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“Ne, Chuuya. I have a question to ask you.”
There's no kind of conversation with Dazai that starts like this that doesn't end badly.
Chuuya throws a kick at him that he dodges, moving without taking his hands out of his pockets. Dazai, though his build isn't as worked up as his own, doesn't even break a sweat yet. Chuuya doesn't consider himself capable of accepting it as anything less than a most grievous failure on his part.
“What do you want now?“ he complains.
This is no time to talk. Dazai has that look he gets when he's planning something, his one visible eye glinting with a mischief that only appears when he has something in mind that's going to complicate the lives of everyone around him, and Chuuya doesn't want to be a part of that. In any case, his bad predisposition has never been enough to stop him, and he already knows that.
They've known each other for a little less than a year, but Chuuya feels like he's spent a lifetime dealing with him. It's not a good thing. At this rate, he'll be bald by the time he's twenty.
“You know that trick you do where you repel bullets, right?” he asks. He dodges another kick, backing away, and barely mussing his hair. He's gotten too good at reading his moves, even when he tries to change the combinations. “Have you tried shooting someone else and stopping the bullets?”
“No.”
“What do you mean, no?”
“No. No one who's sane enough would accept me shooting them for practice.”
Dazai catches his leg as he kicks him again and throws him to the ground. Chuuya grumbles through his teeth, closing his eyes more out of anger than because the blow hurt. Fucker, son of a bitch.
Dazai crouches down next to him smiling. His smile is a strange gesture on his face.
“It's a good thing you have me, isn't it, Chuuya?” he singsongs, grabbing him by the arm to hurry him to straighten up with one hand while he tucks the other under his own coat, which hangs neatly over his shoulders.
Chuuya squints and stands up, freeing himself from his grip as soon as he is on his feet. What Dazai pulls out from under his coat is a gun, which he does not hesitate to extend in his direction.
“Shoot me. I want the bullet to hit me, but I don't want it to go through me or hurt me. You have to stop it just in time. You can do that, can't you?”
He points to the area where he wants to be shot with his index finger, digging his finger into his leg, so that even if the trick fails the bullet won't do lethal damage to him. Chuuya looks at the gun, at the area Dazai points to and then at his face. His gaze is tinged with the assurance that inks it whenever he is sure that one of his plans will go well. Chuuya doesn't like it.
He doesn't want to shoot him, but his last question sounds like a challenge, and he's not one to back down when challenged.
“You know it'll hurt like hell if I miss, don't you?”
“Uh-huh.”
“And I don't plan to carry you all the way to the infirmary.”
“I'd be surprised if you did.”
Chuuya looks at him for a moment, searching for some sign of hesitation in his expression that he doesn't find, and huffs before grabbing the gun and pulling the safety off.
He takes a step back. More distance, more time to calculate when to stop the bullet. It's simple.
It should be, at least.
He aims with steady hands. He can't afford a tremor in his pulse because then the bullet might hit a place that does do serious damage, even in the leg itself, and he doesn't want to have to explain to the boss that Osamu Dazai died or got severely injured because they decided to play a dangerous game.
He inhales, puts his finger on the trigger and fires.
A miscalculation regarding trajectory, or distance, or whatever. The bullet pierces the skin and buries itself in the muscle.
Dazai screams.
“Shit! It hurts, it hurts!”
He brings both hands to the wound, from which blood has begun to gush, and Chuuya clutches the gun to keep his pulse from trembling. He didn't mean to hurt him. The apology stings on the tip of his tongue, but he's not going to apologize to him for getting hurt in a situation where he warned him he could get hurt. Honestly, Dazai did this to himself.
Guilt is an uncomfortable sound in the back of Chuuya's mind, but it's not loud enough for he to not ignore it.
“If you keep acting like a baby about it, I'm going to shoot you again. I told you. I told you it was going to hurt.”
He starts to turn to leave that place because he plans to keep his word, and he doesn't plan to help him get to the infirmary. Dazai's voice behind him stops him.
“Wait," he says, his voice a little higher-pitched from trying to hold in the pain, and his hands are covered with his own blood as he straightens up. He rests his full weight on his healthy leg and clenches his jaw, trying hard not to wince. “Again.”
Chuuya blinks.
“Huh?”
“Again. On the shoulder, but careful.”
A laugh of disbelief escapes his lips.
“You're sick.”
Dazai tries to smile despite the paleness induced by pain. The grimace on his face is uncomfortable to see. His only visible eye is dark, empty.
“Come on, Chuuya. Don't tell me you're afraid.”
He is.
That doesn't stop him from raising his gun again. As if he had something to prove. As if, even if he had it, he would have to prove it to him.
Sometimes he feels as small as a child. The power coursing through his veins reminds him that reality is different. He was never small. He carries greatness inside him, the power of a God in his body. This is nothing more than a game compared to what he is truly capable of, and he knows it.
He shoots. This time, the bullet stops just in time.
The smile on Dazai's face becomes more genuine.
“That's it!” he exclaims, but folds in on himself again, squeezing the still bleeding wound in his leg as the second bullet hits the ground, falling without damaging him. “Can you help me here?”
“Help yourself," he says, tossing the gun at his feet before turning to walk away from him.
Complaints of “Chuuya, how cruel” and “Ow, ow, my little leg” fall on deaf ears.
“Ne, Chuuya.”
Dazai takes the cigarette from between his fingers and puts it to his lips to take a puff. He has become taller than him in the last while, a detail that Chuuya makes a real effort not to notice.
He has a smile, but his expression has become too solemn as of late. Chuuya hasn't bothered to ask what has prompted the change. He'd like to think it's because he's starting to mature, considering they've already turned seventeen, but he knows that's not the case. Deep down, Dazai is still behaving like a child.
It's not like he's any different. At least, not when they're together. That's another thing he's decided not to notice.
Hanging around him is easier when he chooses to ignore some details. That way, he can pretend that everything is simpler between them than it really is; that his chest doesn't close when Dazai smiles and that he doesn't fantasize about his lips every night before he goes to sleep. If he could dream, he would dream of him, and he suspects Dazai knows it.
He hasn't mentioned it.
“What do you want?”
He takes the cigarette from him to put it back between his lips and Dazai blows the smoke in his face, causing him to grimace in disgust.
“There's a new trick I want to practice for our next mission.”
Chuuya raises an eyebrow. Smoke fills his lungs and he exhales it through his nose slowly, shaking the cigarette to let the ashes fall to the ground.
“I don't know if I like the sound of that.”
“Good thing I don't care,” Dazai says, lifting a shoulder and watching him with a mischievous grin that makes Chuuya feel like squishing him like an ant.
Dazai takes several steps away from him with his arms crossed, stopping in front of Chuuya. Then he pulls out a gun from under his coat and extends it to him. The sense of déjà vu is so strong that Chuuya fears he would be able to guess what's going through his head before he tells him.
“I need you to shoot me here.”
Dazai points his index finger at the center of his own forehead. His smile hasn't wavered in the slightest.
Chuuya feels cold.
“You're crazy if you think I'm going to do that,” he mutters, frowning. He drops the cigarette to the ground and stomps on it with the tip of his shoe before breaking away from the wall he was leaning against, ready to leave without discussing the matter.
Dazai's hand wraps around his wrist and he feels the particular feeling of emptiness that invades him every time Dazai touches him, because No Longer Human is an eternally active force inside Dazai and it takes away from Chuuya everything that makes him be. Usually it doesn't bother him, it's even a relief not to feel the vibration of his ability inside him, but the last thing he needs right now is to have his strength taken away from him.
“Let go of me,” he hisses as a warning.
“You know how to stop the bullet.”
“Yes, when I shoot you in the arm.”
When I know I won't kill you if I miss, is what he thinks but doesn't say, because that would be admitting out loud something he's sure Dazai already knows.
“Chuuya," he says in a soft voice. He hates it when he talks to him like that. “You can do it.”
“If you're going to kill yourself,” Chuuya mutters, sharper than necessary because he doesn't know any other way, “just do it. Don't involve me in your shitty ideas.”
Dazai doesn't look particularly hurt by his words. Then again, it's not like Dazai looks particularly hurt by anything ever, and Chuuya considers himself better than looking to hurt him just for the pleasure of it. At least most of the time.
Right now he's angry, and there's nothing he wants more than to consider himself capable of hurting him emotionally.
“I trust you,” is all Dazai says in response.
Chuuya inhales deeply, clenching his fists as if he's going to hit him, but restraining himself from doing so.
He won't say it, but the thought of losing him terrifies him. He's already lost too much in this life, and what he has with Dazai is impossible to replace, he won't be able to find it anywhere else ever again. He still thinks of the Flags, still remembers the scene of their bodies in front of him, still thinks of the massacre committed for his sake. He cannot be to blame for another loss.
He won't say it, because he can trust his life in Dazai's hands, but he can't trust his feelings for him openly without feeling naked and vulnerable in an unpleasant way, especially since he knows Dazai is incapable of returning the gesture. They trust each other blindly and their relationship is motivated by a mutual obsession and fascination, but all this does not involve heart-to-heart conversations and Chuuya will not be the first to split down the middle to expose all that he holds inside.
Despite his silence, Chuuya is convinced that Dazai knows all this.
That's the reason why this request is cruel.
Still, Chuuya takes the gun.
“You're a disgrace to humanity,” he says, taking the safety off the gun.
“Oh, come on, what's the worst that can happen? That I die? It'll be quick, at least. That's a dream come true, you know.”
It's a joke that Chuuya doesn't find funny.
The air still smells of cigarette smoke. He raises the gun and aims at the center of Dazai's forehead.
Dazai doesn't even blink when he pulls the trigger. He stands motionless, unconcerned, leaving his life in Chuuya's hands.
When the bullet stops just before it touches his forehead, Dazai smiles, genuinely proud of the accomplishment, and Chuuya wants to smack that smile off his face. His stomach is churning in such a way that he's surprised he doesn't automatically vomit the instant the tension in his body eases as the bullet drops to the ground without giving him so much as a scratch.
“I knew you could make it,” Dazai says, reaching over to pat him on the shoulder, which he dodges. “Oh, how mean Chuuya is. Aren't you celebrating our new trick?”
“I hope you rot in hell,” he mumbles, dropping the gun and kicking it away just because he's annoyed and frustrated and because God, he can't believe he made it work.
“Soon, hopefully,” Dazai says, as if that's supposed to be a comfort. “For now, let me explain how we'll use that.”
(For a moment after that mission, the important people from the Port Mafia received the news that Osamu Dazai had died at the hands of Chuuya Nakahara.
They had a lot of explaining to do to Mori upon their return, and no one mentioned the matter again).
“Chuuya, come to your senses. Our fate will not end in a place like this. Because you and I are destined to—”
Chuuya shoots at the center of Dazai's forehead. Just to shut him up.
Even so, Dazai will not die today.
It is the second time in their entire history together that they use this trick. Fyodor, blinded by his ignorance, doesn't know that Chuuya has greatly perfected his technique since he was seventeen.