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Dazai is awakened by sunlight filtering in through the curtains.
The tatami mats in the apartment are slightly damp after the week of rain, and the plants by the windowsill droop in the moist soil. Outside the room, Atsushi and Kyouka are conversing in low voices over breakfast.
Dazai lets out a languorous yawn and gets up to pull back the curtains. Soft golden sunlight immediately spills into the room, and he squints at the clear skies outside the window, gently pursing his lips.
He picks up the coffee mug on the table and pours the remaining half into the sink, absentmindedly turning on the faucet to rinse it.
“Ah, Dazai-san, you’re awake.” Atsushi pokes his head into the room. “Breakfast is ready, we’ve saved a set for you.”
“......” Dazai’s movements pause, and he mumbles slowly, “...sound of water.”
His voice is low, almost like a murmured dream, the faint words squeezed out of his throat indistinctly.
Atsushi pauses.
He has heard Dazai’s words, but he doesn’t understand what they mean. Intuition tells him that Dazai isn’t referring to the sound of running water in the sink nor the sound of rain from last night.
But Dazai doesn’t dwell on it. As if nothing has happened, he sets down the washed mug, wipes his hands, and turns to give him a standard Dazai-esque smile. “Thanks, Atsushi-kun, I’ll have it in a bit.”
After breakfast, Dazai doesn’t rush to the detective agency. There’s nothing urgent at the moment, so he texts Kunikida to take leave, ignoring the string of exclamation-laden roars in the replies. He strolls through the streets of Yokohama.
The sound of water.
Since a month ago, he’s been hearing the sound of water.
It originates from the ocean within his heart.
That abyssal, pitch-black sea.
It’s thunder and lightning wrapped in fierce winds as torrential rain plays a mournful elegy on the sea surface. The waves shatter every reef and island, and the storm leaves only a lonely expanse of water that continuously pours into a deep, bottomless vortex at the center of the ocean.
Even for him, his heart hasn’t always been flooded with thunder and lightning—but in the past month the ocean within his heart has been roaring tirelessly, such that he hasn’t been able to get any peaceful sleep.
This has rendered him mentally exhausted lately, too weary to want to do anything.
His wandering gaze suddenly catches sight of a familiar object. Dazai sees a black hat adorned with jewels in the shop window, and averts his gaze expressionlessly. A hint of disgust flashes through his eyes.
Yet a few moments later his gaze drifts back to it, tinged with a fondness that even he himself is unaware of.
At the same time, he is filled with an ominous sense of foreboding.
In certain aspects, Dazai’s intuition has always been highly accurate, so he lowers his gaze and sighs, switching to a route furthest from the headquarters of the Port Mafia.
The journey is uneventful.
“Hello, Dazai-san, where are you?” It’s a call from Atsushi.
Dazai pauses his footsteps and answers with a general location.
“Oh perfect, could you help buy a cake from that area? Our client just brought a kid who’s insisting on having one, I really don’t know what else to do… The name of the bakery is...” Atsushi explains awkwardly.
“Okay, got it,” Dazai detachedly replies before hanging up.
On the other end, Atsushi furrows his brows, wondering if Dazai-san hasn’t been in a good mood lately.
Chuuya speaks into the phone as he walks, giving instructions for the follow-up handling of a mission. He smells of gunpowder and smoke, evidently having just returned from a battlefield.
“Mm, I’m going back to headquarters.” Chuuya tries to quicken his footsteps. “I’m fine, don’t worry.”
He’s about to say more, but as he lifts his head, his face darkens and he hangs up abruptly.
“Dazai!” He rushes forward and narrowly yanks his zombie-like ex-partner away from the road.
The next second, a car whizzes by, and Chuuya frowns at the trail of dust left behind in its wake. “Stupid mackerel, what the fuck are you doing? Don’t you know how to watch the road, didn’t you see how fast that car was going?”
Dazai slowly turns his head to look at him in despair. “...As I thought.”
Sure enough, no matter how much he tries to avoid it, the things he has premonitions about always happen.
Especially when it comes to encountering a certain someone.
“Hah? What’s with that look, I just saved your life!” Chuuya points in the direction the car has driven off to. “Why were you blindly crossing without a crosswalk, that guy clearly didn’t see you!”
So loud.
The clamour of the waves has grown louder. He’s standing on a bustling sidewalk, but it feels as if he’s in the middle of an actual ocean. Dazai's mind is flooded with the incessant sounds of rain, thunder, wind, sea, such that Chuuya’s words become nothing more than noise.
“What’s it to you? It’s annoying that Chuuya interferes in my matters every time,” he says indifferently.
“Should I have watched you walk into someone’s car right in front of me then? Fucking ridiculous.” Chuuya tugs at his collar, “Does getting hit by a car fit your idea of aesthetics? And you know perfectly well…”
So loud.
It’s grown even louder. Raging winds and rain pound upon the surface of the sea, as if attempting to pierce through it, while the sea mocks the rain in defiance as it happily gushes toward the deep whirlpool at its center.
“Chibi really loves meddling, it’s even his business whether a random passerby is watching the road or not.”
“Asshole... you’re fucking hopeless, is it so hard to admit that you weren’t looking?” Chuuya’s temper flares up after having been provoked twice. “Did your eyesight deteriorate so much from the bandages back then? It’s fine, go ahead and admit it, I’ll definitely make fun of you.”
So loud.
It’s exhausting enough trying to suppress the shadows within his heart, and now he has to divert his attention to deal with remarks from his ex-partner. He stares at Chuuya’s moving lips, his gaze dark.
“So loud.” Dazai impatiently tugs Chuuya’s hand away from his collar. “Continue along on your way. Don’t…”
His words stop abruptly mid-sentence.
Even though he hadn’t used much force to bat away Chuuya’s hand, his ex-partner staggers to the side, the ripple of surprise and helplessness in his blue eyes melting into blankness as he falls forward.
Dazai instinctively takes a few steps forward and catches Chuuya by the waist. Only then does he notice a metallic smell of blood masked by the scent of gunpowder and smoke.
“...Chuuya?”
He’s met with silence.
Dazai holds Chuuya’s waist with one arm and gently lifts his face with the other. The mafia executive who’d just been chattering a moment ago has fallen unconscious.
Too negligent.
Dazai had been so distracted by the sound of the ocean in his heart just now that he’d completely missed Chuuya’s state. Now he realizes in hindsight that the grip on his collar had been weak, the face abnormally pale.
As for the flurry of words, rather than the customary taunts whenever they met, it had been more of Chuuya’s attempt to distract him with something else, to the point where it’d seemed like idle talk.
Dazai checks Chuuya’s pulse. Purses his lips, bends down to lift him up.
The small mafioso in his arms isn’t tall, but he’s quite weighty. His black clothes hide his bloodstains so well that it’s only upon closer inspection that Dazai truly sees the severity of his injuries.
Chuuya’s body temperature has always been higher than the average person—even with the slight drop in temperature from blood loss, his body still feels warmer than Dazai’s. Chuuya breathes steadily in his arms, pretty face calm and serene as if he’s asleep, rather than unconscious from injury.
Somehow, Dazai gets reminded of something he thought he’d long forgotten.
Back when they’d gone on missions as partners, he’d usually been the strategist commanding the team from the rear, while Chuuya would await his orders to charge into battle at the opportune moment. Occasionally, there were times when he’d needed to join the battlefield, but Chuuya would always shield him so efficiently that no dangerous ability user could come near him.
When Dazai first noticed this, he’d thought Chuuya was showing off, but even later, when they encountered formidable enemies that were difficult to deal with, Chuuya would still forcibly keep the enemies by his side. Interestingly—sometimes at the end of a battle, everyone would be bruised and battered, but Dazai would be completely unscathed, like some sort of unspoken persistence.
One time Chuuya landed in the hospital, yet not a single strand of Dazai’s hair was harmed. In a visit ordered by Mori, Dazai sat on the windowsill swinging his legs back and forth, and asked about it jokingly, “Chuuya doesn’t have any inappropriate thoughts toward me, does he?”
“No way,” Chuuya scoffed, leaning against the hospital bed while staring at the ceiling. “If you got injured, wouldn’t that make me seem too incompetent?”
His words were strong and matter of fact, with the implication that if Nakahara Chuuya, with his unrivalled combat skills, allowed a bastard in charge of scheming and manipulation to get hurt, then what was his job for?
But getting injured in battle was a perfectly normal thing.
So Dazai merely shrugged, neither agreeing nor disagreeing with Chuuya’s inexplicable personal heroism.
Then once, because they’d received inaccurate intel, Dazai misjudged the enemy’s combat strength, and they arrived without any subordinates to face a considerably challenging enemy force.
Chuuya watched as enemy troops kept pouring in endlessly, his body tense.
He couldn’t use Corruption, because he could only sustain it for a limited period of time—they didn’t know how much reinforcement the enemy still had, and if he was weakened after Corruption ended while the enemy still had backup, they would be at a dead end.
“Hey,” Chuuya whispered as they hid behind a cover. “Think of something.”
He held an inexplicable trust in Dazai on the battlefield, though he didn’t know whether it was trust in his sharp intellect or trust in him as a person.
“I’ll be the bait,” Dazai spoke after a moment of silence. “You lie in ambush and seize the opportunity.”
The tacit understanding they shared had always allowed them to communicate without excessive words. Chuuya furrowed his brows. “Then you…”
Dazai was known for his cunningness—if a bait didn’t get injured, how could it be called bait?
“Ne, Chuuya, at a time like this when our lives are at stake, it can’t be that you’re still holding onto that kind of useless persistence?”
“...Nonsense,” Chuuya mumbled. “Go ahead, stay safe.”
And so the enemy watched as a young man dressed in black retreated clumsily while occasionally firing a few shots with his gun. Probably because he was too panicked, none of them hit the mark.
“...Do we kill him?”
“Wait a little longer.” The enemy’s commander remained composed. “His partner’s still around, we mustn’t let our guard down.”
The commander’s gaze scanned the area, until suddenly he noticed a patch of ginger hair on the ground, along with an outstretched hand soaked in blood.
“......” The commander aimed at the hand without hesitation and fired a shot, splattering blood from the palm, but the hand didn’t even move.
“His partner is dead! Charge!”
The moment they spread out and rushed forward, the corners of Dazai’s lips curled up.
The relentless rain of bullets didn’t break his pace, and he ran forward as if trying to leave the battlefield behind. But the sounds were getting closer.
Just as the enemy’s ability user approached, they received a loud thud on their back.
“Caught you.” Chuuya’s voice held a smirk.
This particular ability user could turn invisible, and his physical skills were almost on par with Chuuya’s. Combined with the enemy’s gunfire cover and special weapons, even Chuuya took some wounds before managing to defeat him.
Reality proved that they’d been overly cautious, for apart from this ability user, the enemy had no other ability reinforcements, and ordinary people were no different from cabbages for Chuuya.
After it was all over, as usual, Dazai’s clothes were slightly ruined, but not a scratch was found on his skin.
“You charged out too early.” Dazai hurriedly helped tend to Chuuya’s wounds to control the bleeding, his pupils shrinking at the sight of the torn flesh, though his face showed no signs of concern. “Two seconds later would’ve been the optimal timing.”
“By then he would’ve already stabbed you...” Chuuya grunted lightly.
“I told you, Chuuya, your persistence is completely meaningless...” In a rare moment of helplessness, Dazai’s voice dripped with an indefinable emotion. “Are you stupid?”
Chuuya closed his eyes as if he couldn’t be bothered to look at him, but it didn’t take long for him to fall into a semi-conscious state due to overexertion.
Dazai stared at him for a while, then bent down and lifted him up.
That had been the first time Chuuya had fallen unconscious before returning to the base—and also the first time Dazai had carried him back to the base.
The situation now is somewhat similar.
Dazai knows why Chuuya suddenly fell unconscious. Other than being heavily injured, it’s likely because... his nerves had completely relaxed, he’d subconsciously allowed himself to let his guard down.
So funny, Chuuya, we’re already on opposing sides, but when you see me, your nerves are still automatically eased?
His thoughts are mocking, yet a warm current surges up from the depths of his heart, filling the huge vortex in the center of the loud, roaring ocean.
Chuuya lets Dazai hold him, seemingly unaware of the outside world. Though when Dazai reaches Chuuya's nearest residence and puts him down, Chuuya’s eyes almost immediately fly open.
“It’s me, we’re at your house.” Dazai pats his back.
As he sets him back down, Chuuya’s eyes have already closed again, as if his fleeting lucidity hadn’t existed.
Dazai reaches out and brushes a thumb over Chuuya’s lips, stroking continuously until the paleness is flushed red by his caress, pooling a deep crimson, but Chuuya’s eyes remain tightly closed.
“You really trust me so much, huh…”
He lets out a low, fond laugh. Leans down to press a gentle kiss to those lips.
As he touches the familiar warmth, the storm in his heart seems to gradually calm, melting into tranquility.
When Chuuya wakes it’s already evening, and all his wounds have been properly treated and bandaged. Used to such pain, he doesn’t pay it much attention, instead lifting his covers and standing up to go make himself something to eat.
But as he shuffles into the living room, he finds the bastard—whom he’d thought had left—standing by the balcony. He’s watching the sunset outside, and the golden-orange hues cast a luminous glow upon him.
Hearing footsteps, Dazai turns around and looks at him, brows slightly furrowed.
“Do I need to remind Chuuya that he still has a fever?” Dazai walks over to him bathed in the fiery colors of sunset, and half-carries, half-drags him to bed. “Lie down.”
Chuuya senses that something is different about Dazai, but he can’t pinpoint what it is, so he asks, “What were you looking at?”
Dazai's hands that are tucking him in pause slightly, and he lifts his hazel eyes, gazes into sky blue.
And Chuuya realizes that Dazai’s eyes hold a gentle warmth, a whisper of a smile.
Different from typical Dazai-esque fake smiles, this smile is faint, subtle, and very real.
“Chuuya, the skies have cleared.”
He murmurs without context, yet it is extremely sincere.
Chuuya doesn’t ask what it means. He sits up, wraps his arms around Dazai’s neck. Tugs him down until their bodies are pressed together.
Dazai is silent for a moment before he sits down at the edge of the bed, and wraps his arms around the mafioso straddling his lap. Presses Chuuya’s head to bury it between his neck and shoulder.
It’s a tight embrace without any gaps.
They stay like that until the sun has completely sunk below the horizon and darkness has soaked up the fading lights. The room dims, and only then does he let go.
Chuuya seems to be letting him do as he pleases, almost indulgently, only speaking after he lets go. “I’m hungry.”
“...Okay.” Dazai smiles, and reaches out to pinch his cheek.
The ocean within him has stilled, and something new is birthed out of the once-bottomless whirlpool.
Just like how he’s grown accustomed to floating and sinking in the midst of nothingness—the ocean inside his heart has always been turbulent and restless, so loud he’s felt untethered to the rest of the world, alone in his solitude.
But one day he found an island, maybe not any special island, but on that island there was sun.
And so he now has roots.