Work Text:
FIVE YEARS AGO
“How was that?”
Dazai can’t help but smile as Chuuya lazily wipes his hand over his mouth. “A decent nine out of ten.”
“Just a nine? What was missing?”
“I can think of something,” he says, wrapping his arm around Chuuya’s waist to reel him in for a kiss. A lifetime of abstinence from affection has made Dazai immune to pretty much every type of physical temptation — except to Chuuya’s French accent. A bit inconvenient considering Chuuya can be quite chatty, and yet this is the type of sickness that Dazai doesn’t mind having, not as long as it leads to this.
“You know,” Chuuya murmurs against him right before capturing his lips one, two… and three more times, “you’re the only guy I’ve ever been with who doesn’t mind kissing after getting sucked off.”
“Maybe that’s a sign to be with other guys then,” Dazai replies and cups the back of his head to get him closer.
A hand on his chest stops him. Chuuya leans away with a startled smile. “Ha ha. Funny.”
“I’m not joking.”
“And I’m not —“ Chuuya shakes his head. “I’m not…”
Dazai tilts his head, feigning obliviousness. It doesn’t take telepathic skills to guess what Chuuya’s scattered sentence fragments are supposed to convey, but pretending otherwise is way more fun. The only thing more irresistible than his accent is his bewildered surprise every time Dazai attempts to redefine the nature of their relationship.
“I’m not just doing guys,” Chuuya ends up declaring. “Women are much less squeamish.”
Good save, Dazai has to give him that. Something that deserves a reward. He intends to give that to him by lowering his mouth back to his jaw —
Until Chuuya pushes him away again, a low noise escaping from his throat. “Enough already.”
Dazai sighs and stretches one arm around the back of his neck as Chuuya slips out of bed. “Who’s the one being squeamish now?”
“I’m not squeamish. I just —“ Hopping around on one foot to get into his pants, he curses under his breath. “I gotta go. As much fun as I had christening your apartment… a few dozen times… I promised Ryuu to play video games with him tonight.”
“You do realize you don’t have to look after the brats when you’re off the clock, right?”
“I’m aware of my job description, Dazai. I just have this thing called a heart?” Chuuya’s smirk glints like a knife dipped in sugar, saccharine sweet and merciless. “I dunno, you’ve probably never heard of it since you barely speak to your siblings.”
“My heart is too busy beating for other things, I guess.”
Chuuya almost falls over at that. Hastily righting himself, he shoots Dazai a dirty look. “I’m leaving now.”
Dazai has to resist the urge to pin Chuuya down to the floor and spend the next thirty minutes ruffling his feathers all over again. Making him squirm tastes sweeter than any type of stimulant that Dazai has ever tried. It’s addicting. He needs more.
“Wait. I’ll drive you.”
“I can find my own way home,” Chuuya answers from the bathroom.
“I know.” Dazai throws on a pair of slacks and a button-up that make him presentable enough to enter his family home in record time. “But I…”
Chuuya comes out refreshed like he didn’t spent the last two hours mewling like a cat in heat in Dazai’s bed. Still very handsome although Dazai prefers him fucked out, too spent to care about anything other than what his body needs. “You what?”
“I need to discuss something with my father anyway. You just happen to live in the same house as him.” Without waiting for his permission, Dazai strides out of the room, slapping his ass in passing. “Now let’s go.”
It earns him a grunt that doesn’t sound too displeased.
***
THREE YEARS AND ONE MONTH AGO
“Do you want to get married?”
It takes a few seconds for the question to reach Chuuya’s brain as he frowns at the pile of papers in his lap, but once it does, it hits him with the suddenness of a ball to the head. Pausing, he shoots Dazai a wide-eyed look. “Hah?”
He has been studying in bed for the last hour, still feeling too under the weather from the cold he caught a week ago to go to the library, and Dazai has been massaging his ankle and doing… well, something, staying close without distracting him, so the question comes entirely out of the blue.
“Do you want to get married?” Dazai repeats casually as though Chuuya didn’t hear him.
“What, like right now?”
Dazai snort dampens Chuuya’s panic. Somewhat. “No, I mean someday. In five years or something like that.”
This time, Chuuya purses his lips to think, not necessarily about the question but about the timeline. Five years seems like a lot of years to wait for something he would do next month — provided they agreed on it in advance. “Yeah, I’d like to do that eventually,” he finally says and looks at Dazai. “Do you?”
“Really?” Dazai asks instead and with such genuine surprise that Chuuya feels the need to put his things away and turn over to scowl at him.
“What do you mean ‘really’? We’ve been together for almost two years now. We live together. Of course I want to marry you someday.”
“Yeah, but…” Dazai trails off and makes an indecipherable hand gesture. “Marrying is such an adult thing to do and you’re like what? Eighteen? Aren’t you too young to think of such serious things?”
“I’m turning twenty-one in three months, you idiot,” Chuuya mutters, swatting him in the chest. “And you’re the one who brought it up!”
Grasping his hand, Dazai uses it to tug him closer, so they’re lying face to face even if only to antagonize him some more. “So you’re twenty. Adding the three-month thing won’t make you any older, Chuuya.”
Chuuya rolls his eyes. “Point is I’m an adult.”
“Barely.”
“If you’re so old, what are your thoughts on marriage?”
“For the longest time, I believed that it was just another form of social posturing, a way of saying ‘look at me, I’m capable of legally binding someone to me.’ Well, that, and the tax benefits.”
“But?”
“But,” Dazai says, his throat bobbing, “I would really like to marry you someday.”
Even though it’s hardly shocking, Chuuya still can’t stop himself from grinning. Dazai was right. It sounds so serious. And while Chuuya’s feelings have been serious for a long time now, there is something alluring about having that gravity on paper. It’s the comment from earlier that makes him raise his brows. “Good, but five years? Really?”
“Too fast?”
“Too slow, christ. Why would we wait that long?”
“I figured you’d want to finish studying first.”
“We can wait until I’m done with my bachelor’s degree but…” He shrugs, a little sheepishly. “You know, I like the idea of saying I have a husband once I start my master’s. Or while I’m doing it.”
“Nakahara-Dazai Chuuya,” Dazai murmurs as though testing out the words.
Chuuya wiggles closer with a smile. “Sounds good, right?”
“Very.”
“Nakahara-Dazai Osamu,” Chuuya tries as well. It rolls off his tongue like their names were made to be joined eventually. Perfect.
“So,” Dazai clears his throat after a moment or two, “how long before the wedding are you supposed to propose?”
“Something like a year?”
Dazai’s eyes widen. “Oh. That’s…”
“Soon?” Chuuya barks out a laugh. “Well, yeah, weddings require a lot of planning and considering half of the people we’re going to invite live in Japan, it’d be good if they cleared their schedules in advance.”
Dazai acknowledges that with a pensive tilt of his head before falling silent, his attention wandering somewhere Chuuya can’t follow. He has his guesses though.
“You’re already planning when to propose, aren’t you?”
“No,” Dazai says way too quickly for it to be true. What a conniving bastard.
Huffing, Chuuya rolls over and crosses his arms over his chest. “I guess I’ll have to surprise you first then.”
“Love, we both know that I always win our little games,” Dazai says, reaching over to squeeze his wrist.
Chuuya stubbornly stares at the ceiling. “Keep believing that.”
Dazai tugs and prods until Chuuya half-heartedly slaps him away and ends up with his boyfriend above him, eyes shiny with amusement. “I don’t believe,” he drawls. “I know.”
Chuuya pretends to be unimpressed by the whole display despite the needy urge to wrap his legs around Dazai’s torso and grind into him. Instead he just arches one brow. “Do I still have my wishes?”
His reply is a suspicious squint. That’s a yes.
Chuuya opens his mouth but Dazai beats him to it. “You can’t use that as your wish.”
“I haven’t said anything.”
“You were going to tell me to let you propose first and no.”
It’s Chuuya’s turn to narrow his eyes. “You owe me, remember? The whole it was just a game thing and all that?”
“You’re the one who insisted that I don’t have to do anything,” Dazai shoots back. At least his guilt no longer paralyzes him. That’s progress even if Chuuya could have used it for once.
“Asshole.”
Dazai’s satisfied smile is a dizzying thing, even more so when he leans down to capture Chuuya’s lips. He keeps it deliberately slow, denying Chuuya the depth he craves by interlacing their fingers and pinning them to the bed every time he tries to get more. A disappointed whine slips out of him as Dazai retreats completely.
“Your fingers are so lovely,” Dazai murmurs, making Chuuya frown dazedly. “You don’t happen to know the ring size of them?”
With a gasp, Chuuya jerks his hands out of Dazai and hides both of them underneath his back. “No. And neither do you.”
Dazai sits back on his heels to shoot him a wry look. It is as infuriating as it is attractive. “Come on, love. You can tell me now, or I can wait until you fall asleep — and you will fall asleep first after we’re done here. Either way, I’ll get the measurements.”
“I’ll sleep with gloves.”
“I’ll take them off.”
“I’ll sleep in the other room. With my door locked.”
Dazai’s smugness wanes into a pout.
“Don’t look at me like that.”
“But…”
“No buts.”
Dropping down to wrap his arms around Chuuya’s waist, Dazai sniffs pathetically. “But who will kick me awake at night and hog the blanket?”
“I do not hog the blanket!”
“Whose snoring will I listen to?”
“Wow, alright. Tell me how you really feel.”
“I feel…”
Chuuya just grunts.
“I feel like I’ll marry you someday,” Dazai finishes, nuzzling his neck and this time Chuuya doesn’t bother stifling his grin. Someday can’t come any sooner.
***
ELEVEN MONTHS AGO
“As much as I enjoy chatting with you, I actually invited you both for a reason. There is something I want to discuss.”
“See?” Paul lifts his cup of coffee to his mouth with a smug smile, clearly speaking to his husband even though he stares straight ahead at Dazai. “I told you.”
Arthur’s expression doesn’t falter. “Ignore him, Osamu. Go on.”
The plan was not to beat around the bush. It’s why he arranged this meeting with Chuuya’s fathers on a whim. He didn’t want to leave himself any time to stop and overanalyze anything — their possible reactions, the timeline of his relationship with Chuuya, Chuuya’s university schedule, the state of the world, and yet now that he is here, seated across from Arthur and Paul in their favorite café in the Marais district where every waiter practically knows them, he feels like his heart is lodged in his throat.
“I want to ask Chuuya to marry me,” he finally gets out and lets out a shaky breath. That wasn’t so bad. “I’m not here to get your permission. I don’t think I need it and Chuuya wouldn’t appreciate it either, but I figured you would like to know.”
“We do, thank you.” Then Verlaine rises to his feet to hold out his hand for him. “More importantly though: congratulations.”
“He hasn’t said yes y—“
Arthur’s bear hug steals the rest of Dazai’s sentence. It takes him a few seconds to overcome his surprise and tentatively return the gesture, albeit somewhat stiffly. As much as he enjoys clinging to Chuuya and leeching off his body heat whenever he can, he is still getting used to how casually affectionate his fathers are, especially with Dazai, even three years into their relationship. Arthur and Paul have every reason to be wary of him — and they were at first, but for reasons he can’t quite comprehend, they have opened their hearts and their home to him over time and have treated him like an integral part of the family ever since. They regularly invite him over for coffee and cake — for any kind of food really, even when Chuuya isn’t around; Paul has been helping him navigate the Parisian social network; Arthur has given him some valuable Chuuya-advice on more than one occasion… and they hug him. A lot.
“There aren’t many things in life that are 100% certain but Chuuya saying yes to marrying you is one of them,” Arthur says after pulling back though not without enthusiastically shaking Dazai’s hand first.
“Have you already bought the ring?” Paul asks. “I can give you the name of Chuuya’s favorite jeweler.”
Dazai nods even though having this information on hand seems awfully convenient. Chuuya’s preferred type of ornaments can hardly be found at a jeweler — not unless the jeweler sells spiked chokers, body piercings, and belt chains. Well, Chuuya did vow to be the first to propose. At least they are operating on the same timeline.
“When are you planning to do it?” Arthur clutches his hands to his chest with a gasp. “Oh, you’re going to do it during your trip to Yokohama, aren’t you?”
“That’s not a problem with you, is it? I thought we could get engaged over there and have the wedding here.”
“We wouldn’t be present either way. I assume it will be a private affair, yes?” Verlaine guesses correctly and gives Dazai’s confirmation a thumbs-up. “Good choice, son. Chuuya will prefer that.”
Arthur sniffs then, eyes already blurring. “It would be nice if you sent pictures. Lots of pictures.”
“Of course, Mr. Nakahara,” Dazai says a little awkwardly. He hasn’t seen his father cry even once, so he was more than taken aback when Arthur started tearing up over a toast for Chuuya’s birthday during Dazai’s first year in Paris.
“That’s Arthur to you,” Paul reminds him for the hundredth time. “You don’t need to take Chuuya’s name to be family.” He shoots Dazai a private smile before reaching over to squeeze his husband’s arm. “Sweetheart, save your tears for the actual wedding.”
“Don’t joke about that.” Arthur shakes his head as he uses a napkin to dab at his eyes. “But speaking of the wedding —“
***
EIGHT MONTHS AGO
“I’m so full I could die.” Flopping down next to Dazai on the bed, Chuuya rests his hands on his belly. “I can barely breathe.”
Dazai hums to commiserate with him. “Let’s die together.”
“You haven’t eaten that much,” Chuuya says, shooting him a side-eye before he noisily rolls over to poke Dazai’s abs. “There’s nothing in there.”
“Well, I made a point to save some space for tonight, unlike Chuuya.”
Leaning his head against Dazai’s shoulder, Chuuya groans, his voice muffled when he speaks. “’s Hayashi’s fault. She kept filling my plate again and so I just… I ate.”
Dazai can’t help but smile as he strokes Chuuya’s bloated belly. “I’m sure you’ll be good to go again in an hour. Maybe even less.”
“I better be.”
“Let’s take a nap. Or…”
“Or what?”
Dazai’s grin answers his question before he even cups Chuuya’s chin to capture his mouth for one, two, three lazy kisses. “Or we do this.”
Ever so needy, Chuuya returns each slide of lips with a dizzying urgency, swinging one leg over Dazai’s hip to nestle closer and slide a hand into his hair.
“As much as I would like to revive some old memories and make out with you in your old room,” he murmurs as his fingertips trace a path from Dazai’s jaw to his collarbones, “we promised to hang out with the kids.”
“They can wait a few minutes.”
Chuuya makes this desperate, little hiccuping noise against Dazai’s mouth before he mumbles, “Osamu…”
“Alright,” Dazai relents and holds up his hands. “I’m not touching you anymore.”
While he would prefer to spend the time until their date lazing around in bed, Chuuya brings up a decent point. Dazai’s relationship with his siblings has been sub-par, at best, partly because he couldn’t find it in him to make an effort when he was still living in Yokohama and partly because once he decided to at least try a little, he moved to another continent. For some reason, neither Akutagawa and Gin don’t seem to loathe him though, so whenever he finds himself back home, he actively plans to spend a few hours of his day with them. It’s much easier when Chuuya isn’t around to distract him —
Chuuya, who scowls at him like Dazai just declared a month of celibacy. “I didn’t say you can’t touch me. Just touch me downstairs…” His brows furrow even harder as Dazai arches a brow. “Not like that. Y’know what I mean.”
“Not sure I do. You’re giving me a lot of mixed signals here.”
It takes another ten minutes of playful bickering until they make their way downstairs where the little ones have been watching TV — or playing video games — Dazai isn’t sure what kids are up to these days…
Grumpily staring at their iPad and painting their fingernails, apparently.
Since Chuuya claims the seat next to Ryuu on the couch and effortlessly starts chatting with him, Dazai sinks down on the floor across from Gin. She has grown from a lanky pipsqueak into a lanky ten-year-old that’s almost as tall as Chuuya — alright, maybe she is still missing a few centimeters. The point is she has gotten older and it’s one thing to be aware of the passing of time; it’s quite another to see it.
“You’re good at this,” he says with a nod toward her nails, painted half-black and half-purple. “Maybe you’ll become an artist.”
“Mommy says artists don’t make any money.”
Dazai’s smile stiffens. He hears Chuuya snort from the couch and he punishes him with a scowl before clearing his throat. “Mommy doesn’t know what she is talking about.”
Not that Gin will have to worry much anyway. Her father might have cut Dazai out of his will, but he has to leave the fortunes of his empire to someone — and that isn’t even including the money Hayashi gained from the divorce. Gin and Ryuu will be taken care of, no matter what their mommy says. Dazai would tell Hayashi that too, but she had to go to some social event that she couldn’t miss.
“Why not?” Gin asks curiously, tilting her head to the side.
“Well, there are a lot of artists and many of them are successful.”
“Are you an artist?”
“No, not really.”
“So what do you do?”
“I run a business.”
“Like daddy?”
“Yeah, something like that.”
Gin finishes her nails and Dazai prepares to be hit with the next difficult question. Instead she asks, “Do you want me to do yours too?”
“Hm?” Dazai glances at Gin, pointedly looking at his hands. This is the one day in his life that kind of requires him to have neat, good-looking fingers, but his ‘no’ evaporates the moment he catches Chuuya’s eyes across the room. The knowing glint in them screams ‘I dare you to come up with an excuse.’ Naturally, that leaves Dazai with only one choice. “Sure. As long as you do Chuuya’s too. Something matching, yes?”
“Something bright and shiny,” Chuuya agrees all too willingly, already on his way over. He uses Dazai as a crutch to sit down, a slight wince crossing his face. “What colors do you have, Gin?”
As Gin presents them with their options, Dazai reaches over to massage Chuuya’s ankle, listening but only half-heartedly. Chuuya is clearly set on getting engaged with the most obnoxiously painted nails anyway. After they settle on a peppy pink nail polish, Gin instructs Dazai to hold out his hand and spread his fingers.
“You want yours done too, bud?”
Dazai’s gaze flickers to the side where Ryuu has silently joined their huddle, appearing both intrigued and uncertain by Chuuya’s offer.
“I don’t know.”
“You can have black nails like me,” Gin says while squinting at the work she is doing. “It will look much better than this one.”
“Yes, it’s hideous.”
Chuuya leans against him and meets Dazai’s eyes, looking like he isn’t sure whether to laugh or be offended.
“Ryuu isn’t wrong, you know,” Dazai murmurs, which earns him an elbow in the ribs.
“It’s not hideous!” Chuuya insists, running his fingers over the hand that is already finished. Only his gaze is fixed not on Dazai’s nails but on the spot where a ring would sit. “It’s very… pretty. Really.”
Dazai pokes his chin to save him before he gets any more distracted and switching to French, he says, “Stop fantasizing about me when I’m right here. It’s rude.”
The flush that heats Chuuya’s neck is almost as bright and as pink as the nail polish. It’s the opposite of hideous though.
***
They have a date at Lupin the same day. Dazai gave his employees a night off, so it’s just the two of them here, surrounded by fairy lights and candles. It’s romantic. Which is sort of the point.
“Something wrong with the food?”
Chuuya blinks at his plate — mostly untouched, then at Dazai. “No, the food’s perfect.” Diced Wagyu beef steak. Expensive and worth every penny. “I’m just…”
“Still too full from earlier?” Dazai asks, mouth tipping up into a half-smile.
“Something like that.” The truth is that he is too damn excited to eat. Whereas stress makes him gorge on food — and sometimes on Dazai, the nerves fluttering through his whole body achieve the opposite, taking up too much space to stuff anything else in there. It would be somewhat ridiculous if there wasn’t a 99% chance of an engagement by the end of this date.
Clearing his throat, Chuuya forces himself to get his shit together. “It’s nice being back. Yokohama always makes me so weirdly nostalgic even though I only spent one year here.” His brows furrow. “Less than a year. Ten months.”
“That’s still a long time,” Dazai says with a hum before waggling his brows. “And it’s not like it was insignificant either. You met some pretty important people.”
“Wow, really? Haven’t noticed.”
“Maybe you should pay more attention.” Dazai grins at him, all bright eyes and playfulness — it’s a look Chuuya gets to see every day, several times a day actually, but it makes him feel tipsy all the same.
He has to tear his gaze away to stop himself from dropping to his knees right here and now. “It did feel like a lifetime back then,” he says, determined to stay on topic for a little longer. “You know, I miss ballet a lot but I only realized how much of my life it consumed after I had to stop and start living instead. Actually living.”
“Would you change things if you could?”
“You mean my injury?”
Dazai nods; underneath the table, his foot finds Chuuya’s, giving him a gentle poke.
He sighs. “I don’t think I would. I would have been too busy at the dancing academy to travel much, let alone do an au pair year.” He pauses. “I wouldn’t have met you.”
It’s odd that the same injury that made Chuuya miserable for so long is by a sick twist of fate responsible for guiding him here, to Dazai. Talk about cosmic balance.
“I considered an exchange semester in Paris once upon a time,” Dazai informs him as he picks up a piece of steak.
“Of course you did. You were obsessed with me.”
“I was not obsessed.”
“Uh-uh.”
“I was very fond of you. A little infatuated.” Dazai points to him with the end of his chopstick. “You were just terrified of trusting me and acted like I was asking you to marry me every time I implied I saw you as something more than a fuck buddy.”
“Asking to marry me, huh?” Chuuya can’t help but parrot.
In Dazai’s defense, he takes the little nudge in stride, holding his gaze without even blinking once. “Yes.”
Chuuya shakes his head, not quite able to suppress his grin. “Fine, I might have been a bit dramatic, but you can’t deny that you were breaking every rule in the friends-with-benefits book. You don’t ask your fuck buddy to move to your country for several years. Or the other way around.”
“And what if you’re in love with your fuck buddy?”
“Then you’re supposed to deny it for as long as possible like the rest of us.”
Dazai arches his brows in the most condescending way possible and lifts his glass of wine to his lips. “We wouldn’t be here now if I had done that, would we?”
Chuuya tosses a peanut at him.
“Besides, you distracted me — I considered studying abroad before you showed up here.” He shrugs. “Maybe we’d have met anyway.”
“Yeah, and how do you figure that would have happened? I barely went anywhere other than to Romaine or my dancing school, and it’s not like you spent your free time watching ballet performances.”
“Hayashi does. During one of her visits, she would have dragged me to one of your shows, I’d have seen you, and the rest would be history.”
“Again, I was in a relationship at that time,” Chuuya points out.
Dazai’s face twists into the same grimace he makes whenever Chuuya picks up Baki’s poop while walking her. “With an idiot. I’d have stolen you.”
“I doubt you would have even wanted to. I was… different.” Dancing aside, he was way more uptight and temperamental. There is a reason why he didn’t have any friends to distract him from his misery after he lost both his calling and his boyfriend, and it’s not just because ballet is extremely competitive. Chuuya had stopped playing nice with his peers at some point. He had been too proud, too eager to prove that he belonged there just as much as everyone else to waste his time forming friendships. “You might have not liked me.”
“Chuuya,” Dazai says in a ‘who are you kidding?’ tone.
“I’m serious! I wasn’t very nice. I was kind of bitchy.”
“Was?”
“Oi.”
“I’m just saying. Have you ever heard what comes out of your mouth when you’re hungry?”
Chuuya gives him a half-hearted kick under the table but still lets Dazai play with his fingers when he reaches for them. “Alright, imagine me like that but a thousand times worse ‘cause I was hungry most of the time.”
“I probably would have liked you even better. Bitchy Chuuya is very sexy.”
“You do get off on it,” he admits, tilting his head from side to side. “It’s annoying. Always pisses me off even more.”
Then again…
“It also leads to rather passionate sex,” Dazai says as though they are sharing one brain. Sometimes it really feels like that. They spend so much time together, watch the same TV shows, discuss the same topics — they share one life — that they accidentally synchronize. What’s surprising is that it doesn’t make their relationship more boring. There are still enough sparks of novelty and excitement — the bedroom providing many of them although Dazai’s not being quite honest: they don’t need to fight to have passion even if it doesn’t hurt either. It’s comforting, knowing that he has a person, a partner who can not only finish his sentences but add to them.
Chuuya matches Dazai’s smoldering smile with a smirk of his own. “That it does. Maybe you’re right and we’d have gotten our shit together much sooner. Not like you were a buttercup when you were what? Nineteen?”
“Nineteen and full of angst,” Dazai confirms with a hum and tugs their joined hands to his mouth. The kiss he presses to Chuuya’s knuckles runs across his skin like water, eliciting shivers even once he draws away.
Not for the first time in their shared history, Chuuya feels the moment approach its climax, the air thickening and tensing, rendering every breath and word so final. The same sensation gripped his heart that day of Fitzgerald’s party all those years ago. They were chatting, flirting, and the closer the conversation drew to an end, the more he became aware of the significance of the minutes that would follow. The same sensation gripped his heart on the ride home on Halloween, the night he ended up actually having sex with Dazai. The same sensation gripped his heart as he stood in Dazai’s kitchen, unable to utter anything meaningful after Dazai had told him he was in love with him. In the airport, waiting for a guy that wouldn’t come. In the back office of Lupin while their friends were celebrating the opening. Outside his fathers’ apartment. Seeing Dazai step out of the car. Hearing Dazai ask him a question that would set the course of the rest of his life. It’s the sensation of standing at the edge of a cliff, wind whipping at your face, and making a choice to either step back and retreat into familiar territory or to step forward and fall and trust that someone will catch him. He hasn’t always made the right decision, too wrapped up in his insecurities and fears and circumstances, but now…
Now Chuuya is ready to take the plunge.
“So,” he says, licking his lips.
“So,” Dazai echoes, eyes bright and sharp. Resolute.
It’s enough to drain the remaining tension out of Chuuya’s lungs and draw out a breath of laughter instead. “You do realize I’m not going to turn around, yeah?”
If Dazai plans to get on his knees, he will have to do it in front of him and, more importantly, with him.
Dazai slightly raises his chin as though to stare him down into submission and when Chuuya only wryly grins back at him, he gives in with a sigh. “Fine. How about we do it at the same time?”
“I can agree to that.”
And so, without looking away from each other, they both reach inside their pockets and get out two little boxes; Dazai beats him to popping his open first, revealing a golden ring with a shiny blue sapphire in the center, and even though Chuuya knew this was coming, even though his box contains a ring too, something inside of him cracks and the excitement he has been bottling the whole day — or better yet, the past few months — spills over.
“Chuuya —“
“Yes,” Chuuya says, nodding wildly. “Yes, I do. Do you want to marry me?”
Dazai grabs his face. “Christ, at least let me finish the damn question.”
Chuuya sniffs, unable to hold back his wobbly grin. “I’ll let you do that if you answer first.”
“I do. I have never wanted anything more than to marry you.”
“Me neither.” Shaking his head, Chuuya exhales a laugh and lifts his hand to cup Dazai’s cheek. “I mean, go ahead. Ask.”
“Do you want to marry me?”
Chuuya gives him a nod. Then another. He keeps nodding as he presses his lips to Dazai’s, murmuring, “I do, I really, really do” over and over, again and again.
***
SEVEN AND A HALF MONTHS AGO
“— six interconnecting rooms overall, but this is the only suitable one for a seated dinner with all of the guests,” Dazai says. “We’re looking at about 34 people right now, so we’d be able to make it work.”
Chuuya pauses to glance around the room: like the rest of Hôtel d’Évreux, it’s pretty intimidating, dripping with gold — golden strips on the walls, gigantic golden chandeliers, even the candle holders are made out of gold. He feels like one wrong breath will break a glass and cost them three months of rent.
“There are two balconies with a view on Place Vendome,” Dazai continues, not nearly as fazed by the obscene opulence of this venue. “Good for pictures.”
“Are you sure civilians are allowed to marry here?” Chuuya asks, fingering the petals of a rose to see whether it’s real. It is. Very real. Very fresh. “Looks more like a place for important people.”
“Important people marry at places like Chateau de Vaux-le-Vicomte. Private weddings are very common here although it does require a black-tie dress code. Oh, and they provide their own catering.”
“Wow.”
Dazai’s gaze slides to him; a smile appears on his face. “You like it?”
“No — I mean yeah, sure, but —“ Chuuya gestures at him. “Wow, you’ve really done your research.”
He was sure Dazai would feel the same as him about the wedding planning: mildly terrified by all the choices that have to be made and otherwise not too concerned about the details, so when Dazai volunteered to take over the organization, Chuuya assumed he would leave the planning to Hayashi, who has been practically begging them to help. However, this is the second venue they’re visiting today and once again, Dazai prattles off information like he has been studying his whole life for this. It’s pretty attractive.
“Did you doubt me?” Dazai asks, coming closer to slide his arms around him.
“I just thought you wouldn’t care much.” That expression that meets him is so offended, he can’t help but laugh. He pats Dazai’s chest. “Not about marrying. About the wedding; i mean.”
“Well, it won’t be the end of the world if we don’t get the perfect venue, but.” Dazai frowns like he is as puzzled by this development as Chuuya. “It’s been strangely fun so far. And I’m familiar with the business anyway.”
“Hey, I’m not complaining. If you’re enjoying this, then by all means — Just — it’s not only so I won’t have to do any of the planning, right? Because Hayashi told us about a hundred times that she is willing to lend us a hand.”
“Oh no, Hayashi isn’t going anywhere near this,” Dazai declares. “She’ll plan the most outrageously extravagant wedding known to mankind. You would not like that.”
If this is Dazai’s version of something not outrageously extravagant, Chuuya is scared to picture what Hayashi would come up with. Thankfully, he doesn’t have to.
“Then it’s all up to you, love.”
“That’s the plan, yes.” Chuuya watches his mouth move, not entirely unaffected by how effortlessly confident he sounds about the whole, frankly, overwhelming and headache-inducing process. “I will still need you to give me your opinions here and there.”
“Uh-uh, sure. Anything you need.”
“Your thoughts on this venue, for example,” Dazai gently points out.
“I think…” Taking a deep breath, Chuuya scans the room before fixing his eyes on Dazai. “I think I need to fuck you really really badly.”
There is just something about Dazai taking charge of the wedding planning —
Or maybe it’s just Dazai taking charge in general. It boils down to the same thing.
“The bathrooms are over there. Let’s make sure they’re adequate, hm?”
“Let’s.”
***
SEVEN MONTHS AGO:
“Deep breaths.”
“She stole my wedding.”
By she, Dazai means Hayashi and by stole, he means that Hayashi showed up at their doorstep this morning without any warning whatsoever to announce that she hired herself as their wedding planner since “you two busy love birds are clearly too shy to ask for my assistance!” before laying out a proposal that contradicts every single decision they have made so far.
Chuuya presses out a clenched half-smile. “She wants to help.”
“I don’t want her help!” Dazai whisper-hisses, throwing up his hands. “Do you? Does anyone?”
They didn’t ask for it. They have told her a dozen times that the planning has been going splendidly, thank you very much, so unless Hayashi is suffering from early on-set dementia, he cannot for the life of him explain how she managed to misinterpret them so gravely. Then again, the problem lies less in comprehension and more in listening — or a lack thereof. Hayashi doesn’t listen. Never has, and apparently, never will.
“No but —” Chuuya lets out a sympathetic sigh. “I think she just wants to feel involved.”
“She has an invitation. How much more involved can she be?”
She is free to have her own wedding if she is so set on organizing one, but this is Dazai’s. Dazai and Chuuya’s.
Chuuya snorts and earns himself a black look. He schools his amusement into something patient and understanding as Dazai slumps down on the edge of their bed and scrubs a hand across his face. His annoyance doesn’t exactly evaporate when Chuuya comes to stand between his thighs, cupping his cheek with one hand, but it does get easier to shoulder. Chuuya makes everything a little easier. A lot like a fairy godmother, only much more handsome and eager to kiss him.
“It’s not necessarily about the wedding. She wants to be involved in your life.”
“I talk to her every other week.” And even that is merciful, considering Dazai could have cut her out of his life like he did with his father. “Isn’t that enough?”
“Not for everyone.”
“Well, it’s enough for me.”
“Look, I’m not saying you should just step aside and let her do her thing — I’ll talk to her, explain that we’ve already made some choices.”
Dazai raises his brows. “But?”
“But she means well. In the Hayashi kind of way, you know?”
“Sure, I know,” Dazai grits out. He has spent half of his life at the receiving end of her good intentions. However, there comes a point where obliviousness blurs into ignorance and Dazai thought — a foolish part of him hoping even — that Hayashi would start to pay more attention after the events that unraveled during Chuuya’s au pair year. He was wrong.
Chuuya’s eyes soften before something sharp and determined takes shape in them. “It’s our wedding,” he says and presses his mouth to Dazai’s. “We’ll do it our way. No one and nothing can change that, alright?”
***
Dazai doesn’t see Hayashi until she shows up at Lupin the same evening. Chuuya took her out for lunch earlier and judging by the apologetic expression on her face when she steps inside his office, it was to soften the blow of sending her back home.
“Osamu-kun, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to step on your toes with the proposal.”
A thousand nasty replies well up in Dazai, yet all that comes out is a clipped, “It’s fine.”
It’s not, but he can’t bring himself to form the words that explain why her sudden and unprompted arrival got him so worked up, let alone utter them to Hayashi. Chuuya is the only reason she is apologizing. Without his interference, she would have not even realized that there was a problem.
“I wish you wouldn’t say that,” she says and it’s surprising enough to make Dazai glance up. Just as confusing is the patient, albeit somewhat sad, smile that meets him. Sentences that start with ‘I wish you would…’ usually end with disappointed sighs and accusatory scowls, not this, whatever it is. “I made a wrong assumption and overstepped. You can tell me.”
Dazai opens his mouth — and closes it again, suddenly wishing the same thing. The futility is what has always held him back. Why make the effort if she won’t bother listening anyway? Except now Hayashi is telling him that she wants to listen and all it accomplishes is even more discomfort.
“I don’t know how to do this,” he finally gets out. “I don’t know how to talk to you about these things.”
“You just did,” Hayashi replies easily as though these two sentences mend everything.
Shaking his head, Dazai looks away. “And I wish never to repeat it.”
“Osamu-kun, you’re not going to get in trouble.”
“I know,” he huffs. He isn’t scared of her. Hayashi’s biggest flaw is her forced optimism. It doesn’t terrify him. It just annoys him.
“I hope that you do. I… I can’t change the past but I would like to try and at least change the present.” She raises her arm as if to stroke his cheek but when Dazai automatically leans back, she pauses and ultimately drops her arm. Her tone doesn’t change though. “This is your big day, and if there is any way I can help, I will gladly do it. If not, then I will be just as happy to attend.”
It is precisely the outcome he wanted only it does not feel like it. It feels prickly and placating like the appeasement of a child throwing a temper tantrum over something that the Dazai five years ago would have not even batted an eye. That is perhaps the most ironic thing about getting better he has learned so far: he is no longer immune to his own feelings, and it is both a blessing and a curse.
Dazai’s gaze flickers to the framed picture proudly standing on his desk, a picture of Chuuya and him grinning at the camera on their first vacation together; spread out behind them is Lucca, a lovely, little city in Tuscany, yet the beauty of the landscape, the sea and Chuuya, sun-burned and freckled, had nothing on Dazai’s mind, able to dim just about anything no matter how bright. Just minutes after the photo was taken they got into a fight. Apparently, Chuuya was able to see right through his smile, a talent that intimidated Dazai enough to double down with a cheerfulness so passive-aggressive that Chuuya walked out on him in the middle of a restaurant.
Forcing himself to look at Hayashi feels a lot like facing Chuuya in their hotel room after that dreadful lunch. Compassion tastes too much like pity to go down easy.
“The theme of the wedding,” he finds himself saying. “Chuuya told me I can do whatever I want and I have some ideas but — I could use a bit of assistance.”
It’s both a compromise and the truth.
For once, Hayashi is merciful enough not to dwell on her feelings, immediately claiming the seat across from his desk and playing along. “Well, you have lovely choices with a winter wedding…“
***
ONE DAY AGO
The apartment is bathed in darkness and silence when Chuuya closes the door after him although the quiet lasts exactly for one second, barely long enough to take off his coat. Then he hears the telltale sound of mittens trotting across the hardwood floor.
“Hello, my sweethearts,” he whispers, unlacing the laces of his boots with one hand and petting the cats circling his legs with the others. “Did you guys miss me? Yeah, so did I. So much that I’m here even though I’m not supposed to see your dad for another eighteen hours. Isn’t that just pathetic?” Nodding to himself, he picks up both of his little monsters and gives each of them a kiss. “I know, I know, I’m not proud of it either.”
Their happy chirping quickly turns into offended meowing, demanding to be released right this second. Well, that’s mostly Truffles, a flighty little tabby thing that is too busy climbing walls to let anyone hold him for more than a second. Miette — his BFF and maybe even his mother, according to the shelter — accepts snuggles as long as she is being treated like a princess.
Chuuya winces when he accidentally knocks over something on the dresser and it sends both of the cats scurrying away. Loudly. If they start having their goddamn zoomies now, they will wake up everyone and there are only a few things more terrifying than Yosano whose sleep got interrupted. Thankfully it stays quiet, so he tiptoes to the bedroom.
Dazai is already sleeping — which is, frankly, surprising considering he is the insomniac out of the two of them. In a good way though, Chuuya thinks as he tugs down the fancy slacks around his hips and his socks and climbs onto the bed to immediately wrap himself around Dazai and bury his nose in his neck. Dazai should enjoy their wedding day well-rested. They both should. That’s why Chuuya is here instead of sleeping in his childhood bed.
Dazai finds his ankle, something he does without even knowing, but then he shifts and murmurs, “Chuuya?”
“Noooo, go back to sleep,” he whispers, hugging him tighter. “Don’t mind me. I’m not here. It’s just a dream.”
“Right,” Dazai says, voice deep and raspy, followed by a low chuckle that goes down Chuuya’s spine like liquid heat. “Must be my sleep paralysis demon squeezing me to death.”
“Uh-uh, so just close your eyes and ignore me.”
Of course, Dazai does the opposite: he looks over his shoulder to squint at him in the darkness. “Arthur will have a heart attack if he hears of this. Our marriage is basically doomed now.”
“Arthur will survive,” Chuuya grumbles. “I’d rather have a good night of sleep than believe in stupid superstitions. Besides, we’re already married.”
They had their legal wedding, in the town hall and approved by the mayor and all, yesterday. Tomorrow is just the symbolic ceremony. But legally they are husband and husband.
“True,” Dazai says with an appreciative hum. “Couldn’t sleep, huh?”
Chuuya sniffs. “No.”
“Any particular reason?”
“I’ve gotten used to our big, comfortable bed.”
“That’s all?”
“And to my big, comfortable husband-sized pillow,” Chuuya mumbles through a sigh, too warm and cozy to deny Dazai the compliments he so clearly is asking for. This is so much better than being alone in his childhood rum. Fuck traditions.
“I’ve grown used to my noisy jet pack too.”
“Oi…”
“Chuuya?”
“Mmm?”
“Let’s play one last round of dirty laundry.”
Seconds away from drifting off, Chuuya still manages to smile. That damned game. It’s so stupid. They know — have seen all of each other’s dirty laundry by now. “Hmmm… dirty…. Dirty laundry, mhm…”
“How very insightful,” Dazai comments, earning himself a half-hearted nudge.
“Shut up.” After another moment, Chuuya squeezes him. “I’ve got something. Ready?”
“Always.”
Chuuya swallows; one half his courage comes from the light-headed mixture of being tired and champagne-tipsy, the other from the fact that it’s Dazai. He could tell him anything. He does tell him everything. Not a single corner of his mind has been left unmapped by the man in his arms. “Seeing you play with my cousin’s toddler today… It made me want that for us too. Someday. Someday soon.”
They broached the topic of having children when Kunikida was the first one to become a parent in the group. And they have talked about it a few more times since then too, addressing their concerns, their hopes, their expectations. It has always been this vague concept in the distant future though. Chuuya being twenty-three and Dazai twenty-six leaves them with so much time still, especially considering they are going to adopt. But…
“Doesn’t have to be right away,” he murmurs. “Just… I want a family with you.”
“Yeah?” Dazai sounds more far away than he was a minute ago, yet still close enough to hear the smile in his tone.
“Yeah.”
“I was wondering whether this is where your head went today. You got so quiet.”
Chuuya smothers his giggle against Dazai’s neck. “Was busy daydreaming.”
“I figured as much. I… thinking about being a parent is terrifying.”
“I know.”
“But I want it,” Dazai says, running his fingertips across Chuuya’s knuckles. “I want it too.”
It’s the last thing he hears before the world fades away.
***
TODAY
As much as Dazai surprisingly enjoyed planning the wedding, actually reaching the day of the wedding is a rather stressful experience. A lot of things can and do go wrong. For starters, they wake up to Kouyou cussing out the cats who have apparently decided to pee on her bag as a way of expressing their displeasure of sharing their space with two, mostly, unfamiliar ladies — if only they could smell someone over face-time. It makes for a hectic but hilarious morning. Chuuya spends the breakfast profusely apologizing while trying to stifle his laughter; Dazai doesn’t bother to hide his glee although it wanes once Chuuya’s fathers arrive on their doorstep to spirit him away, having a lot to say about breaking traditions, and Hayashi shows up with the little ones. She has been nice enough to only help when asked but today her visible excitement makes her very chatty and just a tad overbearing, so by the time, they get on the road, Dazai is dying to just get it all over with so he can crawl into bed with Chuuya and do absolutely nothing for the next two weeks.
Then there is the collision of two very different worlds about to happen. Having met most of Chuuya’s extended family, tolerating their probing eyes won’t be nearly as taxing as greeting his own relatives and friends of the family, people he hasn’t seen in years and people who know him as Dazai Osamu, Yosano Akiko’s boyfriend and Gen’emons disrespectful problem child, not Nakahara-Dazai Osamu, husband of Nakahara-Dazai Chuuya.
It’s… reason enough to squeeze his eyes shut in the car and meditate to blend out Hayashi’s hyper-chipper voice and the muttered squabbling of his siblings. As in he spends the drive picturing Chuuya and counting each freckle on his body twice.
It so happens that Oda gets stuck in traffic with Ranpo, which would be a lot less pressing of an issue if he wasn’t Dazai’s second witness next to Yosano, and thus an integral part of the ceremony. And the photos will probably look terrible because January 19th turned out to be an extremely windy day. And some kind of technical malfunction happens at the venue — although, Dazai lets Hayashi deal with it for once. And —
“What if he changes his mind?”
Yosano doesn’t even acknowledge his question; she just hands him a shot. “Drink this.”
Dazai does. The liquor burns, but not enough to override his stuttering confidence. “Kiko, I’m serious. What if —“
“There is no ‘what if’ when it comes to you and Chuuya,” she cuts in with a scoff that is so condescending it’s also reassuring. “You guys were basically written for each other, and even if you weren’t, you’d still find a way to one another. He is in this, just like you.”
Then the door cracks open and Oda slips in. “I’m here.”
Yosano nods enthusiastically. “Oda’s here. See? Everything’s fine.”
“Everything’s fine,” Dazai echoes under his breath, hoping that repeating these three little words like a mantra will make his hands stop sweating. No one wants to marry a man with sweaty hands.
“Now are we going to do this or what?”
In the end, it’s not Yosano’s pep-talk nor Oda’s arrival that ease Dazai’s violent heartbeat. It’s Chuuya’s grin, sitting so brightly and steadily on his face that everything else fades into the background. The sky could come crashing down and Dazai wouldn’t bat an eye because this one smile is not just enough, it is everything. It is the future and the future is here, taking Dazai’s hands into his and never, not even once, looking away.
Dazai imagined feeling a lot of things, but he didn’t expect to feel so light and so giddy, especially after almost suffering a panic attack five minutes ago. Now, standing across from Chuuya though and declaring the rest of his life to him, it’s like he is back in their kitchen, feeding Chuuya pocky sticks and waxing poetics about his ass to coax out that breathless laugh that escapes him whenever he is flustered. It’s just another moment in a torrent of shared moments — no more and no less important. A few dozen people simply happen to be part of it.
“Hello, husband,” Chuuya mumbles against his mouth amidst the cheering and the noise afterward.
“Husband,” Dazai murmurs back with a helpless smile. He will never tire of uttering or hearing this word. Husband. Chuuya is his husband. They are husbands.
And he doesn’t.
He keeps repeating it, to Chuuya and to himself, throughout the reception, the dinner, the toasts, and eventually, their first dance, swaying back and forth as photographs of the two of them get projected onto the wall. Dazai nods at a picture of them in his old home in Yokohama, their very first one together, squeezed between Hayashi and Gen’emon, Gin and Akutagawa in front of them, Chuuya directing a forced smile at the camera like he would rather be anywhere but next to Dazai while Dazai channels a familiar expression of bored amusement.
“Imagine telling them that they would be calling each other husbands in five years.”
Chuuya’s breath of laughter tickles his neck. “Yeah, no I can’t imagine that. They’d have called us insane.”
Dazai hums. As romantic it would be to pretend that it was love at first sight, it would also be an exaggeration. Attraction at first sight? Absolutely. Walking in on Chuuya rummaging through the fridge that night and being met with that foul mouth yet lovely French accent of his piqued Dazai’s interests, yes. Love? Not so much. Dazai didn’t even believe he was capable of such a thing back then.
The next picture that appears makes Dazai waggle his brows. “Now they would have believed it.”
“As if,” Chuuya scoffs, glancing at the photo of their friend group on New Year’s Eve, then back at Dazai. “Still too soon.”
“Not for me.”
“You had feelings for me. Doesn’t mean you were thinking of marrying me.”
“Oh, sorry for assuming I know what I’m talking about. Clearly you are the expert.”
Chuuya presses his lips together, though he isn’t quite able to hold back his bewildered snort. “I just — we had known each other for just a few months, Osamu. There is no way.”
“Well, it’s not like I was planning our wedding,” Dazai relents, “or like I believed you would want to have one with me, but it did cross my mind. In a ‘if I ever have to marry someone, it would have to be Chuuya’ kind of way.”
The thing that nobody told him about growing up numb to attachments was that experiencing just a sliver of love for the first time would make him gorge on it like a starved dog. He had no reference for liking someone normally, nor did he care to have one. It was either all or nothing, and with Chuuya, Dazai wanted everything. The dramatic love confessions. Trips to the other side of the world. Life-altering decisions made on a whim. The house and the white picket-fence and the kids. The wedding. An entire future. And while his rationality eventually returned, sometimes with such a vengeance that it threatened to ruin everything, the dream never changed. It just became a little more realistic.
Then again, sliding his gaze over his husband’s face, so close all he has to do to cross the distance is lean in, doesn’t make Dazai’s high feel rational at all. They are married and if Dazai wants to kiss him while a dozen pairs of eyes are trained on them, he can.
“And you had the audacity to call me delusional every time I called you out on it,” Chuuya mutters, blowing out his cheeks with a puff. “You were such a hypocritical prick.”
“Alright, let’s use our heads for a second, love. What do you think would have happened if I hadn’t done that?”
“Yeah, yeah, I’d have freaked out even harder. You were still a prick.”
“A prick you apparently had no issue falling for,” Dazai is happy to remind him.
Chuuya parrots him under his breath but it doesn’t stop him from pressing a chaste kiss against his lips before leaning his head against his shoulder. Sighing, Dazai tugs him even closer. Pictures of them that were snapped in Yokohama fade into ones that were taken on their sudden trip to Paris, showing them and Yosano in front of the Eiffel Tower and the Sacré-Cœur and at lunch in some restaurant that he doesn’t remember anymore. What he does remember is the photo booth though — and not just because he still carries his part of the photographs in his wallet.
Judging by the way Chuuya lifts his head, so does he.
“Alright. By that time, I would have believed us. A little.”
Dazai raises his brows. “By Paris?”
Chuuya scowls back at him like the question offends him. “Yeah?”
“Paris?” Dazai repeats, torn between amusement and confusion. Maybe both. “I confessed to you months after Paris —”
“It was a month, at best —“
“That doesn’t change anything.”
“ — and I said maybe I would have believed us.”
“Maybe is a lot for someone who rejected me.”
“Yeah, well,” sniffing, Chuuya shrugs aggressively as his eyes dart around the room, “I was still in denial. You know I was! We talked about it.”
“Did we?”
“Hundreds of times.”
“Did we talk about your ‘oh’ moment?”
“You read too many romance novels.”
“You’re the one buying them.”
“I do it for entertainment, not for —“ Chuuya gestures vaguely at him “— this.”
“Tell me anyway. Even if you don’t want to admit that there was an ‘oh’ moment.”
Chuuya exhales a melodramatic sigh but, as always, it doesn’t take much to wear him down.
“You booked two tickets instead of just one without even thinking about it,” he says quietly. “You slept in my small-ass childhood bed. With Spider-Man sheets. I don’t know. You were just you and I — I wanted you in my life. For more than just a shitty year.”
Dazai’s lips part — and close again. After a moment of useless staring, he swallows his unfinished sentences and looks away. “You were right. Let’s talk about something else.”
“What, feeling shy all of a sudden?”
Meeting his gaze, Dazai answers, “Yes.”
Chuuya’s teasing grin softens around the edges.
The pictures have already moved on to the last parts of their first tale. Blurry photos of Dazai carrying Chuuya piggyback from Lupin’s opening night, of kisses shared on the dance floor, and of two people who were convinced they were about to part ways for a long, long time.
All Dazai has to do is close his eyes to remember that horrible powerlessness of loving someone so much yet knowing it wasn’t enough to undo past mistakes and defy geography. Just as vivid is the spark of petrifying hope that lit up his chest after Baudelaire left his office. Flying to Paris to offer Chuuya a barely thought-through concept of a future together was the most terrifying risk he had ever taken, but it was worth every single nerve he lost on his way there. They made it work. They make it work.
A photograph of their second Halloween lights up the wall. Dressed as a prisoner, Chuuya flips off the camera with a cigarette tucked between his lips while Dazai’s hugging him from behind. Then a selfie of the two of them squeezed into the frame, sporting red-rimmed eyes and a serious case of bed hair, giving their thumbs-up. Probably something Chuuya sent Kouyou or Yosano or both the morning after Halloween. A screen-shot of their GQ interview. Their vacation in Italy. Wearing a sun hat and a hilarious amount of sun blocker, Chuuya is sitting on the beach and glaring because he got a sunburn anyway. Dazai looking for shells in the sand. Both of them with one-liter cocktails and tipsy grins — that day remains Dazai’s favorite from that week, maybe even from the last five years. Nothing beats getting day drunk with Chuuya and then doing… things. A lot of things. Some things that were immortalized too but are best left locked behind a super secure password.
“We should reenact that day on our honeymoon,” Chuuya tells him, smirking crookedly
Matching his grin, Dazai leans down to his ear. “Let’s start tonight.”
The look Chuuya shoots him wavers between mortification and intrigue. “You mean on the plane? Osamu, you know what happened last time.”
Dazai only flashes him a sweet smile before stepping away to twirl him around and dip him. Four years of dancing in the living room to ease Chuuya’s ballet cravings have made Dazai quite decent at this part, and even though it will never replace what Chuuya actually misses, Chuuya laughs in his arms and it renders everything else irrelevant for a few precious seconds.
As their wedding photographer takes new pictures of them, their old ones continue to show the last years of their life.
Pictures of Chuuya holding up a magazine with Dazai on the cover and gasping dramatically at the camera.
Screen-shots of their face-time sessions while Dazai was in Yokohama for business and Chuuya in his bed in Paris, looking just as grumpy as he does every time they don’t see each for two weeks.
Their tour around Japan three years ago. Dazai holding out his hand to a deer at Nara Park. Chuuya eating crab chips during a train ride and offering Dazai one while he is snapping the picture.
Chuuya on the floor of their apartment and piecing together the bed they bought after moving in together
The two of them smoking on the balcony on a trip with their friends from Yokohama, their backs facing the camera and their faces each other.
Chuuya taking a selfie while Dazai is frowning at a puzzle the background.
A screen-shot of Dazai face-timing Yosano in bed, Chuuya napping on his chest, and drooling slightly.
Their first picture with the cats. Under the Christmas tree. Wearing bright-red Christmas jumpers and reindeer antlers.
Their pathetic attempts at making butter during a trip to the French countryside, the place where Arthur grew up. Dazai looking down with a wince while Chuuya is trying — and failing — to hold back his laughter next to him.
Their hands showing off their engagement rings and their horribly bright pink fingernails.
The two of them fully clothed and passed out on Yosano and Kouyou’s couch, Chuuya wrapped up in Dazai’s arms, while they were supposed to be celebrating their engagement.
“Smile for the camera,” someone shouts eventually — Hayashi probably, and they do.
They do.