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(Chuuya, Dazai, age 15.)
Notes on Nakahara Chuuya - by Dazai Osamu
- The slug is o’ so painfully human- it disgusts me how blind he is to it.
The first time Dazai had met Chuuya, he had been contemplating whether to try hanging himself again. The thoughts had been kicked from his brain with all the subtlety and finesse of one Chuuya Nakahara- which is to say, none.
Like most, Dazai had heard of soulmates. He’d read all the tropes- red strings, telepathy, timers, and colours exploding when eyes meet. Whilst he found the concept fascinating, he firmly believed it to be untrue. It was ludicrous- the idea of someone understanding you on such a visceral level; as if you were made for each other.
Lo and behold, enter: Chuuya Nakahara, science experiment extraordinaire and other half of Soukoku.
Dazai didn’t believe in such whimsical things like soulmates. He believed in Chuuya, though. Chuuya, and the colours he bought with him.
“You ought to drink more milk,” Dazai told him, and held back a grunt when kicked in the face.
And that was how it started.
Then came Rimbaud, and then Verlaine. It was a shitshow. Chuuya saw his friends die. Chuuya saw his clone die. Chuuya got tortured. Chuuya, Chuuya, Chuuya.
Despite his near perfect memory, Dazai, for the death of him, wouldn’t be able to recall what he had said to Chuuya in regards to the chance of finding out his humanity. All he remembered was the blue and brown of his eyes- eerily vivid, almost glowing, as if the singularity powering him was shining through.
‘Eyes are the window to one's soul,’ Dazai had once read. He still stood by it years later, when he was clad in brown and missing a few bandages.
Ever the bleeding heart, not fighting wasn’t even a choice. Dazai didn’t make it a habit to underestimate people, but Chuuya had always gone above and beyond.
Roaring winds, trees ripped out from the ground, and death. It was enchanting, in a distant, detached sort of way. Oh, it was all very dramatic of course. Dazai figured he would refrain from mocking the other, just this once.
Two singularities, beings of mass destruction and very little else.
Throughout it all: Chuuya.
Dazai had caught him. The shorter boy’s mangled and grotesque wings had disappeared in a flash of blue and the red lines marring his body faded, leaving blood and broken bones behind in its wake.
How anti-climatic, he had mused, holding the shorter’s body in a way that didn’t aggravate his wounds.
Dazai wasn’t blind, he could see parallels. He also wasn’t an idiot, and figured that whatever happened to Soukoku, Dazai wouldn’t do something as ridiculous as turning himself into a singularity. No, they would die together.
Later, sitting beside a certain someone’s bedside and flipping through a book without absorbing much of anything, Dazai would ponder the limits of humans. It would be a very entertaining train of thought, full of witty comments made by himself, to himself. That would be later, of course.
In the face of the aftermath and the responsibilities that came with it, Dazai was content to dump his workload onto Hirotsu and entertain himself with listening to the beating heart of his much detested partner; annoying him in his sleep by fiddling with the other’s hand and messing up his hair.
- Easily attached- probably a budding alcoholic
“You do realise alcohol stunts one’s growth, chibi,” he says in a lilting voice, making his way to said chibbiko.
Drunk and barely coherent, Chuuya blinks at him tiredly.
“Fuck off,” he replies, but it lacks it’s usual bite. Dazai hums, the sound lacking any purpose apart from a lack of want to reply.
Silence isn't usual with them. There’s always some form of bickering involved, telepathic. Still, Dazai muses, maybe there was a certain charm to graveyards that made one want to appreciate the true beauty of them.
Or it was the grief, in the shorter one’s case.
Despite his apparent hatred of the flags when he had first been dragged in, fresh out of being stabbed in the back with a poison tipped knife, Chuuya was painfully eager to leave himself wide open for more hurt. It was almost amusing, in a sense.
“Didn’t you get your tacky bike from him?” Dazai asks rhetorically, waving his hand in the vague direction of Albatross’ grave. Chuuya grunts, having given up on shooing the menace away.
“S’not tacky,” he protests weakly, raising his hand to take another gulp only to be thwarted by a thin hand. Dazai’s always been unusually pale and thin, the moonlight only exaggerated it.
“If the slug says so,” Dazai replies, lilting his voice again in a facade of facetiousness, his lack of genuine care for the topic showing itself in the strange rehearsed way of his tone.
Chuuya scowls, letting go of the bottle with little fight. The bastard would probably find a creative way to torment him if not.
The stars blink down on them, Chuuya feels warm from the alcohol and the quiet grief, restless energy brimming in him even in a quiet time of mourning.
Then again, Chuuya doesn’t really know how to mourn. It feels inadequate, somehow. Still, he doesn’t know how he could possibly mourn in an adequate manner. He’s never been particularly talented in areas that weren’t combat related.
Perhaps it’s the liquid courage, or even the false sense of security the darkness offered them. Maybe it's the fact that Dazai is quiet for once in his life, probably knowing from a logical standpoint that one ought to be quiet in graveyards. Or he was plotting.
“How would you feel if your friends died?” Chuuya blurts out. He’s not a coward, not even for his topic, as blasphemous as it feels to tread. He senses more than feels Dazai tense.
“Why does Chuuya want to know?” He sidesteps neatly, master of evasion and of being a fucking asshat as always. Chuuya, still drunk and mourning, pushes.
“Answer the goddamn question, bandages,” he scowls.
Surprisingly enough, Dazai complies for once, strangely pliant. Perhaps there was something in the alcohol.
“Follow them,” comes the answer, frustratingly predictable but bleak all the same in its frankness and rare honesty. Chuuya should have expected it.
“Would you follow me?” Comes the impulsive question, the ends of it dropping in a sort of resigned way. Resigned about what, neither of them knows. Still, there’s something angry about it. They’re not friends, after all. Not enemies, and while rivals described an aspect of their relationship, even that couldn’t fully encapsulate the thing that was soukoku.
“No,” Dazai says. “Chuuya is rather bold in thinking he can beat me to death.”
There’s more honesty in the sentence than either one of them expected. Chuuya feels trapped. “Is that a challenge, bastard?” He asks, and Dazai stiffens.
“No,” he says curtly. “I think suicide is more my thing, don’t you? Chuuya’s far too ugly for such a thing as death.”
It’s probably the closest thing Chuuya will ever hear to hearing that Dazai cares for him.
- Unnecessarily competitive, he makes everything so inconvenient.
“Of course I know how to drive a car,” Dazai lies, like the fucking liar he is.
Chuuya, impervious to Dazai’s usual antics, moodily crosses his arms.
“Bullshit.”
Let it be known that Dazai is the brains of their partnership. The mature one, the laid-back one. The taller one. The one who wouldn’t rise to any old petty challenge simply because he was above that.
Chuuya on the other hand… Well, the less said about him, the better.
And so it was with this thought in mind that Dazai realised Chuuya lacked the necessary brain cells to ever realise the extent of Dazai’s maturity. Clearly, the only obvious way to rectify this plight was to sink to Chuuya’s level, which was a rather extreme feat given the other’s unfortunate lacking in the height department.
As if his invisible antennae was triggered by Dazai’s less than generous thoughts in regards to the other’s failures and shortcomings (a list that could go on for miles) Chuuya twitched and Dazai avoided the slow punch in the nick of time.
Sighing, he looked up as if praying to a god he didn’t believe in for patience.
“What an unruly dog I have…” he trailed off, awaiting Chuuya’s reaction. “Perhaps he’s just projecting onto me?”
Like magic, the reaction was immediate:
Chuuya glared at him and in a marvellous and unprecedented show of restraint, refrains from attempting to give Dazai the death he has chased for for a few years now.
“As if, you stupid mackerel,” he declares, hyping himself up. Dazai watches the entertaining one man show with undisguised curiosity.
“I can drive a car perfectly fine.”
As soukoku, it was a guarantee all their activities usually caused chaos and damage beyond human comprehension, and maybe that would have been enough warning to the average person, but there was one glaringly big hole of logic in this:
Simply put, Chuuya and Dazai were not average people. Or people at all, in their respective matters.
“Okay,” he acquiesces easily- too easily. Chuuya glares at him in suspicion. Good doggie, he was learning.
“We’re late to the meeting with the arm’s dealer by 15 minutes and counting,” Dazai says, sliding into the passenger’s seat to avoid the kick swung at his head with enough force to decapitate him. “Go on, doggie. Deliver your master to save the Port Mafia’s profits and alliances.”
To Chuuya’s credit: He, too, slides in with minimal complaints and steps on the pedal.
Despite Dazai’s usual unflappable composure, even he cannot resist taking joy in the simple (and often small) things in life. As such, he keels over in a rather painful way to seek death in laughter.
Chuuya flushes beautifully, face reaching the same vibrant shade of red as his hair, and he frantically grabs levers and presses buttons while valiantly trying and failing rather miserably at maintaining composure.
By some miracle, the car starts, and Chuuya stomps the pedal.
The car launches forward faster than Dazai does when the river’s calls seem particularly inviting. Both teenagers were slammed back into their seats. Chuuya, whose arms were too short to reach the wheel while pressed back in the seat, panics and slams on the other pedal.
They launch forward, Dazai taking care to grab Chuuya with the thoughts of ‘taking him down with me’ as they slam into the glass and everything goes black.
They never did quite get the deal done.
- Ridiculously emotional - he’s almost like the opposite of me, in a sense
Envy is not an emotion Dazai feels.
The green eyed monster doesn’t rear its ugly head within Dazai often- after all, what did he have to be jealous of? Apathy lines him like a well worn cloak. Envy was a painfully human emotion, after all. And Dazai Osamu was anything but.
As always, Chuuya was an exception.
Double Black - two halves of a whole. Partners, allies, rivals. (soulmates)
Chuuya: Bright, lovely Chuuya, with red hair and mismatched brown and blue eyes. As human as one could be, with his intense displays of emotion, befitting the power he held in his body.
Envy is not an emotion Dazai feels, but Chuuya has always been an exception; the target of everything good and bad about Dazai.
Sometimes, Dazai thinks Chuuya might have stolen his humanity.
“Oi, what are you planning now?” Chuuya’s disgruntled voice reaches his ears, stabbing through the fog he had been encased in.
‘ Why so silent ?’ Was what he really meant to ask.
Dazai stares for a moment, pondering what to reply with.
Perhaps it was the dried blood on his cheek, making his eyes seem bluer than they really were. Or even the comfortable haze Dazai had fallen into. Regardless, Dazai lacked an explanation for the unprecedented honesty he felt compelled to say.
“I think Chuuya must have stolen my humanity,” Dazai tells him, an uncomfortable vulnerability splayed out for the picking. Chuuya stares at him.
Immediately, Dazai wants to throw up.
Forcing out a laugh and crinkling his eye, he reaches to pluck Chuuya’s hat off his head.
“Fetch, doggie,” he says, and throws the hat like a frisbee.
Knowing full well this was a hastily and badly executed distraction technique, Chuuya takes a second to stare at him, unimpressed. Glowing red, he takes off like a bullet to catch the hat before it could fall onto the ground, aided by the powers of gravity.
“I’ll kick your ass if you do that again,” he reassures him.
Chuuya has many faults- enough that Dazai can fill up dozens of notebooks detailing each and every shortcoming in detail. Regardless, Chuuya’s unwillingness to touch any sort of emotionally charged conversation with a ten foot pole is one of his few traits Dazai doesn’t mind.
Dazai smiles crookedly, more relieved than he’d like to admit.
“I’ll hold you to that, partner.”
- Trustworthy.
Oda was dead. Oda was dead and his eyes were dull and still there remained Chuuya- Chuuya, and his blue brown eyes and red hair and poorly hidden concern.
“Bastard?” Chuuya says hesitantly, and Dazai says nothing. What could he say, after all? With a leg out of the window and a backup slung over his shoulder, it was quite obvious what he was doing.
Sighing, he turns back, bracing himself to look at blue eyes and red hair.
“Chibi,” he greets, voice sounding like sandpaper, daring Chuuya to stop him.
Would he? Dazai wonders. Would he shoot him dead and bash his face into the curb? He doesn’t think he would mind it if Chuuya killed him.
Dazai blinks his eyes at him- and what a sight he must make, in the midst of turning tail and both eyes unveiled for once; blood on his clothing and tear tracks on his face. He has dirt under his nails from burying Oda.
Chuuya continues to stare, brows furrowed and lips turned down.
A second passes, and then several. Perhaps it was soukoku’s very own brand of telepathy, or simply a byproduct of spending so much time around each other- whatever it was, whatever Chuuya reads in Dazai’s face is enough to make him come to a decision.
Tossing something at him- money and a protein bar- Chuuya scoffs and turns his back to Dazai, stalking away and tugging his hat over his face. Dazai doesn’t know what expression- if any- the other is wearing and he finds that he doesn’t want to know.
“Don’t come crawling back,” he tells him, and Dazai accepts the words as the well wish they are.
Neither looks back.
- Persistent, like a cockroach
It was 4. It was 4 in the morning and Dazai was still cursing Chuuya’s name, fingers itching for a smoke.
Chuuya likes smoking the expensive brands, his brain decides to remind him. Dazai wants to stab his eyes out. It was one thing to be thinking of ways to torment the other when they were still in the same organisation, Chuuya still being in his thoughts a year after defection as a whole other matter.
Sighing and giving up on sleep, he rolls over begrudgingly to scroll through his phone. No use, the background picture was a dead slug. As if summoned by the irritating nickname, his phone rings and Dazai picks up, a smile stretching across his lips as if it were a reflex.
Concerning. Perhaps Dazai had gotten rusty, he would need to train the reflex out of himself, later.
“Hello?” He asks, knowing full well it was Chuuya. Hirotsu-san’s voice filters through the bad phone speakers, his usually stoic demeanour faltering as the tell-tale noises of Chuuya’s inebrity sounds in the background.
“Dazai-kun,” the man resignedly greets. “Perhaps it isn’t a wise idea to have each other as contacts.” Dazai laughs fakely, eyes crinkling and face lighting up despite no audience.
“Tell Chuuya that,” he replies maturely, as if he didn’t have Chuuya saved as slug. The phone crackles and Chuuya’s voice blares in his ear, volume control having been thrown out of a window.
“Shitty mack-”
Dazai hangs up, rolls over, and goes to sleep, reassured in the knowledge that even if Chuuya was being unintentionally annoying just by existing, Dazai was bothering him right back.
- I think my curse on his height worked too well- Chuuya just doesn’t change.
Seeing Chuuya again after 4 years of an unnerving lack of him was a punch to the guts.
Literally.
If asked, Dazai would claim Chuuya as a brutish slug with not an ounce of common sense. In the privacy of his own thoughts, well, Kouyou was many things, but a bad mentor she was not.
Stupidly vibrant red hair and mismatched brown and blue eyes. Still painfully short as ever. Behold: Nakahara Chuuya, in the flesh.
‘A sight to rival a million dollar masterpiece-‘
Fuck .
He sounded the same, the unique rasp as prominent as ever curling around his words- the result of a lifetime of shouting and irreparable damage to his voice box from when he had crawled out of Suribachi city.
It wasn’t that Dazai was blind- he recognised that Chuuya managed to be an anomaly where most things were concerned. He just didn’t expect to have a heart attack from the sheer and abrupt concentration of Chuuya.
As someone with near unparalleled mastery of their body, being caught off guard wasn’t a common nor particularly pleasant experience. But, as he tended to do whenever in the vicinity of Chuuya, he fumbled.
Resisting the urge to ask something inane such as ‘You think I’m worth a million dollars?’ He went with something just as embarrassing but much less desperate.
‘The worst,’ He mutters, like an idiot. ‘Absolutely the worst.’
There, he’s fucked it up. 4 years of a million plans of their reunion, and not a single one of them without a genius insult granted to make Chuuya fly into rage. The age-old fascination reared its ugly head and hit Dazai full force, merciless in its inelegance.
‘What a lovely response, it makes me want to strangle you,’ Chuuya says pointedly, as irritatingly observant in regards to Dazai as ever.
Cracking his fists menacingly, Chuuya smirks, the actor in the spotlight, the villain in the scene; on script as always, Mori would laugh watching the feed later.
It’s Dazai’s turn to respond. Awfully, embarrassingly, he fumbles. Again.
The problem, Dazai was beginning to realise, was that he had never accounted for the fact that four years of no contact did absolutely nothing to smother the urge to pick Chuuya apart piece by piece to examine what exactly made Chuuya so… Chuuya.
‘Well, well,’ he starts, longing for a nice river. ‘The chibi in black is talking,’ he continued, and then, because Dazai was a very sorry shameful being: ‘I’ve always wanted to ask why you bought that tacky hat.’
Why? Why would he say that? He was spying on Chuuya when he got the hat through the bug he snuck in. He was there during the entire Verlaine fiasco. He knew what the hat was for and who it came from.
Even Chuuya had paused at this, taken aback by his pathetically miserable attempt at gaining some sort of control over the play.
Just end me , he begs in the safe confines of his mind where he couldn’t possibly embarrass himself any further.
- An awful host
“Why the fuck are you here?” Chuuya asks without turning around. Dazai, a fucking nuisance, waves a pin around idly with faked lightness.
“I picked your lock,” he replies, avoiding the question.
“That’s not what I asked.”
The menace snorts in response and leans over the edge of the couch, freshly washed brown hair in the middle of fluffing up bouncing against his cheeks. The projector plays in the background, a flashing of greens and browns as Dazai pretends to pay attention to some nature documentary.
“I had to remind my dog of its owner of course,” he says airily, waving around the remote like it would explain everything.
As an unfortunate side effect of the sheer exposure Chuuya goes through on a daily basis, it is, devastatingly, enough to explain most things.
Banging down the can more viciously than what one may consider normal or mild, he throws a fork at an exposed neck, wrapped in fresh bandages. Disappointingly, the mackerel catches it without missing a beat, having predicted it.
Kouyou had raised Chuuya on all things aristocratic and elegant, but Chuuya was a street kid before he became a highly ranked executive, so he doesn’t bother plating the disgusting canned stuff before floating it over to the free-loading bastard having the time of his life tainting a ridiculously expensive couch with his fishy germs.
Settling down with a nice glass of cheap wine and a proper dinner of more than just protein (canned corn, haphazardly chopped spam and microwaved rice) he makes a valiant attempt decapitating the bastard with an expertly thrown pillow, only to have his attempts thwarted before they could even blossom.
As expected, Dazai breaks the silence before it could settle. “Boo,” he boos, like a child. Chuuya’s hand twitches out of reflex, wishing for nothing more than to throw a punch. “What a terrible host, what would Ane-san say, seeing me here with a lacklustre meal and no drink?”
Probably try to poison the canned crab he ate religiously, Chuuya maturely refrains from saying.
“Tell me to kick you out.”
“As if Chuuya could reach high enough to kick me, what, with your unfortunate height.”
As always around Dazai, Chuuya caves and aims a punch, floating the plate of food to free his hands.
It’s a beautiful punch, all things considered, and utterly wasted on the squirming pile of bandages. As expected, his attempt at murder is avoided and his ability is nullified in an attempt to spill food over himself.
“Chuuya is so cruel!” Bastard extraordinaire whines, not looking at all concerned about his lapful of rice and corn.
“Bastard,” Chuuya replies, easily dodging the plateful of crab thrown at his face and accepting the plastic container of takeout Dazai had not so mysteriously procured. The screen switches to the sequel to the trashy movie they had giggled at like drunk teenagers last time, and Dazai, ever eager to have the last word replies with a mumbled insult.
Not one to be outdone, Chuuya mutters a quick “Mackerel,” under his breath, and aims another punch at Dazai’s shoulder (dodged, of course.)
The girl on the screen screams, and they abandon outdoing each other of having the last word in favour of shitting on the actor.
Another side effect of such a partnership is their uncanny ability to let things go unspoken. It’s certainly not the first time Dazai had broken in since he had resurfaced with the detective agency, and Chuuya doubts it would be the last.
Dazai breaks into his house and Chuuya punches him; that’s all it was, and it would be all there was, until they were ready to talk.
“Shortie,” Dazai mutters under his breath, unwilling to let Chuuya have the last word. Chuuya throws his takeout at him.
(Chuuya, Dazai, age 22.)