Chapter Text
Life is a battlefield—of moments that push you to your limits, that beat you into the ground, and that, for better or worse, irrevocably change you.
For Verlaine, such moments are innumerable.
There was, for example, the tail end of a messy divorce that had been years in the making, which culminated in his father dragging him out the door for the first flight out of Japan. And there was the isolation he felt in a country he had only ever heard about in drunken ramblings, where his French was never quite free of the humbling quirks of Japanese, and home was always just slightly out of reach. And there were the awkward stares that greeted him when he returned home years later to siblings that had grown up in his absence, their eyes assessing him like a memory on the cusp of being forgotten.
Life is a battlefield, and people are made by the battles they survive.
But this newest storm that’s brewing on the horizon might just be Verlaine’s hardest battle yet.
The call finally connects, and his sister’s voice drifts through the receiver, impatient as ever. “If your intent with this call is to flaunt your boyfriend in my face again, I’ll hang up this instant.”
“Kouyou,” he breathes out, too distracted to even reprimand her for her impertinence. (She’s just being dramatic, anyway. He only brings up Rimbaud about eighty percent of the time.) “It’s an emergency.”
“It was an emergency all the other times too. I don’t believe you understand the meaning of that word,” Kouyou says dryly. “Whatever you have to say, make it quick. Unlike you, I’m busy.”
Verlaine scoffs, shifting restlessly from one foot to the other. His leg brushes up against the wall of the stall, and he wonders if he should have taken refuge in the supply closet instead—the bathrooms at his university aren’t exactly notable for their cleanliness. “Don’t lie, I know your schedule. Your classes ended an hour ago and you don’t have club activities today.”
There’s a mutter from the other end that sounds a lot like damn stalker, and then Kouyou is biting back with a frankly uncalled for amount of snark. “My most sincere apologies, aniue. How could I have forgotten that my only purpose in life is to be at your beck and call? Please allow me to cancel my appointment straight away so that I may listen to your neurotic ramblings with my undivided attention.”
Kouyou’s theatrics aside, it is a bit louder in the background than usual. If he concentrates, Verlaine can just barely make out the clink of cups and plates, a meandering stream of late-afternoon conversations woven between the verses of a trendy pop song, and the curious voice of the girl in his sister’s vicinity.
Who is it? she’s asking, and Kouyou hastily brushes it off with a No one you need to know, Yosano. Verlaine would have pried further into the matter, if it weren’t for the direness of their current situation.
“I understand you’re upset about your plans being interrupted,” he says placatingly. “But is there anything more important to you than our brother’s wellbeing?”
Kouyou sighs in exasperation. “Alright, get on with it then.”
“I…” The thought of what he’s about to say is so terrible that Verlaine has to take a moment to collect himself. He steels his nerves, his fingers playing with the chain of the silver pendant that Rimbaud had given him a while back. “I think Chuuya got a boyfriend.”
The line goes quiet for so long that he almost thinks the call disconnected. Then, his sister responds in the most venomous tone he’s ever heard. “The next time I see you, I will shave you bald in your sleep.”
“Kouyou—”
“I thought you said it was important!”
“It is important!”
“Who in their right mind cares? The boy is seventeen, it’s about time he found someone!”
“Aren’t you at all worried?” Verlaine shoots back. “Chuuya was finally starting to get better. If his boyfriend turns out to be scum, it could be another repeat of the Shirase incident. He might never trust anyone again…”
Kouyou doesn’t reply right away, and Verlaine can tell that she’s reflecting back on the aforementioned incident. It had taken both of them by surprise—their boisterous, headstrong brother becoming as withdrawn as he had. Kouyou might have been absent for the fallout, since she had been studying in Tokyo at the time, but the soccer cleats in the trash and Chuuya’s perpetual absence when she came home had been alarming enough to send her kicking down Verlaine’s door for answers.
“Of course I’m worried. I worry about that boy every day,” she admits. “But he’s still growing. He has the right to stumble. Whether in love, or in other aspects of life….”
If Verlaine weren’t so familiar with his sister’s particular brand of vitriol, he would have thought an imposter had picked up his call. No one despises romance more than Kouyou—that was the reason he had come to her in the first place. For her to spout such naive platitudes is disappointing, to say the least.
“I won’t allow it. Anyone who dares approach Chuuya with impure intentions deserves to die a slow and painful death.”
“And how are you so sure this fellow’s the same as that Shirase brat? Have you even met him yet?”
“No.”
After a tense pause, Kouyou asks suspiciously, “Did Chuuya actually tell you that he has a boyfriend?”
“No.”
“I say this with as little respect as possible, aniue, but choke on a croissant.”
“All the signs are there!” Verlaine insists as he paces the cramped interior of the stall. “I wouldn’t be calling you if I didn’t have any evidence. Chuuya has been acting strange lately. It bears investigating.”
“Then go do that and stop wasting my time with your imaginary scenarios!”
“I will. I just thought you would care to get an update on the situation. But it seems I was wrong. Clearly, I love Chuuya more than you.”
A sharp intake of breath, followed by the telltale crack of ceramic breaking. “At least I’m not the one breathing down his neck, unlike a certain overbearing roach. Don’t speak of love to me, you cretin. I played hide and seek with him while you were moping about in Paris getting drunk on cheap wine. I was his best friend until the age of nine. I accompanied him to the park to play soccer whenever our mother was away from home. I—”
“Your point?” Verlaine interrupts, trying his best not to let his burning jealousy seep through.
“I’m the one who loves Chuuya more!”
“Oh, please—”
He’s about to launch into an impassioned speech on why his love for their brother is obviously greater, when a knock on the bathroom door cuts him off.
“Verlaine-san, are you done yet? You’ve been in there for a while, so I came to check if you were okay,” one of his labmates calls out to him.
With practiced ease, Verlaine quickly composes himself and places a hand over his phone’s receiver. “I’m fine,” he answers back, letting none of his irritation show. “Just give me another minute or two.”
“Alright, well, could you please hurry up? Those particles aren’t gonna collide themselves, y’know?”
“Of course.”
As soon as his labmate is out of hearing range, Verlaine returns to his call.
The only thing that greets him is the disconnect tone.
***
It had started out as nothing at all—just an extra text here or there, or a fond smile aimed at his phone screen when he thought no one was looking. Aside from the increased screen time, Chuuya was the same as always. He hid up in the courtyard trees whenever Verlaine came to deliver him bread during his lunch period, came home late on days that he had club practice, and was in general very preoccupied with life.
Then the texting became more frequent.
“Who are you chatting with so eagerly?” Verlaine had asked him one day during dinner, when his brother’s phone buzzed for the fifth time in a row and Chuuya finally abandoned his soup to shoot off a quick reply.
“Albatross.”
Despite the casualness of his brother’s response, Verlaine’s keen eyes didn't miss it—that split second of hesitation in which Chuuya had scrambled to come up with an answer that wasn’t too unbelievable.
“You never text him. That punk just shows up uninvited at the most unholy of hours and drags you off to god knows where.”
“Well, that’s what we’re trying to avoid by texting. Preemptive measure.”
Verlaine found it doubtful that a plan of all things would deter an agent of chaos such as Albatross, but the phone had disappeared into Chuuya’s pocket by then, and the conversation had moved on to other topics, like Dazai’s literature club live reading that Chuuya was definitely not attending.
Aside from the frequent texting, his brother had also taken up the habit of going out on the weekends when he didn’t have soccer practice. Normally, this wouldn’t have been a concern. Chuuya had plenty of friends to hang out with, and a restless spirit that compelled him to stir up some type of commotion or other in the city. Verlaine even welcomed it—a lively brother was better than a despondent one by far.
The issue was that Verlaine didn’t know who Chuuya was spending his time with, and that thought brought him unimaginable anxiety.
It wasn’t like he was actively spying on his brother’s social life anymore. (He’d promised to ease up on the hovering after Chuuya blocked him on LINE and Kouyou applied to a school forty kilometers away from home to escape him.) But there were too many odd points for him not to get suspicious. Sometimes he spotted the friend Chuuya said he was hanging out with on the opposite side of town. Sometimes he just happened to be running an errand in the area his brother should have been, with no snappy redhead in sight.
Naturally, Verlaine fretted.
What if Chuuya had fallen in with the wrong crowd? What if he was participating in gang activity, or even worse, being pressured into doing drugs? What if the person he was meeting up with was actually a criminal scumbag? Verlaine’s worries were endless.
As a result of his incessant fretting, his sleep suffered, and so his attention suffered, and so his labmates suffered, and his boyfriend was growing more concerned by the day.
Things finally came to a head when he absentmindedly ate a piece of bread his boyfriend had left on the table and ended up being rushed to the hospital for a coeliac flare up. Rimbaud cried at his bedside for three days while he fought for his life, and that was when Verlaine knew he would finally have to take action.
So a few days after his fruitless attempt to enlist Kouyou’s help, he marches into Chuuya’s room with a slice of rainbow cake and the determination of a man prepared to fight a war, and says, “Are you seeing anyone?”
His brother, who had been listening to music on his bed, pulls off his headphones and narrows his eyes at him. “What?”
“Are you seeing anyone,” Verlaine repeats as he sets the cake plate and a fork down on the nightstand. “Dating them. Going out with them. Is there someone you fancy. Do you fantasize about doing indecent things with them—”
“Okay, stop right there. Why are we having this conversation?” Shifting into a sitting position, Chuuya scrunches his face up in disgust. “Are you still mad about me reading your cheesy ass poems? I said I would stay out of your stuff from now on.”
“Separate issue,” Verlaine says, taking a seat next to him on the edge of the bed. He notes, absentmindedly, that the music pouring out from the abandoned headphones is slow and melancholic—a stark contrast to the blaring rock his brother usually listens to. “I wanted to discuss something else, actually…”
Chuuya is watching him with that mixture of wariness and disinterest that’s customary for teenagers his age, and Verlaine is struck by how much his brother has grown since junior high. He might not have gained a single centimeter in those years, but he was no longer that lost child sitting by the piers. The things he could accomplish had increased. And so had his dreams. That realization makes pride swell up in Verlaine. And at the same time, a great sadness overcomes him.
Chuuya will continue to shine brightly no matter where he goes. Maybe someday, he would even go somewhere far, far beyond Verlaine’s reach.
He would grow up.
“Mon chéri…” He brings a hand up to Chuuya’s face to brush back a stray lock of hair, letting his thumb linger on the fresh scratch below his left eye. “Just know that no matter what happens, I’ll be with you every step of the way. Even if you were to walk the loneliest path in existence, I would not let you walk it alone.”
“Woah, what’s with the heavy talk? You having a midlife crisis or something?”
“Thankfully, no,” he says with a wry smile. “I’ve just come to accept that you’re old enough to be making your own decisions, and I should respect that.”
Chuuya has a hand on Verlaine’s forehead before he even finishes talking, his indifference giving way to a shred of genuine concern. “Holy shit, you’re dying. Have you been inhaling gluten particles again? For fuck’s sake, this is why you don’t go around eating bread, imbécile.”
It takes everything in Verlaine’s power not to sweep him up in a hug then, because goddamn is that cute. If there’s one thing he laments about the teenage years, it’s that he can’t be affectionate with Chuuya anymore without risking a kick to the stomach by a seasoned soccer ace.
“I assure you, I’m in good health. Is it so wrong of me to want to support you in all your endeavors, even your romantic ones?”
“Uh, yeah, that’s weird as hell…” Chuuya abandons his health check to grab the plate of cake, giving it a brief once-over before spearing one of the strawberries on top with the fork. “You literally threatened to kill the shitty mackerel a few months back because you thought we were dating. Which we’re not,” he adds, jabbing his fork in Verlaine’s direction. “So sue me if I find this entire thing hard to believe.”
“In my defense, that hellspawn has gotten you into trouble more times than I can count. But you’re right. It was unfair of me to wish bodily harm upon Dazai-kun, even though he’s almost certainly the result of a demonic summoning ritua—” He catches himself as Chuuya fixes him with an unimpressed look. “Just answer me this. Are you seeing anyone?”
“No,” Chuuya says without hesitation.
“There’s no one you hold feelings for?”
“No.”
“Okay.” Verlaine gives his hair a fond ruffle before rising to his feet. “Thank you for being truthful with me.”
Chuuya is too busy staring at him in disbelief to slap his hand away. “Wait…that’s it?”
“Yes? You already said no. What point is there in doubting your answer?” he answers in such a reasonable tone that he nearly manages to fool himself.
And with that, he leaves his brother to his devices, a troubling thought plaguing his mind as he makes his way down the hall—not a single one of Chuuya’s friends listens to Luck Life.
***
“So he’s clearly lying about not seeing anyone, but the only reason I can think of for him to do that would be if there was something objectionable about them,” Verlaine concludes as he reaches the end of his fifty slide presentation. “Something I would disapprove of. Why else would he feel the need to hide the truth from me?”
Humming thoughtfully, Rimbaud takes in the final slide projected onto his living room TV screen, which displays a map of Chuuya’s activities for the past two months. “As always, your information gathering skills are impeccable. I can’t imagine how much time it must have taken to amass all this data. I do have one question though.”
“What is it, love?”
“I thought you were going to respect Chuuya-kun’s decisions?”
Verlaine has to hold back a scoff. Of course his kind and trusting boyfriend would take such a statement at face value. “Petite miette, he’s seventeen. That’s in the age range when teenage boys are at their most foolish.”
“How can you be so sure?”
“Because I was one.” He abandons the TV to join his boyfriend on the couch, closing the presentation on his laptop and tabbing over to his terminal window instead. The output of his last session greets him—a textual graveyard of logfile dumps and half-parsed email snippets. “Anyway, I’ll start respecting his decisions when he stops making bad ones.”
“Are you sure about this?” Rimbaud asks hesitantly as he leans into Verlaine’s side to get a better look at the screen. “Chuuya-kun won’t be happy when he finds out you’ve been spying on him again.”
“He’ll be even unhappier if he gets his heart broken.”
“Paul…”
A heavy sigh escapes Verlaine as his fingers still over the keyboard. It’s not often that he questions his decisions, but these days, his conscience has been getting harder to ignore, and it’s starting to sound an awful lot like Rimbaud. Not that he minds—he could listen to Rimbaud’s voice all day. It just won’t do for his convictions to be shaken so easily.
“I must know who it is,” he insists, and it’s all too easy for his mind to slip back to the evening of that incident. His brother had looked so small then, shoulders hunched in defeat, legs dangling carelessly over the edge of the water, as he asked in a hollow voice to the distant setting sun—Aniki…was I the problem? To this day, Verlaine had never heard more despairing words. “After that, I’ll stay out of it. I won’t take any further action…Unless it’s Dazai-kun. Then I might have to kill him.”
“You mustn’t,” Rimbaud tells him with a solemn shake of his head. “It would make Chuuya-kun sad.”
“Not even a little?”
“No.”
“What if I just locked him in a closet for a bit?”
“A mere closet could hardly contain Dazai-kun.”
He buries his face in Rimbaud’s shoulder with a groan. “Stop being right all the time.”
They eventually reach a compromise—Verlaine would give up on trying to dispose of Dazai, and Rimbaud would lend him a hand in finding out who Chuuya has secretly been meeting on the weekends. It’s not the most ideal solution, but anything is preferable to Verlaine losing his mind or getting hospitalized by Chuuya when he inevitably does something to push his brother over the edge.
With their agreement settled, Verlaine fills Rimbaud in on the results of his snooping.
“I checked his emails, but they’re mostly announcements from his school or messages with his classmates about group assignments,” he explains, angling his laptop to show Rimbaud the terminal output. “If there’s any useful information, it’s probably on his LINE account.”
“Paul…I’m fairly certain this is a crime.”
“It’s only a crime if you get caught. Besides, his school’s SMTP server isn’t even secured. It was child’s play to spoof an email with a bit of malware attached and install a keylogger on his laptop.” His frown deepens as he scrolls back to the bottom of the terminal. “The bigger concern is how to get access to Chuuya’s LINE account. He’s too old for tricks like bugging his phone—he’ll see through it in a heartbeat.”
Verlaine had learned that the hard way, unfortunately, when he tried installing spyware on Chuuya’s phone a year ago and received a knee to the ribs for his efforts.
Rimbaud watches him for a second or two longer before clasping his hands together and murmuring a prayer for absolution. Then, he reaches over and pulls the laptop towards himself. “If you must snoop, then do so in a way that you won’t get caught,” he says as he removes his gloves. When he’s met with a questioning look, he smiles sheepishly. “I have a minor in cybersecurity.”
Verlaine is certain a more perfect person could not exist. “Tell me more.”