promptly fell back asleep.