Work Text:
Draw the blinds, draw the bath
They’ve fallen into a strange routine by now.
Dazai wonders if it’s a breach of hook-up etiquette to come back to bed after you’ve already showered. He thinks there is a line drawn in sand between definitions of what he and Chuuya are by now, though he is unsure of exactly what those definitions are. Boyfriend is too binding, situationship is hardly a real word and much less a label, but partners is good. Partners is ambiguous, familiar. Partners leaves rooms for interpretation, implying that they have something intimate yet nothing more than a business transaction all at once.
He’s looking out the window now, peeling the curtain back to look out at the city. For the middle of the night— or the very early morning, depending on how you look at it— it’s still bustling. Distantly he hears the shower turn off with a squeak.
Dazai runs a hand through his hair, testing its dampness. It’s probably dry enough to lay down again. He props himself up against the headboard in wait, and sure enough Chuuya emerges from the bathroom moments later in a cloud of steam that dramatizes his entrance. The effect is ethereal, breathtaking. The combination of water and dim lighting makes his hair appear more like an auburn, but splayed against the pale pillowcase the vivid color is restored.
Dazai wonders if it’s a breach of etiquette to take a damp strand of hair between his fingers and does it regardless.
Draw your brow with shaky hand
Dazai is not a heavy sleeper. Years surrounded by the metallic tang of blood and the metallic gleam of a gun will do that to a person. Waking up in the middle of a night used to be an excuse to leave, back when things were very cut-and-dry and they followed a strict fuck-and-go-home routine. That was before the last time.
The last time, he either overstayed his welcome or accidentally established something deeper, because when the sun peeked through those curtains and the city was more alive than ever, Dazai was still in Chuuya’s bed, and it was unfamiliar and alien and it spooked both of them into not speaking for weeks.
(This is when the line was trampled on.)
Since then, a new layer of tension lingers like a foreboding storm cloud over their every exchange. Since then, Dazai has started to suspect that something is looming, that a confrontation is waiting to happen; any moment now, something is going to change. They are certainly both wondering what the unintentional sleepover means for them. It makes Dazai uneasy, not knowing. He is used to knowing in the way he is used to sleeping with Chuuya but not getting any sleep beside him. These things are familiar, safe.
So, because he anticipates the possibility of Chuuya demanding everything or nothing at all and the reality of him being unable to articulate an answer, he draws.
In the four years they were apart, Dazai began to forget Chuuya’s face. For a long time he could not point out the exact shade of blue his eyes were or replicate the pattern of his freckles. He has no intention of experiencing such a loss ever again. He has a moment of peace in the eye of the storm to capture this moment and immortalize it forever, like an insect trapped in amber, lasting through eternity.
So he draws.
He starts with his face. Dazai would be fine to forget every other part of him, to never touch him again, to forget the curves and planes of his body that he knows so well now so long as he could close his eyes and picture his face in perfect detail. To remember what it was like to be looked at the way Chuuya looked at him.
He draws. He draws until the figure on the page distorts before him and he convinces himself that any more changes will sour his memory of this night.
Draw your blood, draw your breath
More than once, Dazai watched Chuuya bleeding out and taking shaky breaths. He felt something akin to fear then.
He feels it again now: an unsettling notion that takes root in his gut and his mind, even though Chuuya is sleeping peacefully beside him, taking long, even breaths.
He loves him, and that is the scary thing.
Forsake me here on the ground
He does not stay until morning. At work he shoves the sketch in the back of his bottom drawer.
He will avoid him. Something about hanging in a will-they-won’t-they limbo seems endlessly more appealing than attempting to understand the undefinable thing they have managed to create.
All or nothing