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There’s blood seeping through his bandages and dripping in quick drops against the concrete, but Dazai barely registers it through the laughs spilling out his mouth. He’s running. They both are.
“Can you shut the fuck up?! This isn’t funny!” Chuuya whisper-shouts at him as they desperately move deeper into the back alleys of Yokohama. It takes Dazai nearly doubling over from the lack of air in his lungs for Chuuya to take hold of Dazai’s hand and drag him through the streets like some sort of shoujo manga heroine. Chuuya’s hand is warm, but the giddiness in Dazai’s chest is warmer. Slips through him like sunshine, and the smile makes his face ache. Their fingers are intertwined in a white-knuckled grip, like Chuuya thought the pressure behind it would crack the softness in the gesture into something less than it was.
They finally stop running. Find themselves in a thin alley behind some hole-in-the-wall restaurant that’s littered with trash bags and old graffiti.
A dingy little place.
Chuuya shoves him through the opening of it and blocks it with his body— or what little of it he can cover at least. Lookout, Chuuya calls himself. His head weaves frantically over the side of the wall to look for any trouble, but soon drops it to swivel back towards Dazai with a bewildered glare on his face.
“How are you still laughing?”
Dazai seals his mouth shut to try and contain the sound, but, from the looks of it, Chuuya only thinks it’s worse.
“It’s distracting,” Chuuya hisses out. “If you get us killed I’m going to murder you, again, in the afterlife. Mark my words.”
After another pointed look, Dazai makes a show of miming his mouth zipping shut and throwing away the key. Seems to appease him well enough, but when Chuuya pushes his head out the corner of the wall again, he rushes back and shoves them both further into the alley. Slightly uncoordinated, so they get tangled in one another. Not that Chuuya cares much at the moment from the frantic rise and fall of his chest.
The sound of heavy footsteps start making their way down the street, and Chuuya forces them flush against the wall. Looks down at the ground and squints his eyes like he’s trying desperately to make them both disappear.
But the footsteps go past, like Dazai knew they would, and after the man is out of hearing distance, Chuuya slumps against him. Boneless.
“That all seemed a bit overdramatic, did it not?” Dazai grins, all tease, mostly because the smile hasn’t been able to un-stick itself from his face.
Speaking of un-sticking, Chuuya finally pulls away from Dazai to rest against the other side of the narrow alley. It’s small, though. So tight their knees are inches apart even standing upright. If Dazai was thinking tactically, he’d know hiding in this place would be the worst case scenario for being ambushed, especially with their fighting style. However, Dazai isn’t. He’s not thinking much of anything at all besides how warm he feels. Summer night air is sinking through his bone and into his marrow. Feather light.
“Overdramatic?! That shit was fucking terrifying!”
It was a little baffling which things got to Chuuya and which ones didn’t. Dazai isn’t sure he’ll ever be able to decode his partner completely.
“That doesn’t even make the top ten for the most powerful abilities we’ve faced.”
“I don't really care what ranking you gave that damn power, it was freaky as shit! It could turn your skin into tentacles,” Chuuya emphasizes by jabbing a finger into his chest like Dazai wasn’t there to witness it firsthand. “Tentacles. How fucked up is that?”
Dazai’s smile grows.
“Pretty fucked up.”
The deadpan look he gets for his add-on could melt glass.
“See, you don’t get it,” Chuuya moves forward to grip his shirt angrily, bunching it in the front. Dazai thinks the excessive touching Chuuya does might be a product of a nervous habit. “You are literally immune to abilities. Even if I’m able to beat these people, it doesn’t make the powers less disturbing to live through.”
Dazai puts his hand over the one Chuuya has bunched in his shirt until he pulls it free and holds his wrist. Skin to skin. He tells himself it’s to make a point as they both feel corruption dissipating between them.
“Exactly, I’m able to neutralize any ability, so if you got hit with one I can just touch you— or them— and the problem goes away.” Dazai’s eyes go wide in a sarcastic kind of fake astonishment. “How crazy is that?”
Chuuya scoffs but doesn’t move away. Dazai lets their arms droop down and keeps the contact of their hands. Just feels more natural this way. There's a neon sign flickering just outside the opening to the space, and it’s flooding them both with red and blue. Dazai tries not to notice the way it reflects over the planes of Chuuya’s face.
“Yeah like I’d trust that. You’re a slimy bastard.” Chuuya uses his other hand to gesture vaguely at Dazai. “I can already see the stupidly amused face you’d do as you’d watch me suffer.”
It startled another laugh out of him.
“Don’t know what you mean.”
Gets a sneer for it. Not very sharp though, and Dazai’s scared to say Chuuya’s gone soft.
It might have something to do with the lack of gloves on his hands, lost somewhere deep in the heat of battle. It leaves the skin of it unguarded. Unprotected. But Chuuya doesn’t wear gloves to protect himself, but to protect everything else. Anyone else. Probably the reason he’d reached for Dazai in the first place was to eliminate the biggest threat in the area, himself. When he looks down at the bumps of Chuuya’s knuckles, it’s strange to think they once held black holes, but Chuuya always wielded duality like a knife. This would be no different.
“What’s so scary about tentacle skin anyway,” Dazai mumbles and unconsciously smoothes his thumb over the top of Chuuya’s hand. With the way his grin goes goopy, Dazai’s worried he’s the one who’s gone soft.
“It’s not about it being scary, it’s about it being gross. Just— think about any octopus dishes you’ve eaten.”
Dazai blinks.
“Like takoyaki?”
Chuuya purposefully kicks his foot, and Dazai squeezes his hand harder in retaliation.
“No, dumbass. Actual octopus. Raw with all the sucky, gross little things they have on their arms.”
Looking up at the sky between the narrow space of the cement walls, Dazai wonders how many stars are shining down on them through all that smog.
“I don’t have much of an opinion on them. I’ve always been rather agreeable with seafood in comparison to other things,” he answers honestly.
At this point in the argument, Chuuya is one hundred percent fed up with Dazai’s apathy and seethes a short, “I hope you get reincarnated into an octopus in your next life and get tragically eaten by someone as miserable as you.”
“And I hope you get reincarnated as that ability user’s little octopus pet. Watching forever in a glass tank as more and more people fall victim to the same fate as you,” Dazai smiles back.
“You’re evil, you know that?”
Dazai shrugs.
“I’ve been called worse.”
“Yeah. By me,” Chuuya deadpans.
“Are you finally admitting that I’m a victim of your constant slew of verbal abuse?”
Dazai moves his hand around Chuuya’s palm to interlock their fingers and waits to see the other boy’s reaction. Chuuya doesn’t seem to mind as he uses the new point of connection to pull himself further into his space, knees knocking against each other.
“When it’s against you, it’s fuckin’ self-defense. If anyone is the victim here, it’s me.”
That sunny feeling in his chest was only growing, nearly spilling out from between his teeth. It’s a relatively new emotion, and Dazai thinks there’s a chance it might swallow him whole. Euphoria covered in blood and dirt, but it’s his.
“I’m not the one shoving people into cramped, dark alleys.” Dazai leans closer and whispers, “It’s a little raunchy.”
Chuuya sputters and steps back to put space between them again, but with how narrow the alleyway is, space is relative.
“It’s not anything,” he spits, but it lacks venom. “You’re delusional and insane. Like usual.”
“Then why are we still here?”
The eyeroll Chuuya does is intense enough that Dazai fears they might roll right out of his head when he’s not looking, and a brief thought that Chuuya’s always breaking to pieces flashes out of his mind the second it arrives. Chuuya has survived this many years in one piece, he’s bound to survive a few years more.
“We’re here because I know that fish man and all his creepy friends are still hanging around in this area. I’m not gonna risk getting caught with how slow you are.”
“I’m not slow, you just have the ability to fly,” Dazai clarifies.
“Whatever. I’m not leaving yet.” There’s an unspoken part of that statement that reads And you aren’t either . The bonds forged from save-and-rescue produced a permanent sort of togetherness. Melded stuck. Nearly impossible to unstick without one side breaking off with more than the other.
Looking out to the mouth of the alley, Dazai deliberates for a second.
“Let’s play a game.”
The groan in response turns Dazai’s smile sharp.
“You’re making me debate whether tentacle skin is worth the risk,” Chuuya mutters.
Dazai clicks his tongue and kicks Chuuya’s leg, but the other boy doesn’t so much as blink. Wary but intrigued, most likely.
“I have to guess what you're thinking, and if I win, I get whatever prize I want.”
Chuuya wastes no time to respond with, “That makes no fuckin’ sense and is completely unfair. No deal.”
“The game goes both ways. If you guess mine, you get whatever you want too.”
They’ve played things like this before, and Chuuya almost never wins. Dazai’s sure he knows it’s a losing game, but stubbornness and spite fuels Chuuya’s very being. He won’t have to push too hard.
Chuuya deliberates over the idea, hands clenching open and shut unconsciously. Another nervous tick. The open air ghosting across his skin drew attention to the lack of barrier from the lost gloves, and Chuuya moved so they were now leaning against the wall. Side by side. If Dazai wasn’t in such a good mood tonight, he might’ve bullied him for it.
“You scared, slug?”
“Fuck no,” Chuuya gritted out. “You first.”
Dazai turns his head to face Chuuya only to find he’s already looking at Dazai. Their faces are close, that stupid neon sign in front of the ramen shop is still shining bright enough for the waves of blue to coast across Chuuya’s freckles, and Dazai can feel their breaths mingle. He panics. Says the first thing his brain conjures up.
“Octopus.”
Chuuya turns back toward the other wall of the alleyway to sputter a laugh.
“No,” and Dazai watches as the amusement turns smug. “Not as much of a super genius as everyone thinks, huh.”
“I was going easy on you for the first round,” Dazai counters with a shrug, trying to gain composure again. “Didn’t want your pea-sized brain to explode.”
Chuuya elbows him in the side, and Dazai watches as the boy’s eyebrows knit together in deep thought.
Deciding he might as well pick a topic for Chuuya to guess, Dazai decides on red. For no particular reason, probably. Tries not to get captivated in the swirl of red curls being pushed up by the summer wind from under his hat.
“Ramen,” Chuuya suddenly answers.
A little baffled, Dazai asks, “What? Why ramen?”
“Because you kept looking over at that sign,” Chuuya replies with a growing confusion of his own.
Ah. Wasn’t what he was looking at but Dazai’s not going to correct him any time soon.
“Dogs,” Dazai decides as his next guess.
“Why are we still on animal related shit?”
“Since when did ramen become an animal?” Dazai turns to watch Chuuya’s face sour.
“Shut the fuck up. Also, wrong again.”
Red was his last thought option, and Dazai decides to stick with it. Watches the way the red is still drifting in the wind.
“Suicide,” Chuuya picks and looks at him with this ridiculous Haha I gotcha face that leaves Dazai stifling a laugh.
“That would be too easy.”
Chuuya’s expression immediately drops into a scowl, probably sensing he was bound to lose this soon.
“Gloves,” Dazai says but it comes out softer than he intended. Pulled out of him. The blood doesn’t sit right on Chuuya’s hands, and Dazai is tempted to rub it out— tempted to make it right.
Not saying anything for a second, Chuuya lets the wind rush in between them and huffs a heavy sigh.
“Fine, you win. I lost ‘em during that fight, so I’ll need to go get a new pair.”
Dazai picks up Chuuya’s hand to inspect it under the neon glow of the alley.
“Why not go back for them here? You know where they are.”
Chuuya quirks an eyebrow up at him. “We discussed this. Tentacle. People. No fucking way.”
That giddy feeling starts fluttering in his chest and Dazai tries not to fight it this time. To let it consume him.
“You better not pick a stupid punishment again or else I won’t bother with these fuckin’ bets,” Chuuya rushes to clarify, probably a little worried from the glee on Dazai’s face.
It doesn’t take Dazai long to decide what he wants.
“I want you to admit why we really haven’t gone back to headquarters yet.”
From the sudden tenseness of his shoulders, Chuuya feels caught.
“I already said—”
“The other reason,” Dazai interrupts.
Chuuya’s face goes hard. Stiffens his upper lip like a soldier preparing for an interrogation room style torture. It’s endearing.
“Because.”
“… because,” Dazai prompts him to continue by knocking him in the shoulder.
Chuuya takes a deep breath— preparing for the water boarding type of torture— and readies himself to talk. Maybe he’s afraid of drowning here. Maybe Dazai can’t blame him. The summer humidity carries sea salt and storms, and his lungs won’t stop drinking it deeper.
“Because you weren’t being as much of a piece of shit today, and the mission was kinda not that bad,” he rushes out with a glare, but it falls short of anger when Chuuya’s eyes catch on Dazai’s.
Just drowning.
Dazai laughs and waves his hand.
“Nah. You’re going to need to do a little better than that.”
Chuuya kicks up non-existent dirt from the floor of the alley and stubbornly doesn’t look away.
“I was having fun,” Chuuya spits like it physically hurts him. Maybe it does when it means he’s losing to Dazai.
“With me,” Dazai chides.
“With you.”
Dazai thinks the smile on his face has enough watts to power half the neighborhoods in Yokohama.
It seems like Chuuya is trying to comfort himself over it when he states, “Worse things have happened.”
“Like turning into an octopus?”
Chuuya links their hands together and pulls them out towards the mouth of the alleyway.
“Yeah, sure. Like turning into an octopus.”
Dazai never did get the chance to rub the blood off Chuuya’s knuckles earlier, and he spends the whole way back soothing his thumb over it until it disappears.
Dissipates like dust into the summer night air.