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Chuuya Nakahara abides by the age-old law that defines his life, his soul; anything that can go wrong, will go wrong.
There are bouts when missions go according to plan, when the world doesn’t try to end, when he doesn’t nearly give into the tragedy that hangs around him like a noose, when the world seems brighter and rose-tinted. These bouts are few and far between.
These bouts will always end.
This is an example of one of those ends.
Chuuya huffs, vision blurry, cursing under his breath about hell and high water — things that evade him still — as he rights his balance.
He is not reliant on his ability. His ability is a part of him, but just that; a small sliver of him, a defining feature but by no means the entire lump sum of his capability. His ability does not wear him like a puppet, but with hands black like rot, the poison pumped through his veins — the poison of his ability, or is it the actual poison? He doesn’t know — Chuuya thinks it’d be mighty fucking convenient for his ability to make an appearance and help with his balance.
The streets of London are unfamiliar to him, a foreign landscape that reeks of filth and desolation. Perhaps Chuuya simply isn’t a fan of the architecture, but there is little he loathes more than the winding, complicated streets of a foreign city as he tries to think with blood sluggishly soaking his pants and his coat.
Where can I go?
He isn’t making it back to Yokohama like this.
Chuuya Nakahara is untouchable. He is like a God, in that way; many believe he is a God, though he knows that he’d never leave himself in this world if he had the power of one.
However, there are stories upon stories of Godkillers, of brazen, bold souls stepping forward to bring slaughter to the air like festival music and thus, there are Godkillers, hunters that Chuuya faces every once in a while.
He is twenty-two.
He lost count of the attempts on his life by sixteen, at a grand total of five-hundred and seventy-three.
Chuuya is not going to die because of a stab wound and his ability acting petulantly. It isn’t something that the fabric of the universe will allow to happen, because Chuuya does not ascribe to any religion, but he’s had one too many close calls to cast religion aside as tasteless fear by the desperate and the devout.
Still, lights and lines are beginning to fade together, the already dark cloudy sky is becoming a wall of black above him, the smell of blood is in the air, and Chuuya’s struggling to breathe as he walks.
He will not die here.
(He does not know how he’s going to survive.)
He will not die here. Chuuya walks on.
(His knee buckles once and the uneven pavement makes him slower than he already had been. He trips. He falls on his injury. Chuuya does not scream, but the pain is so overwhelming, superseding his need to walk, so he grits his teeth and pops his thumb out of place and does not scream but it redirects the pain.)
There is a single address in London that Chuuya knows.
Be it fate or be it blind luck, he isn’t too far away from it.
He does not stumble.
(He can’t feel his fingers beyond the sting of his dislocated, discolored thumb. He is cold. It is not the cold of London, but the cold that has lived in his jaw, snaking through his arteries until he is shivering, until he cannot identify if his own heart is beating —)
Chuuya thinks he gets the right door. He doesn’t speak much English; it’d made his mission incredibly difficult, and the street names are all in English, and Chuuya is never coming to fucking London again, and Chuuya is cursing again as he stubs his toe on the steps and that doesn’t even matter because it’s the last of his worries and he goes to knock.
He does, really, he means to knock.
Except his shoe hits a rock and he falls into the door before he has the chance to hit it, though he supposes it’s accomplishing the same thing.
There is exhaustion that runs like molasses through Chuuya’s body, through his spine, and he does not bother to push himself into something presentable, slumped against the door of a London apartment in a country he hates with no friends to speak of. There is no one who could get here to help — what’s the point of calling anyone back home?
(Chuuya would rather die than go to a general hospital, a private hospital, a free clinic — any of it. Bad memories flood through his head in a cacophony of noise that he doesn’t even remember well enough to be afraid of, and yet .)
There’s too much, too little, not enough, overwhelming — Chuuya’s breathing is labored in a way that makes his ribcage rattle, or maybe he’s coughing. Whatever the hell he got dosed with — whatever the hell got into his bloodstream from the fucking stab wound — it’s working wonders. Chuuya should ask what it is if he makes it out of here alive.
Because if he does, he’s going to crush any trace of that organization under rubble and ash, a desolation of his own making because there are godhunters and there is divine retribution, and Chuuya will act as the God others think he is if it is for annihilation.
Chuuya doesn’t even notice the door open, at first; the only reason it registers with him in the first place is because he falls backward, his head slamming against a tiled floor with a smack that doesn’t ache nearly as much as the rest of his body. Perhaps he’s going into shock. It wouldn’t be the first time something like that has happened.
When he blinks, and colors swirl back into his vision, and he’s suddenly aware that he hit his head hard enough for his eyes to start watering, wet patches on his cheeks, and he’s staring up at a ghost.
“Chuuya?”
Chuuya’s lips part, not quite believing the sight in front of — above — him. He is haunted, a trail of blood like a braided trail following him wherever he goes.
He’s in London.
It’s the only address he knows.
He didn’t expect Shirase to open the door.
He didn’t expect Shirase to be there.
Shirase.
“Chuuya,” Shirase repeats, and he looks older, now, even though his features are blurry to Chuuya and Chuuya isn’t certain what’s real. Sharper, more fitting him than the baby fat that sat high on his cheeks the last time they’d talked at sixteen, his voice deeper, and it isn’t the Shirase he knows, and this can’t be real, but Chuuya can’t choke out the words to accuse him of being a fake. “Where are you injured?”
Chuuya lifts his arm just enough to jab at his hip, where there’s a haphazard cloth — formerly part of his coat — tied at an awkward angle around his thigh and his hip, blood soaking it. The wound is above his hip, but they both ache.
“Poisoned,” Chuuya forces out, biting his tongue as he does so.
Shirase makes a disgusted face at the state of his thumb, but Chuuya finds himself —
Exhausted, in danger, on the verge of passing out —
About to die, in a foreign country, with no accessible way home —
Safe, here, because it is Shirase —
Chuuya did not learn when he was fifteen and stabbed in the back, because he is still in enemy territory and yet he is boneless, and not just because he’s injured.
Chuuya’s eyes slip closed, a call of the abyss so sweetly whispering his name, and the last thing he comprehends is Shirase’s gentle touch undoing his makeshift bandage. Gentle. Why?
How am I alive?
It’s the first thought that runs though Chuuya’s head when he becomes painfully aware that he is awake, that he is breathing, that he hasn’t kicked it just yet. Every part of his body is sore and there are scratchy blankets over him — scratchy, but familiar.
Chuuya groans, the hiss of pain leaving his lips as he pushes himself into a sitting position, glancing at the room he’s in and taking stock of his injuries.
The room is obviously a bedroom, adorned with personal items and decor; a tapestry on the wall of mushrooms, photos on the wall of different locations and people that Chuuya doesn’t recognize, CDs lined up in a neat display, furniture that doesn’t quite match. It’s a modest sized room; miniscule in comparison to Chuuya’s bedroom at home, but a mansion compared to the places he used to sleep as a kid.
There are bandages and gauze wrapped around his body, making him somewhat like a glorified mummy. Ew, he looks like Dazai.
He’s in his boxers, though they’re crusted with blood, making them rather gross; there are bandages wrapped around his thigh and slung over his hips to keep the wrapping tight on his main injury. It isn’t a sloppy job, either, almost medically precise. There’s a wrap around his thumb, too, set back in place. There’s a cotton ball in his ear being held in with a bandaid, a butterfly bandage over his eyebrow that he can feel, and there’s the tell-tale slick feeling of ointment on his lips, soothing the split he’d gotten last night.
He’s in enemy territory. Right.
Shirase.
Chuuya grits his teeth, pushing his legs onto the floor. He’s injured, but not incapacitated; he’s done more with less. His hands are still a charcoal black, the color seeping into the veins in his wrists, his nails ashy, and thus Tainted will be more tricky than ever, but it’s alright.
He just needs to make it back home.
(Where is home, anyway? Is it just the city of Yokohama? Is it his penthouse? Is it Kouyou? Is it Dazai? Chuuya doesn’t know. He doesn’t need to know, he just needs to leave.)
Still, when Chuuya goes to stand, his legs buckle out from under him.
Chuuya curses, his head smacking into the bedframe; a bead of blood drips down from the back of his head where he’d made contact and he curses again, lying in a heap on the floor like a pathetic, weak-willed coward.
“You know,” someone says, and Chuuya’s gaze snaps up to meet Shirase’s. Shirase’s in a loose gray shirt and pants, leaning in his door frame with his arms crossed. His hair is still silver, though his roots are growing out dark; he’s still got dog tags around his neck and now that Chuuya gets a better look at him, time has done Shirase well. “Typically, when you’re deathly injured, you’re put on bedrest for a while.”
“Typically,” Chuuya echoes, though he must sound half-there with how his voice attempts to evade him. Even his throat is sore, and he doesn’t even know how that fucking happened. Was he screaming last night? He doesn’t remember screaming.
“Do you want help?”
Chuuya grunts his acknowledgement of the phrase and his refusal to admit that he does need help, planting his arms on the bed frame behind him in an attempt to help himself up. It does not work.
Shirase doesn’t move to help him, though. Chuuya’s both resentful and grateful for it. His head is too twisted up in knots for this.
“Why are you in London, Chuuya?” Shirase asks next, nonchalant, like this isn’t the first time they’ve seen each other in eight years, like Chuuya didn’t nearly die on his doorstep, like his address isn’t the only address Chuuya knows in this city.
(And what does it mean, that it’s the only address he knows and delirious, out of his mind, that is where Chuuya went?)
“Mission,” Chuuya answers easily, though his movements are anything but. He stays on the ground, one knee pulled up to his chest and the other lying limply in front of him, unwilling to agitate the wound on his hip.
“And you came here?”
“Where else would I go?” It sounds like a confession, an admittance, even to Chuuya’s own ears; he sounds pathetic. He sounds like a scared eight-year-old running back to a tattered, rubble-filled building on its last legs and hiding under Shirase’s coat because the old shopkeeper caught him stealing. He sounds like a combative, grief-filled twelve year old after he ran to hide behind Shirase because he couldn’t bear to tell the rest of the Sheep that the sickly kid hadn’t made it.
Where else would I go?
The phrase in and of itself is the sum total of how Chuuya and Shirase have always come together. Never Nakahara Chuuya and Shirase Buichirou, just… Chuuya and Shirase. Afraid of the world. Afraid of each other. Afraid of living.
It’s the state of the world that scares Chuuya, really. Still, the weakness in his own voice makes him want to bite his tongue out.
Shirase purses his lips into a thin, tight line, and Chuuya cannot pretend that they are anything other than a monument to each other’s past. They have made their peace with each other, with the way they were raised in back alleys and booze bottles, and here he is — ruining it all.
Opening that wound up again, in more ways than literal. At least open wounds, the physical kind that ache to have his organs disposed and torched, don’t ask for his forgiveness. At least open wounds do not smell of the bitter taste of childhood.
“I don’t even know how you know this address,” Shirase says, though it’s more filler than anything and they both know it. Of course Chuuya knows Shirase’s address.
Of course Chuuya keeps tabs on the people he’s willing to die for. Shirase, Dazai, Yuan, the rest of the Port Mafia — Kyouka. Chuuya is not a man of God, and there are no angels to watch over the people that have carved out their place in his soul, so it is his duty to keep up with the work.
(It’s not enough. It’s never enough. Half the time, they’re doomed simply because they choose to be around him. Or didn’t choose. It’s often debated, in Chuuya’s head, which came first — desolation or reunion? And why does reunion always sound like ruination?)
Chuuya doesn’t bother to respond with that. Instead, he pushes his legs underneath him. He’s done more with less, that’s true — and he doesn’t need Shirase’s pity.
What he needs is to be home. It’s something he’s been searching for year upon year, and he’ll search for it in the decades to come. (Perhaps he is not meant for a home. He’ll settle for anywhere that isn’t this muck-filled, backwater country that seems to think they’re haughty for being nuisances.)
While Chuuya gets his bearings and stands, Shirase watches. He doesn’t continue to pry.
Instead, once Chuuya has gotten to his feet, with a deathgrip on the edge of the bed to keep himself stable, he nods toward the injury adorning Chuuya’s skin and the bandages keeping it concealed and healing. “You could’ve died.”
Chuuya snorts. It sounds hollow to his own ears. “I’m not dead yet, am I?”
“Thanks to me.”
“Yeah. Falling into old habits, I suppose.”
Shirase’s brow furrows at that, but he doesn’t show any other outward recognition of that. “Poison again, huh? You know, you’re lucky that it didn't off you before the blood loss did.”
“How did —?”
“I’m a med student,” Shirase says quickly, cutting Chuuya off before he can finish his sentence. It’d irritate Chuuya, but even years after they’ve fallen apart, Shirase knows what he’s going to say before he says it. “Guess patching you up all the time came in handy, huh?”
There’s something to be said about lost friendships and the ache of childhood. For Chuuya, there is something to be said about the people that have taken part of his soul, written their name across it in bold lettering. They can leave his life, but that mark will always be there. (He will always miss what he has lost.)
Medical school, huh?
Not something that Chuuya would have predicted. He supposes it makes sense. You spend so much time trying your fucking best to keep everyone alive with the few supplies you have, and then you’re gone, and you’re alone, and the ache is still there, the need to help when there is no one who needs it that you can help.
Maybe the separation of the Sheep was for the best. None of those kids would be alive if the Sheep had stayed together.
Shirase would still be in Yokohama. Shirase would be dead.
Chuuya would be dead, too. It’s not something he likes to ponder often.
“You don’t have to stare at me like that,” Shirase scoffs.
Chuuya tilts his head to the side. It doesn’t make his vision swim nearly as much as it did whenever he stumbled into Shirase’s apartment, but that’s saying little considering how out of it he’d been.
“Like I’m a ghost,” Shirase says flatly, and he doesn’t give Chuuya the time to process it when he turns on his heel. “C’mon, let’s get you some food. Coffee — do you drink coffee? I like energy drinks myself, but something tells me you don’t need those at the moment.”
Shirase tries not to be as considerate as he means to be. He states that he’s in medical school and he immediately turns on his heel so that Chuuya has to struggle to stumble out of the bedroom he’s in. It’s intentional. Don’t get close to me again.
This isn’t a life you get to be privy to. Why are you here?
It’s not like Chuuya ever calls. Then again, neither does Shirase.
“I’ll take some tea,” Chuuya says, despite it not being in the listed options.
Shirase accepts it with a shrug of his shoulders.
Shirase’s apartment isn’t large, by any means, but it’s suitable for one, Chuuya learns when he makes it to the main living area. The building itself is old, with a large bay window that reminds Chuuya of the fairytales Shirase used to read to him. There’s a draft that sends a shiver down Chuuya’s spine. The mismatched furniture and the bookshelves all speak of a live well lived, the point honed by the open medical textbooks sitting open next to scribbled notes on the kitchen counter.
Shirase haphazardly moves the books out of the way, gesturing for Chuuya to sit wherever he’s comfortable. “It’s no mansion, so sorry about that, eh?”
“It’s no problem.” Chuuya’s salary allows him luxuries he likes to indulge in — like his penthouse, like his wardrobe, like his wine. It doesn’t change the fact that he’s a street rat at heart, as happy on the ground in a concrete foreclosure as the luxury mattress worth more than two months of Shirase’s rent. (Though, getting older and all — and how odd is that to say, at twenty-two — sleeping on the concrete may cause more back problems and knots than it used to.) “How’s… med school?”
There’s a cavern between them that can’t be crossed. The past is meant to stay in the past — closure means that no one was supposed to go and tear out the sutures that have shakily been in place since the Verlaine Incident at sixteen.
Shirase is meant to go live a 9-5 with a stable job and a stable life and maybe even a girl on his arm. He isn’t supposed to be involved in teenage gangs or the mafia or anything like that anymore.
And if Chuuya’s presence here now, anywhere down the line, fucks that up? It’ll be another damned thing to add to the list of Chuuya’s sins.
Shirase shrugs, a clear line of tension running through his back as he turns away from Chuuya — knows Chuuya wouldn’t hurt him even if he could — and grabs a glass from a cabinet. “It’s med school. Slow-going. Got my diploma-equivalent a few years back, so I’m behind the curve.”
“Not learning how to read until twelve will do that to you.”
Shirase hums. “I learned how to read before then. That’s when I taught you, remember?”
“I… thought we learned together?”
Shirase’s gaze, turning back to him, is clouded with confusion before clarity sinks in. “Ah. Right. I just, uh, I didn’t want you to be embarrassed, y’know?”
Chuuya makes a sound of acknowledgement. He doesn’t believe that for a second.
Not because he questions where Shirase was raised, not because he’s startled Shirase would lie, but because Chuuya didn’t have a sense of embarrassment before he became the Sheep’s protector. Before then — it didn’t matter if he didn’t know the things the others did because he wasn’t supposed to be better than them, or protect them.
Not knowing how to read was barely a fault he’d cared for. He’d struggled with learning more than anything, even when he got pulled into the mafia and Kouyou insisted upon formal lessons. Even now, kanji and hiragana have a tendency to become a mess of muddled lines in his mind’s eye, forming nothing coherent or even the wrong word entirely.
“Yeah. Yeah, that makes sense,” Chuuya responds instead, leaving what was intentionally unsaid to stay in the dark. Considering Chuuya lives in the dark, it’s a place he’s comfortable indulging.
Sometimes, loose ends are meant to stay frayed.
Shirase doesn’t ask about his mission.
He does set a glass of water and a couple of painkillers in front of Chuuya, which Chuuya takes gratefully and pretends to not notice the way that Shirase swallows harshly when he takes the pills off the counter without a care in the world.
(Shirase wouldn’t poison him. Not again. Shirase wouldn’t save him and then hurt him — there’s no greater cause, now. There is no Sheep to protect. There is no greater good. There is Chuuya and there is Shirase, and there is a chasm between them.)
Silence reigns.
And Chuuya is okay with that.
_
“I should be out of your hair in a couple of days,” Chuuya says loudly, cross-legged on the couch and ignoring the harsh flares of pain coursing up his hip and thigh when he does as such. More exposure to the pain will make him more used to it, and he needs to stretch these muscles, anyway.
Just because he’s injured doesn’t mean the job is over.
(He should call Kouyou. He should call Mori. He should call anyone, but it seems like a breach of privacy, calling anyone from the organization that is the reason they sit here with souls that have not been entwined in six years.)
I miss you, Chuuya wants to say, but I can’t stay.
If Shirase could, he’d likely answer something like, I miss you, but you can’t stay.
(They are not meant to walk this life side-by-side anymore. They are not meant to be sword and shield, yet they are not meant to be sheep.)
“A couple of days?” Shirase asks from the kitchen, leaning over his counter and studying. It seems that the dining room table is far too precarious for Shirase to sit at, considering the warped wood of the table frame is being supported by a tall stack of books, with nothing on the table itself. “Didn’t know it took the mafia that long to get their shit together.”
I haven’t called. I don’t want to. I want to live away from all that.
Chuuya may be slightly delirious.
Shirase had given him painkillers, and those had contributed to his state of mind surely, but the lack of sleep over the last few days has also contributed immensely. Chuuya hasn’t slept since he passed out unconscious in front of Shirase’s door. There are ghosts behind every door, all begging to be released to the beat of his heart once they realized that Shirase’s door had been opened.
Chuuya does not dream, but he wishes he could if only to give a better reason to his inability to sleep.
Chuuya is exhausted, and in pain, and the paint on the wall is swirling, and none of that matters because Shirase is here and Chuuya is no longer the kid that depended on him, but those were simpler times.
How selfish is it, to beg and pray for times when food was scarce and sickness was on the horizon when he’s lived a thousand better lives since then? How selfish is it, to want to turn back the clock, before the Agency, before Kouyou, before Dazai, to the dark age Chuuya had found his heart in?
I used to know my heart was in the shape of your name. Now, I think my ribs have carved themselves into something sharp to keep my heart from amalgamating itself into anything other than a graveyard.
“There’s more bureaucracy in organized crime than you’d think,” Chuuya murmurs instead, blinking at the raspy sound of his own voice when he recognizes that he has to respond verbally.
Shirase is sheltering him, after all. It’d be rude to defy all manners of being a good houseguest — Kouyou would kill him if she saw him intentionally ignoring etiquette.
(Chuuya doesn’t know how he and Shirase are meant to fit together anymore. That chapter was meant to be closed. Yet he’s ached to reopen it since then — a book on a shelf just waiting for a second chance.)
“Yeah, I never got that far with it. Guess I wouldn’t know.”
Chuuya’s head snaps up to look at him.
It isn’t Shirase’s words that bother him. It’s the lack of resentment.
Shirase has always been this — this supernova, to Chuuya, of emotion, a guide-book on how to be human. Fiercely protective, stupidly loyal.
(He betrayed Chuuya. That much is true. But he did it to protect the Sheep, he did it because he got lost, and who would Chuuya be if he didn’t understand that? Chuuya is not a creature of hate; he was designed to be, but it isn’t in the nature that he’s crafted for himself.)
Supernovas aren’t meant to go out. It’s not — it’s not out, it’s not muted, it’s just… it’s stabilized.
“Shirase,” Chuuya says, drumming his finger against his thigh, and everything else is blurring in his vision other than Shirase, other than that supernova, other than the ache in his chest because he wants to go home and he has no clue where that is anymore, “Are we still —?”
Chuuya doesn’t get much further than that, if only because the ringing in his ears ramps up so much more than he was anticipating.
And Chuuya is not a coward. Nor does he have a low pain tolerance. His body is used to the constant battered state that it’s in — it is not used to poison being pumped through his veins, the sluggish way he needs to move his limbs, the way the painkillers are much stronger than over-the-counter, the way his side is not going to be healing any time soon.
He’s in and out of consciousness for the next while or so. Chuuya has no sense of him.
He knows that Shirase picks him up. He can hear the clinking of Shirase’s dog tags against his necklace. He wants to reach up and touch them, but Chuuya finds with a startling lack of fear that his arms are unwilling to cooperate with that notion.
“It’s alright, Chuuya,” he hears Shirase say at some point, his voice quiet and certain. “I’ll keep you safe. Just relax.”
Shirase has stabbed him in the back before. Shirase has been there for the worst moments of his life and hasn’t left, not until he had to, not until Dazai forced Shirase’s hand. (Chuuya is no idiot — he is more than aware of the circumstances in which he joined the mafia. He wouldn’t go back and change it, necessary evil as it was, but — still.)
Chuuya’s trust has been earned with blood, and blood will not break it.
He relaxes.
Chuuya’s in and out of it for the next few days.
He notes the fact that there are papers now covering Shirase’s walls, notes that his medical textbooks have all migrated to the small desk on the side of his bed, and that Shirase’s hair is getting more and more tangled as the hours go by and he habitually runs his hands through it.
Once he’s conscious enough to do so, Chuuya rolls on his side and hisses at the light that seeps through the curtains.
“You’re not a vampire,” Shirase says without turning away from the bulletin board he’s staring at. It makes him look either like a homicide detective or a serial killer, though Chuuya figures he can’t judge considering he’s got one at home as well. “How are you feeling?”
“What’s it matter? It’ll go back to ‘like hell’ in a couple of hours anyway.”
“Yeah. Yeah, that’s the problem.”
Chuuya makes a confused noise, which is what gets Shirase to finally turn toward him.
Shirase sighs as he does, taking in Chuuya’s disheveled, haven’t showered in a week chic look. “Chuuya — I know you. Nothing takes you down. You get hurt, you stand back up. You’re like — like a —”
“Don’t say God,” Chuuya whispers.
His voice must crack, because there is pity in Shirase’s eyes.
So Shirase doesn’t say God. “You’re nearly invincible. Poison is one of the few things that takes you down, but even then, that’s temporary. You still stand. You still fight. Yet here you are, nearly unconscious, and I had to resuscitate you when you first stumbled in here. It’s been a week. Is that not odd to you?”
“What, that I’m mortal too? I’m still getting acquainted with the concept,” Chuuya says sarcastically, a bite to his voice that isn’t meant to be there and doesn’t come out quite as playfully as intended.
Shirase lets it go, something that his sixteen year old version would be scoffing at. “This was planned. This was intentional. This was designed to keep you down, Chuuya. Whatever is in your system — I don’t know. It isn’t leaving. You aren’t getting better. Your wound isn’t healing. It’s like whatever is in your system is stunting your healing, your abilities, your cognizant thought. You can’t get your bearings enough to have a full conversation without passing out again, let alone a fight. This was formulated as a weapon against you.”
Chuuya sits up with trembling arms, veins still black like rot from overuse of his ability. He blinks.
Shirase hasn’t slept in a while.
Chuuya doesn’t linger on the thought considering his stomach churns and bile pushes up his throat.
Not the first time, considering the trash bin next to the bed, already empty and conveniently lined, but there’s nothing to throw up beyond mucus that somehow pushed down his throat at some point.
He hasn’t eaten. Why hasn’t he eaten? Chuuya thinks he’s been hungry semi-recently.
And Shirase stares at him, not like Chuuya is something to be pitied, but like — like —
(Like he’s a kid again. Like he needs a home. Like there is a tragedy waiting to unfold in the very syllables of Chuuya’a godforsaken name, like Shirase will shield him from the world anyway.)
Like they’re family again. And he holds Chuuya’s hair, and he rubs his back, and he doesn’t shy away from Chuuya like the very power through his veins is contagious.
“I’m gonna figure out what they did to you,” Shirase whispers, a fervent, visceral determination palpable in his voice as it hums soothingly in his ear. “And I swear to God, Chuuya, the ones you pray to and the ones that you don’t, that I’m going to make sure they can never hurt you again. Hurt anyone.”
(It’s easy to forget that Shirase — Shirase, always first-in-command but second-fighter, now-medical student Shirase, big talk with little bite Shirase — has bloodlust in his veins, too, that he grew up on the same streets that Chuuya did, that he’s grown up with busted knuckles and chewing on bullet shells to pass the time too. Part of Shirase will always want to fight.)
It’s more soothing than it should be.
Chuuya’s gone to the world again after that.
Chuuya stumbles into the kitchen. It’s dark out still, but there’s a sharp pain in his stomach that speaks more to hunger than any injury. He’s limping on his injured leg, something he’d hide back at home and yet shamelessly flaunts here. (He isn’t a soldier here. He isn’t meant to be here.)
Still, he stops before he turns the corner, hears Shirase’s voice in a hushed but frantic whisper, and the crackling sound of someone on the other end of the phone.
His vision is sharp enough that he can see the detail in every ray of light filtering through, the moon calling to every crevice she can’t reach.
“I did what I was supposed to. Now it’s your turn — unless you’re still incapable of that?”
While it’s been tamed, Chuuya doesn’t think that time will ever erase Shirase’s temper entirely, evident in the agitation with whomever he’s speaking to.
Chuuya can’t hear who he’s talking to.
When he peers around the corner, he finds that there is blood staining the fur of Shirase’s coat.
“I don’t care who you side with now. Do you think I make a habit of getting involved in this shit anymore? At least London’s organized crime doesn’t show their fucking face everywhere, you are just as annoying —”
An irritated huff.
“He’s not your dog! But he doesn’t belong here all the same. You know what, I shouldn’t have called, you only make things wor — Stop interrupting me! Do you find this funny? Ugh!”
Shirase slams his phone on the counter, and Chuuya doesn’t flinch. Chuuya is not a child, and that would be a cowardly, childish thing to do.
“You can come out now,” Shirase says.
Chuuya nearly trips over himself when he does. What is he, five?
Mafia executive Chuuya Nakahara, the feared gravity manipulator, tripping over his own feet in some apartment in London. How the mighty fall. (He has never been allowed to stumble.) “Guess I’m getting out of practice.”
“Of staying quiet? Nah. Couldn’t hear your footsteps. It’s the death rattle of your breathing that gave you away.”
“‘M not a car. Don’t say I have a death rattle.”
“It’s alright, you know.” Shirase isn’t just talking about his so-called sickness.
Chuuya isn’t quite sick enough to take that bait, though, so he ambles into the kitchen with no further comment, sitting on one of the stools Shirase keeps around. He doesn’t have to say a word for Shirase to start shuffling through the fridge.
“You have enough hydrogen peroxide to get that blood out?” Chuuya asks, raising a brow as best he can at the sheer amount of blood staining Shirase’s clothes. Around his collar, the cuffs of his jacket, smeared near his ear. None in his hair, though. He’s always been protective about his hair.
“At the moment? No. I can always buy some more.”
“Buying things now? New world for ya.”
“Turns out, you have to stop stealing once you make a certain amount. Then it’s just being an asshole.”
“Know your enemy, and all.”
Chuuya can’t stop staring at him.
Shirase made good on his word, and he hasn’t gloated about it once. Not that Chuuya thinks he would — but that Shirase would at least mention it. Shirase is no longer in the life of violence, is no longer shackled to the dark in an iron vice, no longer has the call to war in his veins.
Yet here he is, willing to indulge dancing with the shadows once again and for what? For Chuuya?
What would a sentence like that be, if Shirase got caught? Life or more? The death penalty?
(The law has always been of little concern to Chuuya. Nowadays it’s because he has diplomatic immunity due to the mafia’s deal with the government, but when he was younger it was simply because they couldn’t ruin his life if they took him in. They could never catch him for the bloodier crimes, because they were scared of him. Petty crimes — food, breaking and entering, they booked him for that.)
“Do you think,” Chuuya blurts out, calling Shirase’s attention away from the fridge. “Do you think that family is part of your soul?”
If Shirase’s startled by the question, he doesn’t show it. Contemplates it, though, rolling the words around in his palms if he could. “Well… I suppose it depends on the person. My family — my real family? My mom and dad? I don’t think so. I have no reason to have a place for them.”
And what about me? Selfishly — what about me?
Shirase doesn’t elaborate on the answer to Chuuya’s unspoken question. Instead, he patiently makes a soup that states of Chuuya’s childhood without bothering to take off his coat.
“I can’t cure you,” Shirase whispers, brushing out Chuuya’s hair. He’s lost track of the days. “I’m not… I don’t have the resources for that.”
“What, your college doesn’t give you state-of-the-art governmentally-experimental scientific research?” Chuuya asks, half-joking. He’s overheating, sweat sticking to his brow and causing his hair to stick to his forehead, too.
He isn’t used to overheating.
If anything, Chuuya freezes. This is new. All so very new.
At least Shirase is familiar.
“I’ve got to take you home,” Shirase continues. “They can help you there, Chuuya.”
“You want me to go?” It comes out more desperate than intended.
It’s only acknowledged in the hushed anguish that seeps into Shirase’s voice, a low reverb that speaks of years upon years of concealing emotions rather than let them combust like he used to. “No. No, I don’t want you to go, Chuu-Chuu. I want you to be safe. I want you to heal. You’re not healing.”
“You’re — you’re a doctor.”
“Not yet, and not the kind you need. It’s okay. I know you hate doctors. Can you just get on the plane for me?”
Realization hits Chuuya like a plane, but he doesn’t try and shove Shirase away, not when he’s so gently carding his fingers through Chuuya’s hair, and there is still trust there, and it isn’t just grief, and when did that happen? “You already called. They’re already on their way, aren’t they?”
“If you’re talking about that scary red-head lady, then yeah. She is. You — I — I had to, Chuuya, you know that.” And there is desperation in Shirase’s voice, too, and this is not good-bye, but it’s the closest they’ve gotten to one and Chuuya simply sits and lets Shirase brush the last of the tangles out of his hair.
Shirase has done all that he can.
He has killed for Chuuya. He’s bathed Chuuya, and bandaged his wound, and let him sleep in his bed, and they have never gotten a proper farewell, have never gotten to close this chapter in their lives, and Chuuya’s throat is thick with all of the unsaid that he cannot swallow, and there is no sharper knife in the world than that of endings.
Chuuya knows endings all too well.
“It’s not good-bye,” Shirase says firmly, like he knows what Chuuya is thinking despite all the years apart. “It isn’t. I need you to get better. And then you can come back in a year or two, I dunno, stumble at my door again, yeah? Just…. maybe not dying, okay? Do you hear me?”
“You didn’t call Kouyou,” Chuuya says, recalling the memory in the kitchen, one of the few that he’s been able to retain through the haze in his head that terrifies him only when he can remember that it exists. (A notion that scares him more than anything. What is he, if not his memories? Because he is surely not human.) “You called — you called —”
“Dazai. Yeah. I did.”
“You hate Dazai.”
“I’d hate to see you dead more. And I actually have his number.”
“Why do you have Dazai’s number?”
“He calls me to gloat about you sometimes when he gets drunk. I didn’t know he left the mafia.”
“I — I hate you. I hate that. Fucking fuck.”
Shirase snorts. “I think it’s your naptime, don’t you?”
And it’s so easy, so easy to fall into the comfortability and the familiarity that is Shirase, but Shirase is right — Chuuya doesn’t belong here.
They don’t belong next to each other anymore. Life has taken them to different places, on far more than the whims of the wind, and while it is not destiny that has brought them together and apart, it’s best that Chuuya doesn’t interfere with the life that Shirase has found. Dabbling in the dark has never led to more than heartbreak. Chuuya would know.
Chuuya reaches up and holds Shirase’s hand without a word.
Shirase takes Chuuya to the air strip, a private little airport that the mafia has ties to, because of course they do. Mori is the one in charge of international relations — it seems they’re going well.
They take the train as far as they can, but because it’s out of the way, it’s a bit of a walk. And Chuuya doesn’t stagger, because he isn’t sick enough for that, but perhaps he’s a fool for thinking as such. Shirase’s arm is around him the entire walk.
Because Chuuya needs it, of course. Not at all because this is the closest they’ve been. Part of Chuuya is remorseful about the simple notion that Shirase’s been sleeping on his couch while Chuuya takes his bed this whole time, but Chuuya misses the years and years they spent sleeping next to each other, curled up as far as they could.
Perhaps getting older means they distance themselves from the simple pleasure of company. That’s what Chuuya will go right on believing, because the alternative — that Shirase does not want to be near him — is unfathomable.
When the airport is in sight, the dreary London air stinging Chuuya’s lungs and eyes in turn, Shirase only murmurs in Chuuya’s ear.
He can barely make out figures, but part of him wants to laugh. How injured did Shirase say he was?
What description could possibly make both Kouyou and Dazai stand each other long enough to sit in the same plane for that long, for little old Chuuya? Did Shirase say he had few hours to live or something? All he can see is the fluttering trench coat and red kimono in the wind, but it’s enough identification.
“You don’t have to go,” Shirase does, and it’s a plea in and of itself, but they are not who the other prays to, not anymore.
Chuuya is barely standing on his feet, but he stands proud, and he faces the future the way he can never do with the past: with dignity. Without the memories of a child.
Chuuya smiles, rueful, and the poison running through his system, the black veins, the lethargic heaviness on his chest and the blocks of missing memories are all worth it for the simple fact that Shirase stayed.
They never got a proper farewell. They never got to acknowledge what they’d become, who they were becoming.
They have, now. Even if Chuuya’s barely functioning.
A doctor, huh? He never asked why Shirase wanted to become a doctor, put himself through med school. Maybe he should’ve. Maybe he should’ve asked a lot more questions instead of reminiscing on who they used to be.
They’re walking to the plane ready to take Chuuya back to Yokohama, though, and it isn’t the time for such thought.
“We both know that I do,” Chuuya answers, because it is the only answer, because it shouldn’t be true but it will be, always and forever.
Their places are not next to each other anymore.
“Hey,” Chuuya says, “next time, you can haul your ass to Yokohama, huh?”
(It’s funny, because they both know that Shirase cannot return to the city that he grew up in.)
“Yeah. Yeah, I’ll go and get myself deathly injured the next time I want to see you. You can always call!”
Shirase’s number is written in Sharpie on Chuuya’s arm, smudged and in painfully familiar handwriting, numbers that taught him to count and then numbers he emulated when he got far better at the math and physics side of things than Shirase had ever expected.
When they get close enough to the plane — and by extension, Kouyou and Dazai — that it no longer makes sense for Shirase to walk with him, Shirase doesn’t release Chuuya’s shoulders from his grasp.
“Seriously,” Shirase says, dropping his voice from the playful lilt it’d taken on. “Call. Just… call.”
Chuuya doesn’t know how to say goodbye.
So he doesn’t.
Instead, he nods, and he stands there and lets Shirase hold him because it’s never something he can justify otherwise, and he does what they have both become accustomed to: he leaves.
Chuuya calls. Shirase answers.
Shirase calls. Chuuya can’t answer. He does leave a voicemail, though, and he’s clearly tipsy.
“Hey, Chuuya. You remember the first time you had liquor? Man, you passed out hard… Any — uh, anyway. That wasn’t why I called. When you were here. About — about the family thing and the souls and — and I don’t know. I don’t know if souls are real, but I know that family is, and — and if souls are real, then I know you have a piece of mine, you know? You’re Chuuya. Chuu-Chuu. Do you think that we’re still family, in another life? Are we still family? I think we are. Soulbound.”
It stops there.
Chuuya plays it on repeat all night, and saves it, and backs it up to every platform he can think of just so that he guarantees he won’t lose it.