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Hands gripped tight around a convulsing throat. Red, under his fingers, around the edges of his vision, sliding down her cheeks and framing her eyes.
He lets go and she stumbles, falls, chokes on the air rattling through her bruised trachea. Stares up at him with a question on her face, fear and betrayal and the wetness of tears clumping her lashes together.
He backs away, shaking, startled, there’s so much noise in his ears. In his head.
His fingers twitch, and he glances down at his traitorous hands only to find they’re not hands at all. Paws, large and striped, with wickedly sharp claws curved and black, dripping red, red blood.
His body is trembling, everything except for those damn paws, every part of him terrified of the beast. It prowls in his chest, claws and bites and snaps like the animal it is and he hears a scream shrill even in the constant static of the air around him.
Falls to his knees, wants to put his face in his hands but the paws won’t obey him, lay flat against the ground and sink those terrible claws into the soft earth. Everything shifts and sways around him, confusing, the only reality the thing trying to tear its way out of his body.
He is the beast. The tiger is him.
It pries his jaw open and roars through him. With him. As him.
There’s another noise…
Atsushi comes awake so quickly it physically hurts, and jackknifes up on his futon, hands scrabbling at the blankets pooled around his waist. Hands. Not paws. He stares down at them uncomprehendingly and feels how quickly he’s breathing, the rapid rise and fall of his chest.
“Atsushi?”
Startled and still confused by the dream, Atsushi jerks away from the noise with an instinctual fear.
Calm, dark eyes regard him carefully from the other side of his futon. It takes a moment for recognition to kick in.
“Dazai?” he rasps, and that’s when he realizes how much his throat hurts. Like he’d swallowed a handful of razor blades and they’d all gotten stuck on the way down.
“Hey, you awake now?” the man asks quietly, cocking his head to the side. It’s a good question.
Atsushi glances around his bedroom, at the bland, blank walls, the light from streetlamps outside spilling through his window. They cast golden stripes across everything, just enough illumination that he can see fairly comfortably, but not so much that he can make out specific details.
“I think so,” he answers after a moment, finally returning his gaze to Dazai. The man is crouched near him but not too near, dressed in pajama pants with a soft looking robe thrown hastily over his shoulders. His feet are bare, and so is chest. He hasn’t moved any closer, like he’s maybe worried Atsushi will spook and run like a wild animal.
Just the mental comparison has Atsushi flinching. Suddenly all he can see is the blood on the beast’s claws, his claws, and Naomi’s terrified face looking up at him.
“Hey, hey,” Dazai’s voice and his snapping fingers draw Atsushi out of his head. He’s closer now, looking uncharacteristically concerned. “What’s the matter with you?”
Breathing carefully through the sudden spike in his heartbeat, Atsushi takes a moment to gather himself. Then he shakes the question off and asks one of his own instead. “What are you doing here?”
Dazai looks like he jumped out of bed and rushed over without a second thought.
“You were screaming.” Simple, concise. No hesitation.
It explains why Atsushi’s throat hurts so damn much. He brings a hand up to it, almost expecting the raw burning within to be reflected on the outside. Instead his fingertips encounter only cool skin, smooth under his questing touch.
“You heard me all the way over in your room?” he asks. Most of the agency stays in the same apartment building, but Dazai and Kunikida’s room is downstairs and over a few doors.
“I’m pretty sure you woke up everyone on the entire block.”
Fuck. The scream he had heard in his nightmare must have been his own. He drops his head a little, trying to hide behind his jagged bangs. “Uh, sorry?”
Rather than respond to that, Dazai starts shuffling around, pushing the comforter and Atsushi’s pillows back onto the futon from where they’d been tossed. And then promptly lays down, arms behind his head as he wriggles and makes himself comfortable.
Atsushi’s eyes widen and his mouth opens and closes a few times. Is..is he just going to sleep here? Is he too lazy to go back to his own apartment now? Before Atsushi can actually get a question out, Dazai is already speaking.
“What were you dreaming about?”
Like a switch flipping, his mind goes dark and restless. Claws. Blood. Fingers wrapped tight around a vulnerable throat. Atsushi stares down at the hands resting listlessly in his lap, and remembers being unable to control them.
“Transforming,” he answers after a while.
“Hey.” Dazai nudges him with his knee until Atsushi looks up at him again. “Your ability’s not a bad thing you know.”
Atsushi wants to curl in on himself, hide his face behind his knees, but he just casts his gaze to the wall and curls his fingers tight into his palms. “I turn into a monster.”
“Hey!” This time the word isn’t soft, but a snap of sound sharp-edged enough to startle Atsushi. He finds himself making eye contact again almost against his will as Dazai goes on. “You’re not a monster, and you don’t turn into one. Have you ever actually killed someone while transformed?”
“...no.” It’s a begrudging admittance.
“Not even when you were on the streets? You were starving but you didn’t attack anyone?”
“No.”
“So stop pitying yourself, it’s unattractive,” Dazai concludes. He settles back onto the futon more firmly, making himself comfortable again as he closes he eyes. “Now lay down, we both need more sleep.”
Blinking rapidly, Atsushi stares at the other man, confused but knocked out of his spiral of dark thoughts for the moment. There’s only the one futon in the room, so does he mean…?
Dazai pulls one arm out from under his head, patting the spot beside him and then leaving his arm splayed wide, the invitation obvious. Tentatively Atsushi takes the offer, figuring it’ll be less awkward if he lays with his back to Dazai.
Immediately his plan is ruined, because the man just throws an arm over Atsushi’s waist and pulls him back until they’re spooning. Dazai holding Atsushi close, his nose to the back of the young man’s neck, and Atsushi curled in on himself but slowly relaxing into the hold. It helps when Dazai huffs a hot breath of air across his neck and complains, “Loosen up, it’s like trying to sleep with a piece of rock.”
It’s not until Atsushi is waking up late the next morning, warm and well rested, that he realizes Dazai stayed in an attempt to keep his nightmares at bay. But by then it’s probably too late to mention it.