Work Text:
"...And now to the weather. The snowstorm that hit Yokohama shows no sign of stopping, and a new disturbance will arrive from the sea in the coming days..."
Oda opened his eyes lazily, awakened by voices coming from the television.
The news reporter smiled at him from the screen, wishing him a good continuation of the day. Oda lifted his head from the armrest of the couch and his neck protested because of the uncomfortable position in which he had fallen asleep.
He knew he was not the one who had turned on the television. He rarely did and each time he ended up falling as
asleep in front of it or distracting himself with something else. Oda must have bumped the remote control in his sleep, which, falling to the floor, had turned on the device by itself.
Or it had been Dazai, who was sleeping on the edge side, with the only available pillow under his head and his back pressed against the older man’s chest.
Oda encircled him with one arm, under the black coat they had retrieved from the floor to cover themselves, Dazai had tucked one leg between his own because of the little space the coach offered them. The 18-year-old was warm and comfortable. Oda had earned a stiff neck that would accompany him for at least a couple of days, and the coat did not reach his back. He brushed the younger man's stomach with his fingertips, intentionally tickling him.
Dazai lifted his knee in an automatic gesture, mumbling a few sleepy moans. He stretched against the man behind him in a deliberately provocative manner.
Oda concluded that he was not as deeply asleep as he appeared. "Dazai?"
A groan informed him that he had his full attention.
"Go to the bedroom, get into bed."
Dazai tossed back into the embrace, completely depriving Oda of the coat in the process. "And where are you going?" He asked. The bandages covering the right side of his face had loosened, freeing his eye and going to tangle with his hair that was already ruffled by its nature.
"I'll smoke a cigarette and join you," Oda replied, rising on one elbow to step over him and retrieve his clothes from the floor. Before he could, Dazai tightened his fingers around the hand with which he touched him. "It's cold..." He sighed, although he was the only one of them was covered.
"That's why I told you to go to bed."
"I'll be cold even in bed if I go alone."
Oda freed his hand from the younger man's, slipping his fingers under the bandages that fell haphazardly over his face, and finally loosened them.
Not at all disturbed by the gesture, Dazai went along with his movements by pushing against the warm palm. He moved closer, wrapping his lover in the black coat with him, dissuading him from moving away from the warmth created by the closeness of their bodies. "Stay, Odasaku," he said. "It's too cold to be alone."
Oda had the impression that there was more to those words than their mere meaning. It happened often, after all. He didn’t investigate. If he had had a good reason to get up from that couch, he had forgotten it the moment both of Dazai's dark eyes had met his own.
Oda stretched his arm over the edge of the sofa and, fortunately for him, the search for the remote control was short.
As soon as the TV went off and the comfortable silence of the apartment became the undisputed master of the scene, Dazai knew he had won. His lips curved into a smile even before Oda graced them with his own. He adjusted the black coat over his lover's shoulders as the latter shifted above him.
They forgot the cold for a while, losing themselves in each other's warmth.
"I hope you are not answering the phone because, finally, you have managed to die, but if not, you have to know that I will kill you with my own hands!"
It was Nakahara Chuuya's voice that woke Oda the second time.
"Hey, idiot, listen… I can see you're online! Stop ignoring me, asshole!"
He had fallen asleep on Dazai, and the younger man was playing absentmindedly with his hair, listening to the progression of his partner in crime’s - literally - wrath message after message.
"I hope you've slipped down some dark alley, beating your fucking head in!"
It was not exactly the best soundtrack after the afternoon they had spent together on that couch. They had to move to the bed, but the warmth enveloping Oda at that moment, with the steady beat of Dazai's heart against his ear, was an invitation to desist.
He heard the beep-beep of the phone, caused by the younger man typing on the display. A more mature and calm voice took the place of Nakahara's.
"Dazai, all the city streets are blocked because of the snow. No one knows where you are and the Boss is worried about your safety."
It was Hirotsu, the commander of the Black Lizard.
"Yes..." Whispered Dazai to himself, typing something else. "I'm sure he's dying of worry."
"You should call them," Oda said.
Dazai stopped stroking his hair, realizing that he was awake and had been listening to him for a while. “Chuuya’s voice disturbed you, didn't it?"
Oda lifted his head to look at him. "You should tell someone you're here."
Dazai huffed, looking at the display of his phone with a pout. "I don’t want to risk Chuuya flying in to retrieve me…"
The younger man began to scroll through the contacts saved in the mobile device’s memory, reflecting silently. When he found the solution to the problem, his dark eyes glowed with a sly light. He selected the poor unfortunate man's number and brought his phone to his ear, threading his fingers through Oda's hair to invite him to relax back on his chest.
"Ango!" Hummed Dazai cheerfully.
Yes, Oda should have expected that.
"Apparently they're issuing a missing person's notice at our headquarters. It's for me. Let someone, not Chuuya, know that I was caught off guard by the snowstorm during a walk and that Odasaku kindly offered me shelter! Bye-bye!"
Dazai closed the communication before Ango could respond in any way. Oda could almost see him in his office, with the phone still pressed against his ear and his expression dumbfounded. On the next night at the Lupin, he would buy him an apology drink.
The reality of the situation was a little different: they had arranged to meet, and Dazai had chosen the right day and time for all hell to break loose on Yokohama just as they were at home together.
"How did you do it?" Oda asked.
Dazai dropped his phone somewhere with disinterest. "What are you talking about?"
"You calculated the precise moment to be stuck here with me."
The younger man didn’t answer immediately. He pressed his lips against his hair and laughed. "I'm flattered, but I don't have such great abilities," he said. "It was just a pleasant coincidence."
Without the cell phone clutched between his fingers, Dazai could now caress him with his right hand as well. Oda closed his eyes, relaxing completely against him. He was about to fall asleep again when the younger man broke the silence.
"Did you like snow when you were a child?"
It was not a strange question by its nature, but the fact that it came out of Dazai's mouth was. In the world in which they both lived, no one had ever had a childhood, not in the traditional sense of the word. Oda himself couldn’t remember what had happened before the day a gun had been placed in his hands. The story of the young demon of the Port Mafia was only the darkest of all. Dazai Osamu's life before his fourteenth birthday was a black hole into which no one had been able to shed light yet. Dazai himself spoke as if there had been nothing before his encounter with the current Boss of the Port Mafia.
That question was a door ajar to a dark room, but Oda knew he could not open it wide. "No," he replied. "Snow is not a good thing when you don't have a roof over your head. Experienced hitmen are a guarantee, kids are a risk, and no one likes to take risks when it comes to killing someone."
Dazai sank his nose into his red hair and closed his eyes. "Elise likes the snow."
Oda had no idea who Elise was.
"The first winter I spent with Mori, she tormented me because she wanted me to play with her," the younger man continued. "It was always cold in the clinic, but she didn't feel it. Elise can't feel the cold."
Oda was not sure if the story he was listening to was real and not a nightmare hatched from Dazai's mind.
"And I wanted to make her feel it. I didn't know if it was possible, so I gave it a try: I indulged her and played in the snow with her."
The silence that followed was as heavy as a boulder.
"And what happened?" Oda asked.
"I ripped off her coat, pushed her into a pile of snow, and pressed her face against the frozen ground until she could get free. She slapped me and cried really, really hard. But you want to know the best part?"
Oda knew there was no need to answer him.
"She didn't have a mark on her. In the scuffle, her stockings had broken, and without her coat, there was only a little dress to cover her but she didn’t feel cold." Dazai stopped talking, his dark eyes fixed on the window opposite the sofa: it was still snowing. "The cold eat you up," he added, after a while. "It seems to take a bite out of your skin, until it reaches deep and mauls you. It does it slowly, though, one piece at a time, so that you don't die right away and-"
"Dazai." Oda lifted his head and looked him straight in the eye. He didn’t interrupt him because it bothered him what his lover was telling him - he could have shared far more gruesome stories - but because he had stopped talking to him . It happened that in the midst of a conversation or of a story story, Dazai would plunge into a digression that was nothing more than a chronicle of the flow of his thoughts. It had taken Oda time to recognize those moments, and sometimes it happened even in Ango's presence. He didn’t like them. It was not safe to let Dazai get lost in his own mind.
The younger man kept his eyes fixed on his own for a long moment, then blinked, and those dark irises stopped being those of a dead man. "Once, Hirotsu took us ice-skating," he said suddenly, as if the tale from just before had never been told.
Oda propped his elbow between the couch cushions so he could look into his face.
"We weren't in Yokohama but I don't remember where we were," Dazai added, with renewed glee. "Chuuya and I were fighting, as usual, and I think Mori wanted to get rid of us for a couple of hours. Someone came up with the idea of going skating - perhaps Mori himself - and Chuuya made it his umpteenth declaration of war against me."
"You told me you want to make him your dog," Oda said in a neutral tone, trying to put an unruly lock behind the the other’s head.
"He is the one who suggested it to me," replied Dazai. "Every time he sees me, he barks and growls!"
"And how did it end up on the rink?"
"It was a pond just outside of town. Chuuya cheated right from the start, he didn't really skate for even half a second, he just changed gravity as he saw fit."
"How about you?"
Dazai shrugged his shoulders. "I lost interest while watching another fake pirouette in the air. Chuuya was enjoying himself and I was bored." Pause. "Then I noticed that warning signs had been put up toward the center of the lake, where the ice was thinner."
Oda knew where this was going.
"They were all caught up in watching Chuuya make a spectacle of himself and didn't notice me going over the barrier. I had read that falling into the icy water kills almost instantly, so I began to kick at the ice to break it..." A pause for effect.
"Was it Nakahara who pulled you out?" Oda asked.
"No." Dazai sighed dejectedly. "I never broke the ice. I slipped and hit my head. When I woke up, I heard Mori declare that I had sprained my ankle and Chuuya was yelling all the insults in his repertoire at me."
Oda, by now, had gotten used to those kinds of stories but, perhaps because of that rare domestic intimacy they had found themselves sharing, he covered his eyes with one hand that time and let out a half-hearted laugh.
Surprisingly, Dazai made no comment on that reaction. Oda felt him disentangle himself from him and hurriedly get up from the couch, taking his black coat away with him. Struck by the sudden wave of cold, the man’s attack of hilarity was short-lived.
"Dazai?" He leaned over the back of the sofa just in time to see Dazai step out onto the balcony with only the black coat on.
They were on the tenth floor.
"Dazai!" Oda slipped his pants on in less than a second, but he was not in time to make it around the couch when a snowball hit him square in the face.
He froze, not so much from the cold as from surprise. He ran a hand over his eyes. Dazai was standing in sliding window and shivering from head to toe, but he was smiling like a child seeing snow for the first time.
"I was seized by a thought, Odasaku," he declared, bending down to pick up more from the balcony floor. "Before I die, maybe it's worth trying this snowball fight thing- Eh!"
Oda gave him no time to prepare a second attack. He lift him up on the shoulder in a single, swift movement and took his way to the bedroom. Dazai weighed nothing, which reminded Oda that it was good for both of them to eat something. He had forgotten one crucial detail: Dazai still had snow in his hands. He remembered this when he felt it slipping under the elastic of his pants. The shock was such that he lost his grip on Dazai, who tried to cling to him, causing them both to fall.
Oda landed on one elbow so as not to crush the younger man, whose head touched the floor with a resounding tonk.
"Dazai!"
All his worry disappeared in the crystalline sound of Dazai's laughter. "Odasaku," he said, out of breath. "I'm going to get a bump!"
Oda felt the injured part to make sure there was no other damage besides that.
"Ouch!" Dazai immediately pushed him away.
"You have a hard head," Oda commented.
"Yes, many people tell me that," Dazai replied. "That doesn't take away from the fact that it hurts."
"You're the one who stuffed snow in my pants," Oda reminded him, without any intonation in particular.
With Dazai it was like that, and there was no point in scolding him for his nature. He could only stay in the dark with him, waiting for a glow of light that might never come for either of them. Or maybe it would. His power did not allow him to see that far.
Oda tried to get up, but Dazai wrapped his arms around his neck. "Wait..." He murmured, pulling him toward him. "It's cold," he added, before kissing him on the lips.
"Because we are on the floor," Oda replied. "I'll make you something to eat, we'll take a shower and then continue to bed."
"What if, in the meantime, the snow melts?" Once again, Dazai meant much more than he said. Oda understood him without asking for an explanation.
That day, thanks to the snow, the world had stood still, but it was nothing more than an instant-long gift, and that instant had to be experienced in its entirety before it slipped away.
Oda knew this better than anyone: time could not be rewound. Every kiss they deprived themselves of was lost forever, and for those who lived a life like theirs, tomorrow was a luxury they could not afford.
Any objection to staying on that floor died against Dazai’s lips.
There was no other way to write their story but one moment at a time.
Dazai Osamu was not a certainty, but an intense, dangerous, fleeting moment; the only one that Oda Sakunosuke had failed to foresee and escape.
Assuming he had ever wanted to.