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Chuuya’s never been one to cover up. He wears his cuts and scrapes like badges of honour. Whether he got them tripping over an empty crate in the Sheep hideout or avoiding showers of bullets from Port Mafia men is irrelevant.
(Maybe it’s because those marks are proof that he’s human. Machines don’t get hurt. Lines of code don’t get hurt. But real, human people do. People bleed and they scar and they hurt. So maybe he wears them like badges because they’re proof for him.)
But sometimes, other marks appear. They don’t hurt, though they always look like they should.
When Chuuya was maybe eleven or twelve, Yuan saw marks on his arms. She asked him what they were, quietly and carefully, interjecting reminders that she cared about him and she was his friend and he could tell her anything. She gave him a very strange look when he told her that he didn’t know where they came from, that they just appeared one day and he has no idea how they happened.
That was the day Yuan told him about soulmates. She told him how some people are bound to be together no matter what the universe throws at them. He asked her if she meant people who get married. She explained that sometimes soulmates get married. Sometimes soulmates are enemies. But the crux of it was that soulmates would always be together. There is no one in the universe that could ever understand a person like their soulmate could.
And then she explained the marks. Soulmates’ skin mirrors each others’. Scars, writing, tattoos, all of it. What is on one soulmate’s skin appears on the other’s.
She never told him what those scars meant, but she always gave him pitying looks, mumbling to herself about what poor luck Chuuya had to be saddled with a soulmate like that.
It wasn’t until Chuuya was a little older that he began to figure out what the marks were from. They weren’t simple injuries. Those marks were put on his skin by his soulmate’s own hands.
There were so many marks.
Chuuya lost count of them eventually, his skin littered with lines. Some appeared clean and almost surgical. Others were jagged, as though the skin had been ripped by a serrated knife. They appeared on his arms, on his legs, on his chest and Yuan once mentioned that they appeared on his back, too.
Chuuya loved his little ‘badges of honour,’ his proof that he’s human, but once he learned what those new marks meant, he stopped showing people his skin. Mostly because he didn’t think everyone deserved to know what his soulmate felt like. Partly because everyone looked at him like he was cursed by the gods to bear those marks and he hated that. He hated people pitying him for a soulmate he hadn’t even met yet.
So he started with the jackets and the rips in his jeans got smaller and smaller.
One morning, he woke up and Yuan quietly took him aside and told him his neck was really red. It was winter then, so Chuuya wrapped a scarf around his neck and said he was cold. When he got a moment alone, he found a mirror and stared at it for ages, tracing the redness and the harsh lines breaking the reddened skin up.
It wasn’t until Chuuya, at fifteen years old, met a boy his own age, with an abyss in his eyes and an empty echo in his voice, that Chuuya began to wonder who his soulmate was.
Chuuya was seventeen years old when he found out. He remembers the day vividly, even ten years later. It was an ordinary day for him, really. Wake up, go to work, drag Dazai’s ass along, do all the hard work, get back, write the entire report himself, make sure Dazai eats, go to bed.
That’s his usual routine, anyway. Sometimes things go awry and they get hurt. Dazai always disappeared on those days, probably to patch himself up alone, change those stupid bandages of his that he’s always wearing, and show up the next day like nothing even happened.
The day Chuuya found out who his soulmate was, was a rare day when Dazai’s plans had a loophole the enemy found. Chuuya always trusted Dazai with his life, even when he hated Dazai. He knew Dazai would never put him in harm's way if he had anything to say about it. Still, Chuuya was astounded to turn around at the sound of a gunshot from behind and find his partner with his hand pressed to his bloodied shoulder.
Chuuya made quick work of the gunman before demanding that Dazai come home with him and, at the very least, take a proper shower. Dazai had been uncharacteristically agreeable.
Chuuya remembers how much coercion it took to convince Dazai to toss his diritied bandages out, how many promises he had to make that he wouldn’t dare open the bathroom door until Dazai was all covered up again. He didn’t understand Dazai’s need for the bandages, but he never overstepped and he never questioned.
After all, he never showed his arms to anyone and he wore a choker to hide the old rope burns on his neck that he didn’t put there.
Chuuya waited in the living room with food that was slowly getting cold, having left a box of bandages outside the bathroom door for Dazai. When he heard the bathroom door open, he waited to hear the shuffle of the box and for the door to close again. Neither happened. For a long moment, the apartment was silent. Then footsteps.
He pretended to be busy writing up the report at the dining table, only looking up when Dazai was standing right beside him. His intention was to throw Dazai a playful scowl and tell him to go dry his hair, but his words died in his throat when he looked up and was met with two pretty brown eyes staring down at him.
When they met, Dazai’s eyes — well, his one visible eye — had been nearly black. They were lifeless, dull and empty, like a bottomless pit. Right then, in the quiet of Chuuya’s apartment, Dazai’s eyes seemed like the prettiest brown Chuuya had ever seen.
Dazai’s eyes were the colour of Chuuya’s favourite blend of coffee. He heard people describe brown eyes like chocolate, but he couldn’t liken Dazai’s eyes to something sweet like that. Dazai’s eyes were still dark, still bottomless, but not empty.
Eventually, Dazai moved. He tugged the sleeve of the jumper Chuuya left for him lower before slowly poking at Chuuya’s sleeve.
“Can I see?”
The question stumped Chuuya. See what? Why? More importantly, why did Dazai suddenly look his age? Young and fragile and small?
“Please.”
And that only stumped Chuuya even further. Dazai never said please. Not seriously, anyway. That word only ever left Dazai’s mouth when he was whining and pleading with Chuuya to do Dazai’s part of the reports, or to beg Chuuya to help him prank other members of the mafia. Dazai never genuinely said please.
“See what?” Chuuya asked, even as he raised his hand towards Dazai.
Dazai poked his sleeve again. “Under.”
“Under?”
“The scars.”
And Chuuya didn’t keep secrets from his partner. He was a little curious about Dazai’s odd behaviour, but he didn’t feel like Dazai would give him those same pitying looks other people did. So he hiked his sleeve to his elbow and showed his arm to Dazai.
Dazai stared in silence for a while. Then he traced the most recent scar Chuuya found — maybe three months ago. He remembered that he was bored, because Dazai was on some super secret mission for the boss and Chuuya was left alone, so he stayed home and tried to count his soulmate’s scars again.
“I’m sorry.”
Chuuya scoffed. “For what? It’s not your fault?”
Dazai dropped his head and didn’t respond.
Chuuya stood up and looked at Dazai. They used to be closer in height, but Dazai was getting taller faster than he was. Pretty soon, Dazai would be at least a full head taller than him.
Dazai wasn’t a very touchy person most of the time. He hissed like a stray cat when strangers bumped into him. He glared burning holes into anyone in the mafia that dared come close enough to him. But Chuuya knew he was the exception. He had to be, because Dazai often threw himself over Chuuya in the most annoying ways he could think of.
So Chuuya didn’t think he was crossing any kind of line when he took Dazai’s face in both hands and tilted his head up from the ground.
(He was crossing a line. One that would change the course of their lives just a smidge. He just wouldn’t find out which line until he was a bit older.)
“What are you sorry for?” Chuuya asked.
When Dazai kept his gaze down, focusing on the print on Chuuya’s jersey rather than Chuuya’s face, Chuuya sighed and dropped his gaze slightly. And with Dazai’s head lifted like that, Chuuya saw what Dazai hid beneath the bandages on his neck.
Damaged skin and old rope burn.
The same kind that hid beneath Chuuya’s choker.
Oh.
Dazai probably hadn’t been on some secret mission. He’d probably been in recovery.
“You don’t have to be sorry if what you’re sorry for is putting marks on my skin.”
Dazai tilted his head, like a confused puppy. Chuuya copied the motion.
“But they’re ugly,” Dazai said, “and you didn’t ask for them.”
“I didn’t,” Chuuya agreed, “but that’s not either of our faults, is it? We didn’t ask for any of this.”
“But I put them there,” Dazai said, and his coffee eyes grew distant.
Chuuya lifted Dazai’s head again when he felt it drop. “Hey, what do I always tell you, huh?”
“That . . . we’re partners?”
“That we’re partners,” Chuuya said, nodding. “That you can trust me if I can trust you. That I’m always gonna be on your side. That you and I are the most powerful pair in the entire city because we’re together. A few marks aren’t gonna scare me away.”
“But it’s not a few. It’s all over. It’s — they’re everywhere.”
“So?”
Dazai made a disgruntled little noise. “You don’t get it. I made you ugly.”
“Oh, Dazai. You’re not ugly.”
Dazai blinked, thrown off his tracks completely. “What?”
“You think you made me ugly because of all these scars, but I’m not. I’m the best damn looking person in the entire Port Mafia. If these scars don’t make me ugly, they definitely don’t make you ugly.”
Chuuya didn’t know then how to make Dazai believe him. He was a kid. Dazai was a kid. They didn’t know how to be kids, though. They barely knew what comfort was, let alone how to offer it to one another.
But after that, Chuuya dragged Dazai to his apartment as often as he could. He always kept a box of bandages in the apartment for Dazai to use after he forced Dazai into the shower, but Dazai never used them until it was time to leave the apartment in the morning.
Chuuya got used to Dazai tracing the marks he’d put on Chuuya’s skin. Dazai was always different like that. Outside the apartment, he was insufferable as always, a menace to be around and a general pain in the ass. But locked away in the quiet of Chuuya’s apartment, Dazai was almost peaceful.
Chuuya let Dazai stare for hours at the scars because Chuuya didn’t think that made him any less. He could see the way Dazai struggled to grasp the idea that the scars didn’t bother Chuuya. He could only hope that one day, Dazai believed that they didn’t make him any less of a person.
When Dazai defected, Chuuya was furious. Months went by before he woke up to find a fresh scar on his thigh. There was a morbid kind of relief to find it. Dazai had made another mark. But he was alive to do it.
Chuuya would get worried when he didn’t see any new marks.
The marks themselves never bothered him, but the fact that it was the only way to tell if Dazai was still alive did.
He’d tried writing. Putting words over the marks with a thick marker. But they always stayed until they faded or Chuuya washed them away. Dazai never replied to them.
Eventually, Dazai stopped decorating Chuuya’s skin. For a horrible moment, Chuuya thought it was because Dazai wasn’t alive to do it anymore.
The marks grew faint. Some healed completely. Others turned into thin lines. Kouyou always stared at them when Chuuya changed his look and his sleeves stopped extending down to his wrists. She never said anything. She knew, though, where they came from.
Chuuya earned many more marks over the years, from his own doing and from Dazai’s but very rarely are the new marks on either of their bodies done by their own hands.
Dazai comes up behind Chuuya in the bathroom mirror, rubbing his sleepy eyes and yawning. He pauses when he realises there is something between him and the sink, blinking slowly and waiting for his vision to clear up.
He gives Chuuya a lopsided grin in the mirror. “What are you looking at?”
Chuuya grins back. “I still think I’m the best damn looking person in the entire Port Mafia.”
Dazai hums and wraps his arms around Chuuya, resting his head atop Chuuya’s. “I have to disagree.”
“Excuse me?!”
“Elise has been looking real cute lately.”
“Oh, fuck off,” Chuuya grumbles, trying and failing to hide his amusement.
Dazai’s hands creep upwards until he’s brushing his fingers over the almost fully faded mark around Chuuya’s neck. “Y’know, this is the only one I really don’t regret putting on you.”
“Yeah? How come?”
Dazai grins at Chuuya in the mirror, still tracing the marks. “Got you into that sexy collar of yours.”
“It is not a collar,” Chuuya snaps, slapping Dazai’s arm. “I don’t know why I expected anything normal to come out of your mouth.”
“I don’t know why either. Haven’t you known me long enough by now?”
Chuuya wriggles until Dazai gives him room to turn around so he can put his hands on Dazai’s cheeks. Dazai closes his eyes, expecting Chuuya’s usual gentle caresses. Chuuya squishes his face.
“I will never know you long enough. Unhinged bastard.”
“Disgusting little sap,” Dazai teases, which is code for ‘I love you.’
“You’re the bigger sap,” Chuuya teases back, which is code for ‘I love you more.’
Nothing is perfect, really, but they still have this quiet in Chuuya’s apartment, where no one else can see them like this. They’re still alive, they’re still together and they’re still always gonna be in each other’s corner.
They’re partners, after all.
At twenty-seven, Chuuya’s body is a patchwork of lines and sutures and old wounds. But it’s fine, because at twenty-seven, Dazai’s body is the same, and Dazai doesn’t think either of them are ugly anymore.