Work Text:
“Your time is running out, Fedya,” Dazai took a long drag of his cigarette. His thin fingers were clasped elegantly around the silver cigarette holder and for a brief moment, clad in his all-white suit, he looked like the winter itself.
“And when it does, I will be there to relish your end.”
"You're saying as if the hands of time aren't already wringing your neck, my dear," Fyodor looked through the lonely window of their living room. The first snow of the year had fallen, and Naples never looked more beautiful.
"I'm not afraid of dying, love. There is no sweeter thought than simply perishing. But you are different than me. So tell me, does the fear of death gnaw your immortal soul?"
Fyodor simply sat down next to his husband, their blood-red couch effectively hiding all the sins that graced this very room.
Dazai was cheating on him. With the short red head thief, nonetheless. Ivan had seen them, walking around in pure sight, examing fruit at the marketplace.
Perhaps Dazai was never his in the same way Fyodor was never Dazai's.
They were joined in violence and depravity, but never love.
There was no place for love in the mafia. There were only intertwined histories that one could never escape.
He knew all that, and yet why did his heart beat faster when he thought about tonight's meeting with Nikolai at the clock tower? Nikolai was going to betray him. Everybody always did. Bratva, Dazai, his old gang.
Nikolai was no different. Long ago they meant everything to each other.
But even eternity of knowing one another meant nothing when one was faced with the endless cycle of violence, revenge, and pain.
Fyodor's past and future and present were painted red, and there was no escape.
Despite all this, Fyodor's heart truly ached for his old friend.
Dazai Osamu did love his husband, but he also loved himself. After Fyodor betrayed him and violently tore him off from his own family, a branch of Yakuza that had settled in Russia, there was no going back.
Dazai could not break this marriage, but his loyalties no longer laid with Fyodor.
They were beasts, promised to each other while standing in the blood and guts of their enemies, and yet Fyodor tried to tame them by moving to Naples, not even considering Dazai's feelings.
When the hour hand finally reaches twelve, Dazai would betray him, as he himself had already betrayed Dazai.
In meantime, Chuuya Nakahara proved to be a pleasant distraction. He was fire and passion and everything Fyodor was not and Dazai fell in love immediately.
He was a petty criminal, out to steal jewels and diamonds and everything people like Dazai wore completely apathetically.
He stole to feed the orphans, to make the ends meet, his violence was not simply for the sake of violence, and he was the breath of fresh air in Dazai's stale life.
It was absurd to think that Chuuya loved him back with the same intensity, but that was fine.
Dazai lived on borrowed time after all.