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Even with this room’s burnt, bronze lighting it’s easy to tell when Akutagawa’s on the precipice of waking. His pulse stutters, stutters, stutters under Dazai’s fingers, gaining steady rhythm over the course of hours. When the sun begins cracking its lemon sunlight through the window, Dazai’s eyes are aching with thirty sleepless hours, and Akutagawa’s lashes are beginning to flutter open.
His eyes survey the room sluggishly, misted and gray as they slide from the broken wood chair to the rotted blood on the floorboards, taking in the skeleton of a bedroom. Like so many others, this apartment was hastily abandoned because of the whole vampire apocalypse thing.
God, Fyodor really has a taste. Vampire apocalypse.
How absurd. He wants to laugh
When Akutagawa finally registers his presence, Dazai sitting one leg over the other on the mattress beside him, book held in one hand, other on his neck, he freezes. Confusion. Tentative reliance.
“...Dazai...san?”
Dazai’s book closes with a sharp snap; tension knots in the line of Akutagawa’s shoulders. “Hey!”
“What...” Akutagawa struggles, words lisping, slurring. The muscles used for complex speech must not be responding properly, or simply unable to respond properly, rusty with disuse. “Where, where are...”
This is so fucking awkward. Dazai doesn’t want to be here. Five years ago, he would’ve just left him. Akutagawa is so painfully tense, and when Dazai removes his hand, watching Akutagawa struggle to sit up, to collect himself in Dazai’s presence, he doesn't know what to do with it.
‘Kind’ isn’t a word Dazai would assign Mori in a million years, nor ‘gentle,’ or ‘soft,’ but he was...lenient. More so than Dazai, at least. He never laid a hand on him.
“We’re in Venice, Italy,” Dazai says. “It’s currently October twenty second, five thirty two in the morning. You have a hairline fracture on your left shin, two broken ribs, and are low on blood. Your sister is safe.”
Voice steady but not flat. The cruelty Dazai inflicted on Akutagawa wasn’t entirely inherited, wasn’t even mostly inherited, not really. He should take responsibility for that, right? That’s what good people do, take responsibility.
“Italy?” Akutagawa says, incredulous, which is fair; last he knew, he was in Japan and Dazai was in France. “I—October? Was I trafficked?” A frown. “No….no, I died—”
“It’s a long story,” Dazai says. Pauses, then, “You don’t have to hear it from me.”
“Huh?” Akutagawa finally succeeds in sitting up, and his palm presses hard into the mattress, fingertips white, sheet denting. “Sorry I—I don’t,” his cheek indents; he’s biting it, “I don’t understand.”
Annoying.
It’s so easy to fall into old habits, with him. Four years without contact and first thing Dazai did, or, the first thing he did when they were alone, when Dazai was chained to a prisoner block pretending to be captured, was taunt him. My new subordinate is far more talented than you ever were.
There was purpose to that taunting, though. To set Akutagawa firmly against Atsushi, built a rivalry, protect the city. Manipulation, yes, but—
(old habits.)
“I mean,” Dazai says, and god, he doesn’t wanna deal with this, “Ugh. Here—” he digs through a pocket, feels denim against the inside of his knee, flicks the items to Akutagawa.
Akutagawa catches them. “These are?”
His face is smoothing over, voice steady, if hoarse; his shoulders are still giving him away.
“Your ticket back home,” Dazai explains, “kinda hard to find travel services that actually work right now, y’know! Those are my only tickets! Should bring you right to Yokohama port. You can speak rudimentary English by now, right?”
“Right,” Akutagawa says. Can’t quite bleed out the uncertainty. He’s so vulnerable like this, freshly human again, just barely coming into consciousness. Dazai hates it.
“So you can go, like,” Dazai gestures vaguely at the door, “whenever. The world’s a bit of a mess right now but, the decay of angels situation is solved.”
Something sparks across Akutagawa’s face. You’re going to leave me? Or, you want me to leave? This is so fucking annoying. Dazai wants to curl up in a closet and die and never deal with the consequences of his own actions ever again.
Akutagawa says, “What about you?”
“Do you think I’m incapable of arranging my own transportation?”
It’s not the right thing to say; Dazai knows this.
Akutagawa’s eyes widen, pupils dilate. His jaw sets. “No. That’s not what I meant.” Slight hesitation, then, “Does it matter?”
It’s a challenge, a manifestation of the fact that Akutagawa knows Dazai doesn’t have the right to say something like that in a tone like that, doesn’t have the right to punish, never did, not really, not in the way he did. He’s twenty, now. Not fourteen. Dazai deliberately triggered a backslide, all those months ago.
“Ahhhh,” Dazai says, “no it doesn’t. Don’t worry about it! I simply—” and when he raises his arm in this long, sweeping motion, all dramatics and playing-nonthreat—
Akutagawa flinches hard. One instant to the next, and his forearms are shielding his face, like Dazai was going to hit him. The sentence curdles sour on the back of his tongue.
A memory comes violent: the choke of that blonde-woman’s voice as it was cut by the impact of a slap, the distant clatter of her glasses against concrete, the harsh tone of Akutagawa’s voice, filtered through Dazai’s headset, You useless bitch. When Dazai arrived in that alley, he took care to note the red on that woman’s face, the crack in her glasses.
It’s so odd, to see victims of his own teenage self’s violence, who he had never touched, never known, never cared enough consider. Dazai is used to seeing his victims, but not unintentional ones. He saw it in Kyouka, too, the echoes of his own cruelty, handed down through Akutagawa.
“Sorry,” Akutagawa says, then snaps his jaw shut. Looks angry at himself for saying it at all.
Dazai runs through a hundred replies: no, it’s alright, or, no it’s whatever, or don’t worry about it. None of them play out right. Some are downright offensive, probably.
He settles on a shrug, a noncommittal hum.
Akutagawa eyes him, and there’s bitterness in it, anger clotting black. That resentment isn’t new, but the clear consideration and structure of it is. Child abuse isn’t...wrong solely because of the innate abuse of power, and the physical helplessness involved, it’s because children are terrible at situational and self analysis. At fourteen through sixteen and in the thick of it, Akutagawa was simply unable to fully understand what he was feeling, and what was being done, and why, and if it was necessary.
It wasn’t.
When a person changes their actions for the better, they become good. It’s simple in concept if harder in execution. A person is bad and then they’re not. Relationships aren’t so easy, and it’s so frustrating. He doesn’t care about forgiveness, but he should offer closure, right? Unless that’s selfish? Dazai likes tying things into clean, pretty endings. It should be Akutagawa’s right to decide, though, is that it?
From what he’s heard, Akutagawa stepped in the line of fire for Atsushi; Dazai’s job is done, mostly.
“You don’t have to see me ever again,” Dazai says, impulsive and nearly on a whim. And then, when Akutagawa looks likes he’s been slapped, that sudden look of fear and horror—“That’s not an ultimatum.”
A beat.
“It’s not?”
“It’s just a—” he very nearly sighs, “choice.”
“...Oh,” Akutagawa says, after a long while. “Thanks.”
He sounds incredibly suspicious. Honestly, that’s more than fair. He sounds, too, like he just doesn’t know what to do with it. Doesn’t know what to do with what Dazai is offering him.
Dazai doesn’t know either, really.
This hasn’t gone too bad, though. The lemony morning sunlight has spread across the floor, shining in from cracked glass windows, illuminating dust motes gold. There’s a sweet rot on Dazai’s tongue, and he is almost beginning to settle into this awkward, full-body misplacement. Maybe this is a start, or maybe it’s the start of an end; Dazai doesn’t mind, either way.