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It wants to rain, where they are.
They’re headed to one of the Port Mafia’s French safehouses, a studio apartment in the banlieues, where a half-drowned Chuuya, a limping Dazai, and a comatose Sigma blended right in next to smoking delinquents and weary immigrant workers. The lights in the building are dim, and they hum a familiar electric tune, unlike the eerie bright sterility of Meursault. Chuuya exhales, finally safe under the false cover of night, and Dazai takes it as a cue to slip off Chuuya’s supporting shoulder to pick the lock to the apartment.
Chuuya’s instantly hit with the smell of those pretentious cigarettes Verlaine used to smoke emanating from the dusty furniture. The studio is fitted with a few select luxuries like a kitchenette, a small living room, and a little wetroom. It’s enough for a night, he supposes. They won’t be here for very long, just long enough to wait for a replacement aircraft to come get them after Fyodor crashed Plan A into a building. He shrugs Sigma off his back onto a dusty couch to let him sleep off Meursault. Dazai insists on covering him with a blanket and fixing his pose a little. “The worst part of waking up from a coma is the back pain,” he explains simply without prompting. Don’t ask him why he knew that.
The French humidity that’d built up in the room settles under the crooks of Chuuya’s elbows and armpits immediately. He can’t think of anything but a shower and a warm bed right now, but the fangs that poke his mouth whenever he starts dozing off keep him alert, albeit the kind of bleary and raw alertness so resembling stumbling through blinding snowfall, the kind where everything dazzles and his eyes don’t quite track with his mind.
Dazai on the other hand, despite having gone through the same meat grinder and back, is quite chipper, even with his condition. He busies himself rummaging through the cabinets, chock full of chemicals perfect for homemade bombs and medicines and such. Waiting for Dazai to do his Dazai things, Chuuya leans cooly against the adjacent cabinet containing the firearms to subtly close the latch from the inside with his ability.
It’s a sort of automatic gesture, the kind of mundane trust exercise that they practiced during their time together in the Port Mafia. Dazai does not acknowledge his gesture, continuing on with his search, but Chuuya knows that Dazai knows what he’d done. They don’t need to talk about it.
“A-ha!,” Dazai rubs his cheek fondly against a bottle of… nail polish remover. “Ah, what a feminine little chemical… do you think I’ll be able to find a beautiful French woman to commit double suicide with me in the city of love, Chuuya? Mori gave this to me once as a reward after a particularly successful mission. Didn’t work for me, of course, but it’ll melt a slug like you just fine!”
“I’m not putting that in my mouth,” Chuuya replies gruffly. He ignores the part about the suicide. He’s found that it’s just easier if he does.
“ You’re not putting it in your mouth. I am,” Dazai chirps. He pulls Chuuya along to the wetroom and turns on the ventilator first. Once upon a time, the bathroom doubled as a darkroom for developing blackmail photos and the like, so when Dazai flips on the light next, the two of them are bathed in shades of dark crimson.
He settles close to Chuuya.
Even though Dazai arguably has worse wounds to be attended to, namely a broken coccyx and four open gunshot wounds, he straightens out Chuuya and takes care of him first. He’s a little hunched over from the pain of his broken tailbone, and it makes him directly eye-level with Chuuya now, something that Dazai only does when he’s trying to make fun of him. Chuuya resists instinctively poking his eyes out for the slight.
He reaches for a cotton ball and squeezes a fussy Chuuya’s jaw open.
Chuuya focuses on anything but Dazai’s eyes made bloodshot by the light. He looks down on dark bandages instead. When Dazai flexes his shoulder to press the acetone down on Chuuya’s fangs, blood seeps out and dyes his pores black. Ah, so the bullets made their exit wounds after all. That’s one less thing to worry about. Chuuya can’t help but brush away the blood, maybe too rough too soon for what they just went through. Dazai’s façade doesn’t drop for even a second now that he was no longer performing for Dostoyevsky.
Chuuya makes every effort to spit the acetone and glue out of his mouth as it worked its magic. Dazai gets his little revenge when he “accidentally” squeezes some of it out onto his tongue.
His mouth is bleeding and it’s cold and it burns. He spits out two little fangs into his palm and then some. Bloody spit shows up black on his hands. Guess they’re even now.
Dazai murmurs an apology and half chokes on it midway when he remembers it’s Chuuya he’s talking to.
An apology? What the hell?
“Domo go-fuck-yourself too,” Chuuya responds.
Nailed it.
“You next,” he settles to break the awkwardness with something completely different so they wouldn’t have to think about whatever the fuck Dazai just said. “I need to see your tailbone.”
“Ask me on a date first,” he retorts. “You know they watched me shower every day in prison? The worst part about it was showering every day. Bandages on, bandages off, on and off again, what a hassle!”
“I bet they tortured you by feeding you regular meals and giving you a Western style bed too. You know, if I were a Meursault guard, I would’ve had half the sense to spray you to death with a firehose.”
“You flatter me, Warden Nakahara.”
Thankfully, the next thing he does is not continue to mouth off, but to actually drop his pants. Honestly, the way he did it might have been a little too fast for Chuuya’s comfort.
More importantly, though, his tailbone is something wicked. Through thoroughly wrapped bandages, Chuuya examines the bruise trailing up his spine in varying stages of development. Dilated red blood vessels line the contusion like claws, highlighted by the darkroom light. He can’t exactly see the colors it’d taken on, but from the shades of red and black and his experience with Dazai’s other injuries, he conjures the image of a descending dragon flying through sunset clouds, yellow, then red, then blue. If it weren’t Dazai, he would have called it the most beautiful thing he’s ever seen.
And because it’s Dazai, he digs a mean finger into the epicenter of the bruise, eliciting a yelp from the other man.
“What was that for!”
“Nothing misplaced,” Chuuya declares, “you’ll be fine, you big drama queen, but you should clear it with Mori first thing when we—“
“Yosano.”
“Who?”
“ Yosano from the agency is gonna look at me when I get back.” Dazai half-cocks his head in some show of assuredness.
Right.
Chuuya’s truly fumbling this evening, but it’s not like he’s not used to redirecting when it comes to navigating conversations with Dazai. So he looks for any excuse to.
“Turn around. You look like you need a shave.”
“I was wondering when you were going to notice my manly stubble, Chibi. Maybe you were jealous? Someone as short as you couldn’t possibly –”
“Dazai! Even the stupidest guard in there would know not to let the self-proclaimed suicide enthusiast near a razor. Not everyone puts up with you like I do.”
“Put up with me? You just told me you would’ve sprayed me to death with a firehose.”
It always ends like this. They bicker and bicker in circles. If Chuuya’s being honest, these kinds of interactions were safely familiar. He wishes, as always, just this one time, that he could have this conversation last on and on...
He just had to pick up the razor.
It is a straight razor with a simple antique wooden handle, the weighty kind that had seen its course of mafiosos who’d previously taken refuge in this apartment. Chuuya methodically runs the faucet and rubs palmfuls of cold water onto Dazai’s face. It’s not fancy shaving cream, but Dazai should be fine without such luxuries. He hardly seems fazed by the water dripping down his chin. In fact, he grins back at Chuuya in anticipation when he met his eyes.
Dazai clams up as Chuuya approaches. He takes the razor to Dazai’s face and makes practice swings for where he planned to shave.
“Not so bold with a blade to your lady-killing face, huh?” he taunts.
“You wouldn’t know. Poor Chuuya, with the height of Napoleon and hardly the face to match.”
Upon closer inspection, Dazai’s stubble is terribly patchy and the blade cuts through his fine hairs as smoothly as it would silken tofu. For all that talk, he really can’t grow a beard. Not even a scratching sound comes from the shave, leaving only the running tap and a general peace the only sounds in the room.
“Who shaves you in the ADA? Mr. Perfect with the notebook and the blonde hair? He seems the type. Don’t tell me you make the weretiger do it,” Chuuya chatters away.
“I do it myself,” Dazai smirks, “But I’ve missed my dog who I’ve trained so well to do it for me!”
Not stopping, Chuuya takes a cheap jab because that’s what he does when Dazai does it too. They haven’t aged since they were fifteen, he can tell you that much.
“You were starting to look just like that grunt you left me for. What was his name? Oda?”
Dazai flinches at the mention of his name, catching his cheek longside on Chuuya’s razor. Blood draws forth and stains his face dark, reminiscent of the marks that Arahabaki leave on Chuuya.
Of course, Chuuya instinctively reaches out for Dazai seeking tenderness, offering relief the way Dazai does for him. He wipes the blood away with a towel and the mark goes away too.
“Sor–” and Chuuya catches himself. Don’t apologize to Dazai, he thinks .
“I knew this would happen,” Dazai laments. “Chuuya always does this. You know I don’t like pain, yet you only come back to hurt me!”
Dazai flies out of the room, chin trailing water onto the tile floor like tears.
The door slams open, and a white French sunrise meets the darkroom at the boundary of the doorframe.
Chuuya stares out, dumbfounded, after a blackened silhouette blurred, shrinking against the snowfall brightness. He lets him go.
“Just tell me why you left!” Chuuya screams after him.
He knows when Dazai looks back, he sees nothing but a little light spot against a darkened room.