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“Hey!” A young Dazai exclaimed as he reached across the sleek, sticky, copper-wooden and plastic coated table in the diner, reaching out to Oda, fighting to regain the fry he’d just been robbed of.
Ango, disgruntled, reached for Dazai’s arm, pulled him backwards, and twisted it slightly, tutting under his breath. “You’re putting your arm in your ketchup. Stop that.”
“He’s a thief,” Dazai whined pitifully at Ango sitting next to him, uncomfortably sandwiched between Dazai and the other. “He keeps taking my food.”
Ango met his dismay with a mocking grimace, quite frankly not giving two shits about the fact Oda had taken some of Dazai’s food from his cheap little basket of fries. “Act your age. You’re not five years old.”
“Feels like he is sometimes,” Oda hummed. He threw the fry in his mouth, and when Dazai whimpered like a dog at the sight, he sighed with a heave. Brushing his hands off on a napkin, once cleaned, he raised his gruff hand to Dazai’s hair and ruffled it without a care.
Ango pretentiously pushed up his glasses at the comment. “Don’t take his side. Oda.” His eyes held a look that could only be described as, ‘any hope of us ever having romantic interaction ever again will be crushed within an instant if you side with a rambunctious fifteen-year-old over me.’
Oda let the threatening use of his name brush over him and pass him by as he dryly chuckled with no hesitation. “Relax.” His hand shifted from Dazai to Ango’s shoulder, settling for a second before his thumb started rubbing circles.
There was nothing Ango despised more about Oda than how utterly, completely complicit he was in Dazai’s childlike behaviour, the way he would nag and annoy and rile to his heart’s content. Oda simply allowed it. Ango, when bringing this up, was always met with the argument, ‘He’s not my dad! He can’t tell me what to do!’ To which Oda loosely agreed. Ango begged to differ with the both of them.
Dazai dragged his coat further over his shoulders with one hand, the other reaching for the last few fries in his basket, the overwhelming volume of grease and salt on them covering the pads of his fingers.
If Ango wasn’t already hypersensitive to the sound of people eating, he definitely was now.
Dazai grappled the basket and tipped the rest into his mouth, the waxy paper in the bottom falling out onto his face before slipping messily onto the table. The lights above them flickered with broken fuses and shattered dreams, the only people to ever see them being Einsteins who never were, because they dropped out of school and were forced to get a minimum wage job. The symbolism of the cracked lighting reminded Dazai, and all of them, for that matter, of how weird their job was. Of how strange it was that they’d all found themselves in a place like the Port Mafia.
He stepped out of the booth as his boots hit the black and white chequered floor once again, catching Oda and Ango’s eyes as he dusted himself off with his muddy paws.
“Be right back!~” Dazai jested with a grin. He joyfully skipped off away from the table, like a fish out of water against the neon blues and the crimson linings of the empty, desolate diner, clad in all black as he made his way up the back to the bathrooms to wash his hands.
The night was edged with a chill, though the world felt much warmer inside a crappy place like this. As soon as Dazai was out of sight, Ango rested his head in his weary hands and let a weak, fragile cry drag past his lips. It had been a day. One hell of a day.
Oda clicked his tongue at the noise and the motion Ango made in misery. He lifted his jacket off of his shoulders, that strangely charming trench-coat looking piece of fabric that he always carted around on his person, and wrapped it around him. His hand came in front of Ango to slide his glasses away from his face to save him from putting a crack in them.
Ango’s lips quivered, trembling as he tried to curb his panic. His skin had paled more than usual, and the sorrowing brown colour of his coat didn’t help hide it at all. It only made it stand out more.
“Too much?” Oda tread carefully over the topic of the day they’d had. There was nothing about it that made it stand so clearly out from the others. It was just the horror of their occupation, the fatal truth of their lives. The wear and tear.
“Too much,” Ango said with little conviction. “Too fucking much.”
“Shh,” Oda muttered in a voice all too familiar to him. He wrapped an arm around him, pulled him near, his eyes darting up to the scene that surrounded them, wondering if any of the minimum wage workers nearby had the gall to listen in or bear eyes to Ango’s vulnerability. “I’ve got you.”
Oda’s hand followed a path up and down his arm as he pressed him against his side, the heels of Ango’s palms pressing against his eyes as he put weight on them onto his elbows on the table. Oda took the time to be patient, or as patient as he could be, knowing Dazai was a ticking time bomb, waiting to rush back to the table, and definitely did not dry his hands after washing.
True bliss to Ango was being able to have one, sleep-filled night with no nightmares, without that overarching trepidation that he constantly ran from, feeling like a hollowed shell of himself. He was always clean-cut, poker faced. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d cried - and on the same track, he couldn’t remember the last time he’d cried that wasn’t in Oda’s loving arms.
Describing Oda and Ango’s relationship was a difficult task, too. They were definitely more than friends. They were definitely attracted to one another. But with lives like theirs, did they have time or energy to indulge in a fully attentive, fully energised and balanced relationship? No, they didn’t. The answer was no. The answer would always be no, and they knew that.
“He knows we’re trying,” Oda added midway through another thick exhale. “He knows you’re trying.” Ango’s hands only pressed further against his eyes, so hard he was seeing those strange, fuzzy, colourful, metallic looking patterns behind the shutters.
“I don’t know,” Ango whispered, voice crack after voice crack after voice crack. “The highlight of his week shouldn’t be eating at a shitty diner somewhere off the highway. It should be getting out of school on a Friday. It should be- I don’t know, fuck- It should be something normal teenagers do.”
“I wasn’t a normal teenager. But I don’t blame anyone for it. If I were him, I definitely wouldn’t blame someone who’s not even related to him, but is trying hard enough to put in the effort to try and make his life a little better, for anything.”
Ango turned to him and sniffled, wet, sappy tears, committing the unspoken sin of wiping his nose on Oda’s sleeve. “You have such a way with words.” He said it in a way that made it near impossible to tell if he was being kind to him or insulting him.
“We’re going to have bad days, Ango. There’s always going to be bad days.”
“When are good days going to happen, Oda?”
Oda didn’t have an answer. He could shoot, he could kill, but the one thing he wouldn’t do was lie.
So, he settled for something he found acceptable within his limited capabilities of comforting people. “They might not. Ever. But we’ll have neutral days. We’ll have okay days. We’ll have pretty alright days. None of them are going to be good. But they won’t all be bad.”
“I’m a grown man,” Ango scoffed at himself. “I shouldn’t need you to tell me this.”
“I wish I had the answers you wanted, y’know.”
Ango tiredly lifted his weighted-feeling head and looked at him, his eyes drooping and his breaths coming out slow and wavy. He cautiously tugged at his collar to pull him closer and messily kissed his cheek, stealing a kiss like never before. One of the few times Ango had kissed him, now. They generally tried to avoid it. Tried to avoid falling.
He drew his lips away gently after making his mark, smiling. “Oh, I know.” He lethargically sighed, finding his smile again, tears still streaking his complexion.
Oda totally short-circuited. Felt his face go warm at the sentiment and the kiss, feeling his heart flutter unexplainably as he smiled through the teary sadness and melancholy of it all.
With that short interlude for Ango’s feelings bubbling over the top, things began to feel okay. But, before they knew it-
“I’m back!” Dazai yelped. Ango hadn’t quite found the time yet to wipe his tears and clear up the emotional mess he’d made in the space of his absence when going to the bathroom.
Ango could only match Dazai’s eye contact for a second, blinking slowly before resigning himself back to Oda’s shoulder, clinging to his side for some kind of comfort. Something to ground him. Having feelings was more tiring than any of them had ever anticipated.
Oda and Dazai locked in a gaze next, having one of those cliche moments where you could say they were having a conversation all with their eyes, except their expressions didn’t change or indicate any sort of communication at all, their eyebrows did not move and their eyes stayed the same, and though strange, they seemed to get a message across to one another from that single look.
The small diner booth felt hot and heavy and tense all at the same time as Oda held Ango close to him, staring up at this completely befuddling boy who had murdered people with his bare hands and still looked like he didn’t understand the ‘i before e, except after c’ rule.
Oda broke the silence. “Movie night?”
“Definitely.” Dazai agreed.
“Always.” Ango exasperatedly sighed from his side.