Chapter Text
The first time Dazai discovers bloody flower petals in Chuuya’s trash can under spirals of cucumber peels and two empty packages of nori, they are newly sixteen.
Why is Dazai looking through Chuuya’s trash, you ask? Well, it’s a coworker’s prerogative to keep tabs on their partner when that partner is as prickly and noncommunicative as Chuuya. If Dazai is hungry and Chuuya complains every time he takes food from his fridge and is much less likely to notice missing contraband from his trash, that is completely incidental.
Unfortunately for Dazai, Chuuya is about the least wasteful person he has ever met. There is not even a stray cracker in his waste bin.
Even the cucumber leftovers are a rare treat—Chuuya is the type to eat even banana peels no matter how many times people inform him that they’re not meant to be consumed. Dazai knows better than to take them for granted and carefully uses the pair of tongs he’d found in the drawer to pick them out of the can.
“What the hell are you doing?” a voice behind him demands. A voice that is decidedly not Chuuya’s.
“Why hello there, Seagull,” Dazai titters, turning around and pasting a wretched little beam onto his face.
The interloper crosses his arms, and though Dazai cannot technically see them under those ridiculous sunglasses, he can tell by the creased lines of his face that he’s narrowing his eyes. “It’s Albatross,” Albatross corrects.
“Whoops, my bad,” Dazai says with a simper. “I’ll remember that for next time, Pigeon. By the way, what’s with the shades? It’s the middle of the night.”
Albatross’ eyebrow twitches. “I have sensitive eyes,” he proclaims. “And don’t think you can distract me. What are you doing in Chuuya’s apartment at one in the morning?”
“I could ask you the same question,” Dazai shoots back levelly, turning back to the trash and blinking when he notices a red mush that had been carefully concealed under the other discarded pickings.
His attention is distracted, however, when Albatross begins to splutter. “Well—er—that’s none of your business! I can definitely tell you that I’m not here to go through his trash. Chuuya’s right: there’s something seriously wrong with you.”
Dazai snorts. “You’re here to steal the rest of the yaki udon he made yesterday, aren’t you?”
It brings Dazai unmitigated joy, what a vibrant shade of rouge Albatross’ face turns.
“It’s not stealing,” he insists. “Chuuya would be perfectly willing to share it with me if I asked.”
“But you didn’t ask, did you?”
The spluttering goes gargley, and Albatross begins to accompany his pressing words with increasingly wild gesticulations. “Like you have any room to talk! You’re the reason Chuuya has a lock on his fridge now.”
Dazai raises an unmoved eyebrow. “Actually, I think that’s you. Chuuya knows that no lock would ever be able to stop me. If it was me he was trying to keep away, he’d booby trap it instead.”
To demonstrate, Dazai deliberately and pointedly begins marching toward the fridge. He’s so intent on rubbing one in Albatross’ face that he doesn’t notice the trigger point on the floor until it’s too late. And then Dazai, very much against his will, has an electrified net unceremoniously dropped over him.
Though he will deny this for the rest of his life, in everyone else’s account of the story, Dazai, who hadn’t had a chance to prepare himself for the pain, proceeds to scream like a little girl. Seconds later, Chuuya bursts into the room, wearing nothing but a pair of boxer shorts, gun cocked.
“DROP YOUR WEAPONS!” he roars.
Albatross, too busy cackling, and Dazai, too busy twitching on the floor in a puddle of his own electricity-induced piss, do not comply.
“Oh,” Chuuya says next in realization, so, so longsufferingly as he clicks the gun’s safety back on before letting his hands fall to the side. “It’s just you guys again.” He sighs. “Is there a single night I don’t have one of you trying to break into my house to steal my food?”
“Actually,” Dazai pipes up helpfully, voice a bit hoarse, “this technically isn’t a ‘single night one of us have broken into your house.’ Both of us have broken into your house, rendering your complaint semantically inaccurate.”
“I will gut you open like the fish you are and then strangle you with your own entrails,” Chuuya threatens, entirely unimpressed. “I’m so not in the mood for your garbage. Do you even know how late it is?”
“Don’t threaten me with a good time. And yes, for your information I do know. It’s one in the morning,” Dazai chirps helpfully. He had actually not known that before Albatross had informed him of that neat little fact several minutes ago. How handy.
“Hey!” Albatross protests. “I’m only here because I heard noises from my apartment and thought that you had an intruder. I was trying to help!”
Dazai’s eyebrows skyrocket into his hairline. “That’s a complete lie!” he protests. “He came here to steal your food too!”
Narrowing his eyes, Chuuya crosses his arms. “I only see one of you trying to get into my fridge.”
“I was just trying to—”
“Nope,” Chuuya interrupts. “I don’t want to hear it.”
He stalks over and grabs Dazai without even trying to disentangle him from the net. He then summarily proceeds to walk across the room and dump Dazai in his trash can. Across the room, Albatross is practically preening as he watches Chuuya discard him. Dazai flips him a last-ditch middle finger right as he’s being dropped into the bin.
“Are you throwing me away?” he demands.
“I’m not throwing you away,” Chuuya counters. “I threw you away. Past tense, ‘rendering your complaint semantically inaccurate.’”
“You’re so clever,” Dazai deadpans. “I’m swooning.”
For some reason, these words cause Chuuya to still for a moment. It’s so brief that Dazai is half convinced he imagined it.
“Both of you get the fuck out of my apartment. I’m going back to bed. I have to be up at four AM.” Chuuya taps his pistol against Dazai’s head as a final warning before turning away to walk back into his room.
“Love you too!” Dazai calls back, because apparently last time he’d said that and been sliced, diced, and then poured into the rejection blender hadn’t taught him a lesson.
This time, he knows he isn’t imagining Chuuya freezing for a moment.
“Don’t say things you don’t mean,” he snaps after several moments, before slamming his bedroom door behind him.
Dazai rolls his eyes, squirming around in the can as best he can considering he’s also tangled in a net. A veritable Russian nesting doll set of traps. His socks are wet, he notices, caught in some puddle of mush in the can. It must be that red stuff he noticed earlier. Ew.
Continuing to rock his weight back and forth until the can tips, Dazai hits the ground with a thud before worming his way out from the trash.
“Keep laughing and I’ll shoot out your tongue,” Dazai warns Albatross as he dusts off his pants and pushes himself into a standing position. Just to spite the bastard, Dazai heads back to the fridge to take the udon for himself. The trap has already been deployed, after all. His feet squish, squish, squish as he makes his way across the room.
Pulling the two bobby pins he hides in his hair out, he begins to fiddle with the locking mechanism keeping the fridge shut.
“Yo, dude…” Albatross says, sounding suddenly very somber. “Did you cut your feet on glass in there or something?”
Glancing back, Dazai takes in the worry lines scrunching between his brows.
“No…?” he returns, narrowing his eyes quizzically. “Why do you say that?”
But in but a moment he answers his own question as he looks down and sees the bloody footprints trailing across the wood of Chuuya’s kitchen floor.
He’d had to distract Albatross by pretending to drop the yaki udon and shattering the container, but Dazai had managed to sneak a plastic baggie of the bloody mush in Chuuya’s trash can out of his apartment successfully. It’s not because he cares or anything. He just needs to make sure it’s not Chuuya’s blood, because it was a lot of blood and Mori will have his head if his perfect little Goody Chuu Shoes kicks the bucket.
Because he’s that kind of asshole, of course Mori has his own capillary electrophoresis equipment, so when he has his back turned Dazai just so happens to “borrow” it to check if the DNA is Chuuya’s. Spoiler alert: it is.
Interestingly enough, the actual mush part of the mixture turns out to be flower petals. Dazai had snuck in to use Kajii’s mass spectrometer for that one, and embarrassingly enough had had absolutely no idea what compound the distribution of elements indicated without his database’s help beyond the fact that it was living matter.
This all creates a pressing question: why are there plant bikinis swimming in Chuuya’s blood in his trash can? A question that no matter the might of his mind, Dazai finds himself absolutely unable to answer. There had been no traces of stomach acid in the mixture, so Chuuya hadn’t thrown them up.
However, there were traces of sputum. The only logical conclusion to come to from that was that Chuuya had coughed up the flowers. But that was ridiculous.
Dazai ponders upon this for a whole week before Mori confronts him. Apparently, the quality of Dazai’s work has “greatly decreased” and losing ten men on a mission is “unacceptable.”
“I already know what’s going on, Dazai-kun,” Mori informs him. “The consequences will be severely lessened if you’re honest with me right now.”
Hah. This is a classic Mori trick: trying to pry information out of someone by pretending he knows it already. Dazai can’t judge, really. He does the same thing during interrogations.
It’s still so bothersome.
“I’m going to give you five seconds,” Mori informs him.
“I’m not a three-year-old,” Dazai counters. “You don’t actually expect me to talk before you hit zero, do you?”
“Five.”
“This is so stupid.”
“Four.”
“I’m not scared of you.”
“Three.”
“Just give it up, old man.”
“Two.”
“Wait, you’re actually serious?”
“One.”
“You know what? I don’t care. Go take a long walk off a short pier.”
“Zero.”
Dazai makes a derisive gesture. “Oh my,” he mocks. “How frightening. I’m shaking in my boots. However will you punish me, Boss?”
Mori steeples his hands just under his chin. “Hmm,” he ponders, and Dazai raises a confrontational eyebrow. This man can’t scare him in any way that matters. “I think I’ll make you babysit Kyuusaku next week.”
“What?” Dazai demands. “You’re joking.”
Mori gives him a nastily beautific little smile. “I am in no way joking, Dazai-kun.”
“You can’t do that,” Dazai insists. “I’m terrible with kids. I’ll probably lose the little rug rat. Or kill them. That’s a possibility too.”
Raising an eyebrow of his own, Mori levels Dazai with a look. “If anything happens to Kyuusaku while they’re under your care, you will find yourself in an interrogation room being treated like a traitor faster than you can say ‘rug rat’ again. I’d go right to making you bite the curb, but I have a feeling I’d be giving you exactly what you wanted that way.”
Being real, that’s a fair point. Dazai scowls. “You’re the worst,” he complains.
“I try. Now, we were about to discuss Chuuya’s illness?”
Dazai opens his mouth to speak, but chokes on his own words once what Mori said registers, mouth remaining hanging open like a change slot.
“Wait,” Dazai says. “You weren’t lying about knowing what’s going o—wait 2.0, what do you mean illness?”
“I’m surprised you didn’t recognize the symptoms right away. I suppose I expected too much of your worldliness—oh, don’t look at me like that, you’re sixteen. Believe it or not, you’re not expected to know everything yet.”
Though his words are said without condescension, a scowl remains determinedly planted on Dazai’s face.
“What kind of disease makes you cough up flower petals then, oh so intelligent doctor?”
“Well hanahaki disease, obviously.”
Dazai can’t help himself: he laughs. “A sickness called ‘flower vomit disease’? You’re kidding me.”
Mori remains as phlegmatic as ever. “I am once again not at all kidding you,” he informs Dazai, “although I can hardly believe it myself. It’s very rare, and when doctors do see it, it’s usually people faking it. A lot of doctors believe that it doesn’t actually exist at all.”
Squinting, Dazai crosses his arms. “And what’s so special about this disease that so many people want to fake having it? Flower petals aren’t exactly subtle. It’s not like seizures where if you do it right it’s unprovable that you don’t have it.”
Mori hesitates for the first time this conversation—or possibly ever, actually.
“It’s,” he eventually said, “a disease that infects people who have an unrequited love, or at least believe their love is unrequited. It’s resolved when the love becomes returned. Otherwise, the plant in the patient’s lungs will grow so large that they won’t be able to breathe and will asphyxiate. You can see how it would be desirable to fake it—it’s an unfailing way to pressure someone into returning your feelings.”
Dazai blinks. Then he blinks again. And again. “You’re telling me that Chuuya is not only in love with someone, but is so in love with someone that he’s gotten some mystical flower disease that’s not supposed to even exist.”
“That’s an… interesting way of putting it, but essentially, yes.”
Gut curdling uncomfortably, Dazai contemplates this. Chuuya? In love? That’s ridi—
No, that’s exactly something that would happen to Chuuya. Of course him and his big, dopey heart would go and fall in love with someone. Of course he would be special enough to develop a disease that the chances of getting are infinitesimal over it. Of course he would find a way to die before Dazai, who self-admittedly treats suicide like an Olympic sport, completely on accident.
(For one of the first times in his life, Dazai feels a pain in his chest so ardent that he nearly doubles over. Briefly considers that he may be having a heart attack. Feels the pain deepen when he realizes what it really is.)
“So since you’re apparently so knowledgeable,” he asks, trying to regain his bearings before Mori notices that something is up—giving Mori an in on this sort of information is never advisable, “what stupid, hideous mongrel has Chuuya fallen head over heels for?”
“Oh, I’m so glad you asked it like that,” Mori says, not even bothering to hide his smile behind his hand. “You.”
Dazai spends the next week doing two things. One, avoiding Chuuya. Two, studying Chuuya’s current relationships in painstaking detail to prove Mori wrong, because he is absolutely wrong.
Chuuya hates Dazai—something Dazai both understands and reciprocates. Dazai doesn’t mind his hatred, can easily bear it, but there is no coming back from how the two of them had met. He had shattered Chuuya’s old life and tricked his friends into turning on him.
It was unabashedly bastardly behavior, but Dazai, as he is not the type of person to coddle feelings, can’t even conceive this being regrettable.
Chuuya, despite his lack of obvious abhorrent personal misdeeds against Dazai, is just as easy to hate, in Dazai’s not-so-humble opinion. He is loud, and has loud opinions, and is far too kind for their line of work. He thinks with his head but leads with his heart, and smiles too much.
Because of Chuuya’s strength, this life has not managed to break him down yet—and that fortitude is admittedly fascinating—but it’s not going to last forever. Dazai supposes how long it’s lasted comes from being introduced to crime by necessity at a very young age.
Dazai of all people understands that, more than he will ever let Chuuya know. But people like them are a dime a dozen. In fact, were it not for his ability, Chuuya would be a liability to the mafia. Yes, he has leadership skills, perseverance, dedication, the beginnings of a very tactical mind, and the drive to work hard. If anyone were to take a cursory glance at the situation, they would think Dazai was flat-out lying.
This new disease—“hanahaki”—however, is all the proof Dazai needs to prove that Chuuya is exactly the liability he had been concerned he would be. Love is a liability in the mafia. All Chuuya has to do is ask his mentor to learn that.
Dazai has narrowed the object of his affections down to three possible people: the self-dubbed “Piano Man”, the blond ponytailed ex-beau with a ridiculous notebook fetish that had broken up with Chuuya two weeks ago when the guy had found out that he was in the mafia, and, of course, for negative confirmation purposes only, himself.
It’s a series of several interesting—and Dazai does not say that complimentarily—relationships, that Chuuya has with his little social club, but with several mathematical calculations of the ratio of his private time between the Flags along with smile duration and frequency, Dazai has determined that the one that Chuuya is most likely to be in love with is the man of the piano wire.
The unfettered and uninhibited ease Chuuya appears to experience around Piano Man, however, is directly contradictory to that. There is no blushing, no increase in frequency of breaths, no pained looks when Piano Man expresses platonic affection. Frankly, if Dazai was willing to admit to himself that his deduction likely had no ground to stand on, he would have abandoned it three days ago.
The ex-boyfriend theory is frankly a little shaky, but the timeline would fit, and a more overt rejection of affection like the one Chuuya had experienced when he’d been broken up with would certainly be more likely to cause the onset of a disease about unrequited love, wouldn’t it?
They’re certainly a good match for each other: both passionate, both left-brained math-science people, both heavily principled even though those principles differed greatly. Ugh, it makes Dazai nauseous just to think about.
But Chuuya had come to work in the week following the breakup with a bright smile and a can-do attitude, and only a bit of dourness, showing absolutely none of the tells that Dazai has come to know from him.
The only flaw in Dazai’s postulate that Chuuya is in love with one of these people is that all evidence points to the contrary. How inconvenient. How horrific.
But besides the man of the piano wire and the idealist, there is only Dazai Osamu. A boy Chuuya for all intents and purposes should have no lost love for. A boy who not even his own mother could love. A boy who for all his intellectual aptitude, has little idea what “love” even is.
How could Chuuya love a boy like that, a thing like that?
That’s why on one sweltering August afternoon, ripe with the calls of sweaty birds and the scintillation of the indefatigable sun, Dazai knocks on Chuuya’s door determined to squeeze the identity of his mystery love out of him.
He does his usual routine of nonstop knocking with increasing urgency until Chuuya barges out the door to wring his neck. However, when Chuuya arrives Dazai’s taunt abruptly dies in his throat.
Chuuya actually looks like a slug right now, so glistening with sweat that it covers him like a second skin. His cheeks are flushed, he’s trembling despite it being in the thirties, and there’s a heady look in his eyes. Heat radiates from him, appropriately, like a radiator.
“What the hell?” is the first thing Dazai says, and then he says, “Why is Mori letting you stay home by yourself right now? You’re burning up; you shouldn’t be alone. If you die of hyperthermia your friends will blame me.”
Chuuya’s face crunches, but he doesn’t say anything.
“If you tell me where you keep your TYLENOL, I promise I won’t overdose on it when you turn your back.”
Once again the only sound is silence. Eyebrows furrowing, Dazai studies Chuuya.
Chuuya should be hitting him. Chuuya should be telling him about how slow (months) and painful (very) a death by acetaminophen is because Mori taught him a little bit about suicide response action and ever since he’s been playing armchair doctor like his life depends on it. Chuuya should be spitting something acerbic and rolling his eyes.
Chuuya does none of those things. He merely continues blinking demurely and staring at Dazai from the doorway.
“OK, this is so wrong,” Dazai complains. Huffs out a sigh. “Wow, I really have to do everything around here.” He begins leading Chuuya into the apartment and sits him down on the couch. “Alright, I know you’re off in loopy happy fever time world, but you need to come back long enough to tell me if you’ve taken any meds.”
Reaching over, he gives Chuuya a weak slap across the face to get his attention. It doesn’t really work, but when Dazai pulls away, that is the least of his concerns. Because across Chuuya’s face, there is a perfect figure of Dazai’s hand not in even brighter red, but in fleshy peach.
“Huh. I could have the most complicated pattern-recognizing sparse approximation algorithm in the world and I still wouldn’t be able to figure you out. You’re such a weirdo. Is this an Arahabaki thing?”
Curiously, Dazai extends a single finger to poke Chuuya in the red part of one of his cheeks. Sure enough, when he pulls it away, he leaves behind a single, fingerprint-sized dot of uninflamed skin. When he reaches out to touch Chuuya again, this time on the arm, he notices that Chuuya’s whole body is gradually being divested of red, pinkening and then eventually fading to its original color.
That’s… not how vasoconstriction works. Is supposed to work. Dazai puts a hand to Chuuya’s forehead and finds that, in fact, Chuuya has not only grown less colorful but also cooler. He feels the drop of temperature under his hand.
But then he finds it being slapped away.
“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” Chuuya demands.
Staring at Chuuya like this, with his arms crossed and his brow dour, it comes to Dazai in flashes, and then all at once.
“You’re so clever,” he deadpans. “I’m swooning.”
A stilling. A preeminent stilling.
“Both of you get the fuck out of my apartment. I’m going back to bed. I have to be up at four AM.” Chuuya taps his pistol against Dazai’s head as a final warning before turning away to walk back into his room.
“Love you too!” Dazai calls back.
And again, Chuuya freezes. Freezes with his whole heart.
The reverie seeps from his body. Oh. Oh. Oh, no.
Chuuya—oh.
And if you were to call Dazai Osamu the stupidest boy on the planet in this moment, he wouldn’t object.
As Dazai walks home, having been summarily kicked from Chuuya’s apartment with the brand new and rather unwelcome epithet “Peeping Tom”, he starts to feel cold creeping around in his veins. Then, a tingling sensation.
Then nothing at all.
He pinches the—his? no—skin to test it, and barely feels it. Walking becomes harder as he loses a real sense of mechanoreception and proprioception. Each step feels in equal parts like walking on elastic legs and sinking into a trampoline.
Huh. This hasn’t happened in a while. Fascinating. Or not really. Dazai finds he doesn’t particularly care. He gets closer and closer to losing his tether by the minute. Life. Unlife. Here. Not here. A liminal space in between. A gap between the frog’s eyes and mercury in the can of tuna kind of place. Not something given much consideration unless it’s brought up. A secret only Mother Nature knows the answer to. That it’s probably better the people with people faces and people names don’t.
He isn’t really sure what happens to him after that. He drifts. He’s walking, maybe, but maybe not? There’s a shifting in the air—or is there?—or either way it doesn’t matter.
When he finally comes fully back into himself an unknown amount of time later, he’s on the cot Mori keeps in the room behind his office. Mori, who seems to have a sixth sense for Dazai’s level of awareness at any given time, sweeps into the room moments later as Dazai is blinking the fuzz and dotty lights from his eyes.
“Where did you find me?” Dazai asks.
Mori levels him an unimpressed stare. “Spread on the ground like you were making a snow angel in the middle of the sidewalk. You’re lucky you were in mafia territory. A grocer under our protection alerted one of our men and I came to get you.”
“Hmm.” Dazai glances around for the window, realizing that the neon of the night city is shining through rather than the dastardly summer sun. “How long was I away?”
Ah, the joys of pretty euphemisms.
“A few hours, at least since you were found.”
“What did you tell the people who found me?”
“That you were high.”
“What—?” Dazai starts to demand before slowly pressing his mouth closed. “That trick isn’t funny, you know.”
Mori smiles him a beautific, conniving smile. “It will stop being funny when you stop falling for it.”
“You’re so annoying. What did you really tell them?”
Sighing a deep, beleaguered sigh, Mori waves him off and tosses him a sphygmomanometer and a stethoscope from one of the cabinets. “Get me a blood pressure. If your diastolic is above 76 I’ll let you leave.”
Dazai levels him a pointed look.
“Alright, alright,” Mori concedes, holding his hands up in the universal gesture of surrender. “I told them that you had been poisoned. It actually worked out quite nicely. I was planning to ask you to fake being poisoned anyway so I could accuse the son of the leader of that new group that’s moving in on the east flank of the ports of doing it. We need him out of the way in a way that causes no trouble.”
Snorting, Dazai wraps the cuff around his arm, pushes the stethoscope diaphragm into his brachial artery and earpieces into his ears, and begins to inflate the cuff.
“This seems like an awful lot of trouble to me,” Dazai mutters, and then says more loudly, “It’s pretty bold of you to assume that Mr. Mashima will take your side over his son’s.”
Mori shrugs. “I’m a bold man. And I hear they’re doing great things with artificial intelligence-generated videography these days.”
Another snort on Dazai’s part, before he goes quiet. “’Bold’. That’s one way to put it.”
Mori raises an eyebrow. “You can’t deny my methods are effective.”
“Most of the time,” Dazai appends. “What were you thinking, letting Chuuya stay home alone with a fever like that today? You’re crazy, old man. He could have died.”
“I would not have left him alone were I not sure he would be fine. And aht aht,” Mori corrects. “We aren’t done with our other conversation yet.”
Dazai rolls his eyes. “What more is there to say? I think what happened was pretty straightforward.”
“That’s exactly the problem,” Mori asserts. “Did you even try any of the techniques I taught you?”
Scoffing, Dazai twists the bell to turn the stethoscope’s hearing onto the diaphragm as he starts deflating the cuff. “Have I not gotten it across how stupid I find counting how many blue objects are in a room?”
Waiting for noise.
“I find that far less stupid than being rendered prone in the middle of the street because you refused help,” Mori retorts.
Waiting for noise.
“Didn’t you say five minutes ago that I was supine, not prone?”
Waiting for noise—there it is. 104 systolic. Not as bad as it could be considering Dazai’s usual is 110, but Mori will probably make a fuss about it.
Mori lets out a large puff of breath. “Still stealing my medical textbooks, I see.”
“If you want me to stop,” Dazai informs him, “stop leaving the key to your office key lateral enough to your lordotic curve that I can grab it while walking by you.”
“If you’re going to be a smart aleck, at least do it right. I don’t have excessive lordosis, so it would be more descriptive to refer to that part of my back as my lumbar curve.”
Dazai doesn’t dignify that with a response.
The noise stops at 74. Dazai considers lying, but he’s never been able to get anything past Mori to this day and he’s probably not going to start now.
“104/74,” Dazai informs Mori, beginning to stand up. Whether it’s Mori’s sharp eye or the sudden wave of dizziness that strikes him which prevents him from completing his mission will forever remain a mystery if he has anything to say about it.
“Stay,” Mori orders, as if Dazai is a dog. Dazai simply rolls his eyes again, dropping the blood pressure cuff and the stethoscope to the side. The best way to give someone else power over you is to let them know that they’ve gotten to you, so he doesn’t plan on reacting like Chuuya, thank you very much.
A few seconds later, a glass of water and a package of senbei are pressed into his hands. “Eat and drink and get back to me when you can walk without passing out. I have to get back to work.”
“Yes, sir,” Dazai returns snidely as Mori grabs his medical supplies from next to Dazai, puts them away, and makes his way from the room.
Dazai waits for ten minutes before he does anything: the first eight because Mori has caught Dazai doing something illicit by popping his head back in a few minutes after he leaves more than once, and the last two for good luck. He eats the crackers and drinks the water like an obedient child. Admittedly he starts feeling a lot less like there are dumbbells on his brain and chest once he consumes them, but that’s neither here nor there.
After said amount of time passes thusly, Dazai stands off, warding off the shakes and making his way to Mori’s obscenely ornately carved wooden bookshelf. It doesn’t take much searching to find Mori’s MSD manuals—they take up more space than even his collection of antique books. Although since they don’t make physical MSD manuals anymore those themselves could be considered part of the vintage book collection. For a thirty-year-old man, Mori was an oddly large percentage of brontosaurus.
He pulls out the Diagnosis and Therapy manual and flips to the index. It’s so large that it proves to be functionally useless, but after a lot of blind flipping and an interesting detour on Hodgkin’s lymphoma, Dazai stumbles upon it by sheer blind luck: hanahaki disease. He only skims the upper portion of the information, as what he wants is at the very end: the treatment.
Hanahaki disease is currently medically untreatable despite years of drug trials and several lung transplant attempts. The patient will only experience an alleviation of symptoms upon their awareness that their object of interest returns their romantic feelings. Otherwise, they will die.
There has to be more. That can’t be it. Dazai and Chuuya, in a relationship beyond the mere professional and preeminent hatred that has driven them for the entire year they’ve known each other? The very notion is laughable. Dazai loving? Being loved? Inconceivable.
He is a mafioso. They are mafiosi. People like them who fall in love end up like Ane-san, one alone on God’s green Earth and the other alone on the final journey of man, both brokenhearted as they had been stupid enough to open their hearts in the first place.
However, while the situation where this happens is rare and has not occurred often enough in the case of confirmed hanahaki havers to be indubitably proven, it seems that the patient also experiences a complete cessation of hanahaki symptoms upon the death of their object of interest.
Wait, what? Could it really be that easy?
He reads it again to assure himself that it’s not a mirage.
… it seems that the patient also experiences a complete cessation of hanahaki symptoms upon the death of their object of interest.
So that’s how it is. That’s how it is indeed.
It seems that the unstoppable force has finally met its immovable object: there is no one in this world more determined to die than Dazai Osamu, and to stop stupid Nakahara Chuuya from kicking the bucket before him—imagine the insult—die Dazai will. He’ll make sure of it.
Hanging is certainly a crude method of suicide, but also time-tested and effective so long as one stays true to the Haughton’s drop equation. Most importantly: it is immediate. There will be no “saving him” at the last minute upon his discovery.
The equation requires a rather annoying conversion of his weight from the metric to imperial back to metric, but he calculates the correct number and dutifully begins preparing his journey to the other side.
Spoiler alert: he needs a nearly six meter drop. Ergo six meters of rope—and procuring that when you’ve been blacklisted from every hardware store in the prefecture is not easy. He tries to get Odasaku to go for him, but no matter how much Dazai insists that he’s only using the rope for extreme flexibility training, the guy doggedly refuses.
He almost gets Ango to go for him because by then he’s come up with a much better lie, but unfortunately Odasaku immediately intervenes and informs Ango that the rope is not, in fact, needed because Dazai is restocking interrogation materials. Ango is appropriately scandalized to find out he’d almost been dragged into one of Dazai’s suicide schemes.
Eventually, Dazai resorts to stealing from the very interrogation materials he purported he was trying to restock. Mori will, of course, immediately know what happened when the theft is reported, but Dazai has the foresight to steal it after he’s already gone to bed. Mori never sleeps for more than four hours at a time—a hazard of the job—but four hours is plenty of time to do what he needs to do.
He’s not stupid enough to use the mafia headquarters to do the deed, as fittingly tall as it is, but he’d isolated an appropriate building—under construction with work done during the day hours—to use earlier that day. Disengaging the lock is child’s play, and in only minutes he’s reached the third floor: the lowest floor he can use to do the deed. Third floors are typically approximately nine meters from the ground, the perfect distance for his machinations.
As he prepares his materials, he feels that cold, deep seated, primal dread he always does right before a suicide attempt. He’s gotten better at ignoring it since he figured out that it was not genuine hesitation, but a survival mechanism on the part of his body. Dazai knows better than anyone that he has no reason to live.
But completely accidentally, he has found something better than a reason to live: a reason to die.
He’s considered for quite some time why he’s so willing to die for Chuuya. He’s come to the conclusion that it’s simply a part of the logical subset of his brain. The math is simple: Chuuya is more of an asset to the mafia than Dazai is. Dazai has a strategic mind, but so does Mori. Dazai has a handy ability, but there is no need to nullify another ability when you have a powerhouse that can simply blast the user away. Chuuya is that powerhouse.
Clearly his subconscious had been speaking louder than the forefront of his mind the entire time.
Well. No use in dwelling on that. Dazai lets the cold anxiety double, then triple, then crescendo as he loops the rope around his neck and ties a hangman’s knot. He’s nearly stiff and his hands shake as he does. It will be over soon, he repeats to himself in a litany. Soon, soon, soon.
Stepping forward on jelly legs, he waddles his way over to the window. It takes a few tries, but he manages to press his shaking hands to open the window.
“Dazai.”
Shit. He has to move. Shoving the window open, he pops out the screen and heaves himself into a sitting position on the ledge.
“Fuck, Dazai, stop!”
“Sorry, Charlie!” Dazai calls with cheer that belies the sinking in his gut as he pushes himself over the edge. Chuuya may not know this, but this is for his own good.
And then he falls. He falls, falls, falls, and prepares himself for his spinal cord to snap like a wishbone. He wonders, vaguely, if he’ll feel any pain. If it will be instantaneous or if he’ll end up like a chicken still running around with its head cut off. He does something a little like praying to a God he doesn’t believe in that it will be quick.
But his neck never snaps. He keeps falling.
When he finally has the good sense to look up, he sees that the rope is no longer tied to the window, presumably cut by the knife currently in Chuuya’s hand. Chuuya who is rocketing toward the ground along with Dazai, manipulating his gravity to make himself to fall faster until he hits Dazai and his ability deactivates in a flash of blue light.
Dazai is so frozen that he doesn’t even struggle as Chuuya wraps his arms around him and rotates their bodies so that Chuuya is below him, taking the brunt of the fall. Dazai barely has time to choke out a “No!” of his own before they boulder into the ground with a smash!
A flash of pain so abject Dazai heaves. Then nothing.
Dazai comes to awareness in flashes, ephemeral impressions of the setting that come and go. Drifts back into dreamland more than a few times. The final time he awakens, he first notices a softness pressing into his back. Then the stenches of accelerated hydrogen peroxide and industrial laundry detergent. The cloying, indescribable thickness that’s always imbibed in the air in places where gravely ill people dwell. The steady beep, beep of a heart monitor.
A hospital, he realizes. He must have been badly hurt if Mori had reached out for outside help. There’s certainly corruption among many hospital administrations and healthcare professionals, but it’s still not easy to coordinate a stay at any major hospital. People have to be bribed and threatened. False explanations are needed for Dazai’s assortment of scars to put on the Social Care paperwork.
Finally, he turns his attention to his own body. He can’t feel much. Everything’s a little floaty. Analgesics, probably. He’s careful not to open his eyes even having figured this out, listening for the sounds of breathing or shifting in the room. He doesn’t want to deal with Mori right now, and if that means pretending to be knocked out, well, that’s a sacrifice that has to be made.
“I know you’re awake.”
Dazai doesn’t let his breathing change, but his heartbeat certainly does. He really needs to learn to control that.
“Now I really know you’re awake.”
“’M not in the mood, sensei,” he complains. His voice comes out hoarse. Feeding or endotracheal tube? Woah, just how long has he been out?
“I’m not your sensei,” the voice returns, and Dazai goes carefully still.
“Odasaku?” he tries again.
“Don’t know who that is.”
This next thought is so outlandish that Dazai hardly dares speak it, but who else would come to see him?
“Chuuya?”
“Try again,” the voice says. It sounds like he’s holding back laughter, just a bit.
“You’re making fun of me,” Dazai complains, trying to engender a retort but finding that kicking his brain into gear is a lot like trying to light a wet match.
“Yeah, I am Don’t like the taste of your own medicine, do ya?” This time he really knows there is laughter in that voice.
“I make fun of a lot of people,” Dazai informs the voice. “If you want this conversation to go anywhere, you’re going to have to tell me who you are.”
An outright chuckle. “Open your eyes, fishcake.”
But Dazai doesn’t have to now. “Parakeet,” he realizes, and feels his lips curl up when he hears a returning noise that sounds so much like a squawk he would swear it came from an actual bird.
“Even when you’re out of your mind on drugs, you still can’t get my name right,” Albatross laments. “You’re one sick bastard, ya know that?”
“The one and only,” Dazai chirps in reply. Or at least attempts to chirp. It comes out sounding more like a disgruntled wheeze. “So how can I help you, Cardinal? You’re clearly not here for the pleasure of my company.”
Albatross is quiet for a few long, pensive moments. “Do you… remember why you’re here?” he asks eventually.
“No,” Dazai admits, trying to sound blasé about it and not like he’s scouring his memory for the faintest hint of what could have brought him here. “I’m assuming I either got injured on a job or made an enthusiastic attempt at suicide that some dastardly bystander ruined.”
There is more silence. Tense, this time. The air vibrates like a taut bowstring.
“You’re such an asshole,” Albatross complains, but before Dazai can open his mouth to say something in return, Albatross soldiers on. “But I can’t even hate you for it right now. You don’t even know why what you said was so assholish.”
Dazai, whose eyes had been beginning to drift open, narrows them. “Would you care to enlighten me?”
Albatross stutters a bit on his next breath. “You really don’t remember?” he asks. “You’re not fucking with me in some sort of crazy mind game like the one you used to blackmail Chuuya into joining the Port Mafia?”
The moment Dazai hears Chuuya’s name, his blood ossifies. It comes back to him in jilted pieces:
… Dazai is so frozen that he doesn’t even struggle as Chuuya wraps his arms around him and rotates their bodies so that Chuuya is below him, taking the brunt of the fall. Dazai barely has time to choke out a “No!” of his own before they boulder into the ground with a smash!
… “Sorry Charlie!” Dazai calls with cheer that belies the sinking in his gut as he pushes himself over the edge. Chuuya may not know this, but this is for his own good.
… it seems that the patient also experiences a complete cessation of hanahaki symptoms upon the death of their object of interest.
… “Oh, I’m so glad you asked it like that,” Mori says, not even bothering to hide his smile behind his hand. “You.”
… A flash of pain so abject Dazai heaves. Then nothing.
All of this happens in the span of a few seconds. Before his face can slip and betray him, Dazai carefully curls his lips into a well-curated smile. He feels like he’s gargling cement at the moment, that it’s solidifying in his lungs just like that stupid plant is in Chuuya’s, but there’s no need for Albatross to know that.
“You caught me,” Dazai says in his best approximation of sheepish at the moment—it’s a little weak but it will have to do. “I was pretending! Of course I remember what happened! Chuuya decided he wanted to be my double suicide partner and took a swan dive after me off a building! Truly warms a suicide enthusiast like myself’s soul.”
A heaving, shuddering breath. “This… you think this is a joke?” Albatross demands.
“Don’t take it personally,” Dazai reassures him. “I take pretty much everything as a joke. It’s a fun way to live your life—you should try it sometime.”
“No,” Albatross says, sounding sick, “Don’t you chalk this up to humor. This isn’t something that can be laughed away. Chuuya almost died, and all because he put his life on the line to save your sorry ass! You don’t get to laugh off his sacrifice! Ya should be grateful he saved you!”
Dazai scoffs at this, staring viciously at the ceiling. Does not let himself think about the gouge in his chest that is sawn deeper open with every mention of his stupid partner. “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”
I was saving him, he wants to bite out, but refrains. As much of a bastard as Chuuya is, Dazai’s not going to out his little secret just yet. How embarrassing would it be for someone to find out that Chuuya was literally dying of love for him, Dazai, the Demon Prodigy? Yeah, that can’t happen.
“Don’t tell me I don’t know what I’m talking about. Chuuya is one of my best friends!” Albatross snaps.
Rolling his eyes, Dazai gathers himself enough to raise a dubious eyebrow at Albatross. “Yeah, and some friend you are.”
“What the hell is that supposed to mean?” Albatross demands, clenching his fists so hard Dazai hears his knuckles crack.
Dazai smiles with cold, lifeless amusement. “You forget that I have the ear of the man who runs this organization. Do you think he hasn’t told me about your little ‘assignment’?”
Albatross flashes him a dark look. “Knowing about my assignment tells you nothing about my intentions, asshole.”
Dazai raises a calculatedly curious eyebrow. “So you’re saying that you’ve grown genuinely fond of him.” It’s not a question. “I don’t think Mori-san would be too happy to hear that you’ve allowed your emotions to cloud your assignment like that. He might even consider it failing.”
Face freezing, Albatross starts to stutter out some poor facsimile of an excuse. “Well—I—uh—"
“Enough,” Dazai interrupts. “Fortunately for you, today is your lucky day. I have no interest in outing your little charade to him. Your secret is safe. For now.”
Albatross’ face goes through a series of increasingly convoluted expressions. Eventually, it settles on his mouth pressing into a thin line.
“I’m not going to thank you, if that’s what you’re waiting for.”
Snorting, Dazai tilts his head. “I’m not asking for one.” He fixes his eyes on Albatross. “Now, is that all you came here for? To yell at me for endangering your friend?”
“You’re a selfish bastard,” Albatross grits out.
Though he knows it won’t be received well, Dazai can’t help himself: he bursts out laughing. He laughs and laughs and laughs, laughs until he’s gasping for air, laughs until his lungs give out, laughs until he’s nothing but pieces and shards of the being called Dazai Osamu, if he wasn’t that already, if he was ever anything at all.
“What’s so funny?” Albatross demands as he’s cackling. “Hey, asshole, I asked you a question!”
“You don’t even know,” Dazai manages eventually. “You don’t even know what you just said.”
“No, dammit, I don’t!” Albatross snaps. “So why don’t you tell me?”
The one time Dazai does something selfless in his life, and no one even sees it.
A bad man’s reputation is like a burnt piece of paper. Not even saving the world could do a single thing to unburn it. No one will ever see anything but his ashes.
“Ah, how do I put this?” Dazai contemplates. “What is it that the French say? ‘Let them eat cake?’ If you truly have no bread, Albatross, that’s all I have to say to you.”
He dies two weeks later. Albatross, that is.
After Verlaine retreats into his basement and all he is left with is the wreckage of the life he had built for himself, Chuuya is different. A different kind of different than he was when the Sheep had betrayed him and he was checkmated into joining the mafia.
Dazai doesn’t bother banging on his apartment door when he goes to retrieve him for jobs anymore. Chuuya won’t answer, so today he simply picks the lock as he has grown used to doing and lets himself in.
“Chuuya?” he calls as he peers around looking for him.
The kitchen is empty. So is the bedroom. Dazai only hits his lucky break when he peeks into the bathroom. Deceivingly, the door is neither shut nor locked, hanging open with a deceptively lackadaisical air. When Dazai pushes his way inside, he sees Chuuya idly floating in the bathtub, staring at the ceiling. His fingers graze the water like he’s clipping grass, a distinct lack of interest in the root of things, and his hair fans out around his head where it’s immersed like a crown of fire. He looks like a god. He looks so very human.
Dazai is only a teenage boy, so he stares at Chuuya’s figure for a little longer than he should before his eyes more respectfully land on his face.
“Chuuya?” he asks again, this time distinctly more incredulous. “Uhm… you’re not dead, are you? Because that would be very inconvenient for me.”
The time that elapses between Dazai’s words and when Chuuya finally speaks is so great that Dazai starts to think that maybe he has kicked the bucket. But respond he does.
“Go ‘way, bas’ard.”
Owing to the fact that they’re mumbled into the water, Dazai can barely make his words out.
“Believe me, I wish I could. We have a job. What the hell are you doing? You’re so crinkly right now you look like a peach pit.”
At this, Chuuya deigns to pull himself out of the water and meet Dazai’s gaze with the eons of dead in his eyes. The movements are nearly zombielike, lethargic and clumsy. He is, Dazai thinks, more terrifying now than he ever was as the King of the Sheep, or even as the vessel of Arahabaki. Neither, after all, hold a candle to the power the dead hold over the living.
“My clone suffered for years while I did nothing to help him, so I figured it would only be fair that I get a taste of what he had to live.” There is not an ounce of life in the monotone voice that he metes these words out in.
“Wha—?” Dazai starts to say, but cuts himself off as the ominous tank of water that had been Clone-ya’s home flashes across his vision. “Oh.”
“Yeah, oh,” Chuuya intones back.
The obnoxiousness of his pallored behavior is more than enough to snap Dazai out of the reverie it had initially put him in. “Oh, come on. The pity party is over, Chuuya. Your clone, your dumb gaggle of friends, that detective, all of them would be rolling in their graves if they knew you were pressed enough about their deaths that you started refusing to go out and be a person in some sick honor ritual.”
(Why should I sacrifice my life for yours if you’re not even going to live it?)
For the first time in weeks upon weeks, something sparks behind Chuuya’s eyes. It is something pernicious, surely, but it is something nonetheless.
“Do you think I don’t know that,” Chuuya snipes back snappishly. “Do you think that I don’t think every day about how their sacrifices were in vain and how it should’ve been me? I’m sure they’d be better at dealing with my death than I am with theirs, I know it, actually, but right now I feel like I can’t even breathe without them, so yelling at me about it isn’t going to do anything, you stupid mackerel!”
A beat. Then two. Then five. Dazai simply watches Chuuya, for seconds upon seconds, processing his outburst. Eventually, after what might be a minute or might be ten, he musters up something that won’t be absolutely paltry in reply.
“They really meant a lot to you, didn’t they? The Flags?” Dazai asks, and he hates how stripped raw he feels after asking it, as if he’s showing his own hand no matter how much he knows that really, Chuuya is too lost in the delirium of the omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent visions of his dead… “loved ones” is the right word, probably, to even take a second look at Dazai’s intentions.
“They mean—meant everything to me,” Chuuya says quietly, and Dazai finds himself momentarily rended by the frankness. He knows better than to comment on the tense stumbling. “They were home. I lost home when Shirase stabbed me—”
And oh, every time Chuuya is too good to bring up that it had been Dazai who had manipulated Shirase into doing that, it makes Dazai’s teeth grit so hard that the bones seem to crinkle.
“—but they gave it to me again. The mafia is my family, and I’ll always be grateful to Mori-san for what he did for me, but they were…”
He trails off, throat flexing and contracting like a guppy mouth as he can’t quite seem to get that last word out.
“Home,” Dazai finishes for him when he gets tired of the fish glubbing—and Chuuya calls him a mackerel.
“Yeah.”
Chuuya’s voice is so raw that Dazai almost thinks that someone’s taken an apple peeler and shaved off the outer layer of his throat. His eyes meander slowly across Dazai’s body, his arms, his crisply pressed suit jacket and the trench coat engulfing his shoulders, up the sensitive carotid arteries and trachea that seem to tingle under his gaze all the way up to his eyes. Dazai meets his gaze evenly, not letting a hint of a reaction to his blatant leering show.
“You’ve never had someone like that, have you?” Chuuya asks.
“No,” Dazai admits, caught in the moment so much that his larger thinking faculties stutter to a halt long enough for the slip, but he quickly improvises a suitable farce and coughs out a rude, high-pitched giggle. “Just kidding! Does Chuuya really think he can predict me so well when he can’t eve—”
Dazai is smart enough to cut himself off before he finishes that one, words like “Verlaine” and “Shirase” and “Murase” on his lips that even he’s not cruel enough to speak.
“You don’t have to lie to me,” Chuuya says quietly. “I can tell you are. You don’t understand what I’m feeling right now because you’ve never had a home to lose.”
“Oh, fuck you,” Dazai snaps before he can stop himself. When he realizes what he’s said, his eyes widen, and he snaps his mouth shut.
Barking out a weak laugh, Chuuya shoots Dazai the closest thing to a grin that Dazai’s seen on him since what Dazai and Kouyou refer to in hushed tones behind Chuuya’s back as The Incident.
“You’ve used that trick on me so many times. It’s about time I get to use it on you.”
“Har-dee-har-har,” Dazai retorts between gritted teeth.
Chuuya’s face goes solemn again. “You know everything about me Dazai. And I know a lot about you too.”
What. What do you know about me, Nakahara Chuuya.
“I know that you always lace your left shoe before your right shoe, and you only single knot them both because you think that if you can’t even be brave enough to let your shoe untie sometimes how are you ever going to face life?”
Dazai raises an eyebrow. It’s not that he doesn’t know where Chuuya is going with this. He does. He just never expected someone with hats for brains like him to ever actually work up the wherewithal to take things in this direction. But his beginning is not very impressive. Such a trite piece of information thrown back in his face doesn’t impress Dazai.
“I know that I’m never going to get you a watch for your birthday because you’d spend half your day every day tuning it down to the exact attosecond.”
That’s—something he’s not told Chuuya. He’d remember if he did. Has he truly been watching Dazai so closely that he’s kept such a ridiculous little fact in his back pocket all these years?
“I know that you’re the one who keeps pissing in Q and Elise’s goldfish bowl and killing the fish with the ammonia, because you are fucking disgusting and have no manners or decency.”
If Dazai were the type to, he would flush. As it is, he cocks a half smile, a little more fierce than it is friendly, and tilts his head. The most impressive thing about this, to be honest, is that Chuuya has had this piece of information and has not tried to use it as blackmail against Dazai.
“I know that you’re annoying and funny, and cruel and reckless, and you can’t keep a girlfriend because you’re allergic to commitment and maybe it’s just because you have a death wish but you’re the bravest motherfucker I’ve ever met!”
There is something, something in his chest. Something he does not understand. Something that makes each silly little tidbit Chuuya throws back at him scorch like a hot iron poker, stab stab stabbing Dazai because why the fuck not, because Chuuya is weird, he is so weird and he wields their rapport like the most dangerous weapon Dazai’s ever seen.
“But I don’t know where you come from. You know where I come from, but not the other way around. And maybe… if this partner thing actually meant—or means something, even, to you, you’ll actually take me seriously for once and yknow, tell me.”
And yet, and yet all he does with this weapon is ask Dazai to tell him about himself. Dazai understands this creature better than anyone, but there are some times, despite it all, where he realizes that perhaps he never understood Chuuya at all. Perhaps he never will. What does a creature who was born demented have in common with one who was born so bright and bold that not even this cruel, dastardly thing called life could corrupt it?
Chuuya huffs at his bangs, but as they are wet, they remain plastered to his forehead. “But it’s whatever,” he finishes. “Do what you want.”
Huffing out his own breath, Dazai brazenly meets Chuuya’s eyes. He will not look away. He refuses to look away. “I guess, as a suicidal, it would make sense that I would leave my legacy with someone. If you’re masochistic enough that you want that to be you… who am I to stop you?”
Oh, those dastardly puppy dog eyes. Dazai breathes. In, out, in. Death, rebirth, death. Or maybe the other way around. Who knows these days? Chuuya’s one crazy motherfucker.
“I’m not like you,” Dazai starts. “I remember my parents. I don’t really know what to say about them. They weren’t prepared to be parents. I think that’s the best way to describe them.”
“You know… how I am. What I’m like. They weren’t prepared for that, either. I remember, when I was very small, that things used to be… different. I used to be able to… be like you, and everyone else. And it was easier for them. But those feelings are so far away I barely even remember them now. They went away… with the cold. I remember a lot of cold.”
Dazai knows he’s making roughly zero sense, but Chuuya’s eyes are rapt.
“They, haha. They got scared of me. I was a demon even from a young age, you know. And it was like that for a little while, but when I was seven... I strangled our cat. And then I sawed her open on the lawn using a boning knife to see what her insides were like. And things had to end from there.”
“What do you mean, ‘end’?” Chuuya asks, and Dazai cannot look at his face right now anymore. He is not brave like Chuuya said at all.
“My mom brought me to the well on the edge of town. She said our water supply was contaminated with arsenic and we needed to go there to get some fresh. I knew she was lying, but I was curious what would happen if I went along. So I did.”
Dazai keeps his breaths low and even. He can hear Chuuya’s hitching even from the door where he’s still standing.
“She said she saw a frog hopping in the well, and I leaned over to see, because even if you’re messed up like me, there are still some things you don’t expect. And she? She kind of—of—?”
He loses some time, he thinks. A few seconds? Maybe a minute? He can’t even tell if he’s still talking, so he presses his tongue to the roof of his mouth to see.
“It’s OK, Dazai,” Chuuya says. “You don’t have to finish. I, I. I know what happened next. It’s OK. You’re OK. You’re here, with me.”
His voice is unusually soft, and seems strangely close. Dazai blinks several times, realizing there is red right in his face. Chuuya is crouching on the closed toilet lid on two legs, butt naked and still dripping with water, right in front of Dazai, holding his cheekbones and rubbing soft circles into his jaw. It’s kind of annoying, actually. Disturbing. But Dazai doesn’t really have the words to say that right now.
“I know where I am, stupid,” he says, so hoarse his voice sounds like a gross frog ribbit.
Chuuya chuckles, but it sounds wet. “Of course you do,” he says with a huff, pressing his forehead ever so gently to Dazai’s. “You’re too good to lose where you are to your past like the rest of us.”
That’s enough to get a weak smile out of Dazai. “No, you’re just really dumb, Chuuya,” he informs him. He’d usually have a lot more to say, but his mind is kind of spinning in way too many silly loop-de-loops right now to be spitting out comebacks.
Besides, it’s really hard to pay attention when Chuuya lets out an obnoxious, wet, sniffle. Oh no, is he crying? Ew.
“Stop it. Stop that right now,” Dazai demands.
“I can’t exactly help it, dumbass,” Chuuya complains with that awful, snot-stained voice that comes with tears. “Do you think I want to spend my Thursday morning crying for a jackass like you? Because if you’ll remember, I have much better things to cry about right now!”
That gets a real laugh out of Dazai. A full-bodied, embarrassing cackle. “I’m sorry,” he taunts between laughs. “I didn’t think your sob sessions about your buddies were all that special anymore, considering you have about twenty-five of them a week!”
Chuuya pulls away at that. “You are demented!” he snaps, but the scowl isn’t so fierce as it would be ordinarily, and it only causes Dazai to cackle harder. Rolling his eyes, Chuuya gives him a light shove. “That is not what you say when someone is crying! The only reason I’m not beating you to shit right now is that that was your awful story that started this.”
He determinedly wipes his eyes, seeming to come to some sort of resolve.
“I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m being selfish right now. You’re the one that happened to. I just—Dazai. I don’t want to, like, patronize you, because you’re the smartest guy I know besides the boss, but. You understand why—why what she did wasn’t OK, right? Like, even by our standards in the mafia, really, really not OK?”
Dazai’s face crinkles. He doesn’t really know how to answer that question.
“Fuck. You don’t, do you?” Chuuya’s voice is hitting that dangerous misty place again. “You really, really don’t. You stupid walking, talking murder machine, of course you wouldn’t. God. God. Jesus fucking Christ. I don’t know whether I want to hug or strangle you right now.”
All Dazai can muster upon hearing that is a look he hopes gets across exactly how bizarre he thinks this preternatural being that calls himself Nakahara Chuuya is. No. This human. Dazai will not do him that disservice, even in his mind.
“You’re so weird, Chuuya,” Dazai complains, and for the life of him he doesn’t know if his heart is in it or not. “You’re so, so weird. You spend weeks moping and nesting in your dirty clothes in your bed like some kind of really gross scavenger pigeon, and I start thinking that Verlaine actually messed around with your little gremlin mind so much that he broke something for good, but as soon as I look even a little down in the dumps you can make yourself be OK and have a conversation that’s longer than three sentences and be totally normal again.” He scoffs. “Those Sheep… they really broke you, didn’t they? You can’t be a real person unless someone needs you. I think that’s way more pathetic than my stupid well story.”
Chuuya’s face contorts, for a moment, before his expression breaks with a wet chuckle. “No one’s ever put it quite like that before.”
“I’m not wrong though.”
Brows press together. Separate. A release of breath. “No… no, you’re really not.” Another laugh, more grounded, earthy this time. “It’s funny… I think in another world, we could have been friends. Like, a ‘fuckup for fuckup’ vibe. Nobody knows me like you do. I think if it weren’t for—if this were the kind of world where things last, it could have happened.”
Dazai chuffs. “Yeah,” he says, and never more than in this moment has he felt life’s ephemerality so deeply. For the first time since his and Chuuya’s fight with Rimbaud, even, he finds himself contemplating the merits of sticking around, even knowing that that’s never been less of an option.