Work Text:
one. Chuuya Nakahara is your best friend. For the better or worse, this will not change. Certain people have their own gravitational pull, and once they hold someone in their orbit, there is no way of freeing them from it without changing that person in an irreversible way. The circumstances of how this friendship began were irrelevant. As far as he recalls, you have always been his friend. Seven years later, he can't remember where he saw you for the first time. Like a lot of things that he didn't question, only accepted; the part you played in his life had no beginning. No ending. It was only one continuous strand of thread braided around another. That was then when the stained glass hallways were filled with discordant laughter, shouting, and the clacks of fast footfalls. The sound of three people, he remembered clearly.
Out of the three, one remained, and the hallway had become quiet once more.
Yet perhaps if someone pressed their ear to the glass, they could hear the faint reverberations of chaotic memories of the years past.
two. There is no leaving the Port Mafia. Those that do so and live under the light are exception, not the rule, and they shall remain as such. Even if successful, there is no true way to wash one's hands off the mafia entirely. Parasitizing on memory, the weight of your actions will remain suspended in the back of your head forever. It isn't necessarily a conscience, but rather an imprint, a tattoo. Even for those untouched by guilt, there is no way to get rid of that essential stain. The things you have seen will remain in the back of your mind forever.
That night, the linoleum floor was dotted with piling corpses, casualties on both sides sprawled across the blood-streaked room. In that ghastly scene, the face of victim looked no different from another. Some had wide eyed looks of shock on their faces, terrified. Some looked perfectly at peace, as if they did not even have a chance to react. That night, any one of them could have been you, and yet it would've made little difference. Even with those sinners' lives wasted all for nothing, the world spins around anyway. Whatever threads they might have intertwined with other people, all those knotted strands had snapped in one go once the last bullet casing clanked on the ground.
The life of a mafia grunt isn't one to be honoured—even an unmarked grave was a luxury for most. In the end, they had all faded into anonymity, and all that was left was them were simple numbers. A single count of the casualties of that night.
The next day, the bodies were gone. All that remained were the red streaks on concrete—the exposed walls held their memory in crimson. You wondered if you would be content with a similar death, but the answer quickly followed that it made little difference if you did. The world kept on turning, but a part of you was frozen in that locked warehouse, standing still amongst the freshly spilled blood. Somewhere in your heart, you knew that you wouldn't ever get it back. In the back of your mind, it'll always be there.
That locked room was the death of innocence. Often, the death of innocence is also the death of guilt. The night's cold realizations had opened your eyes to something you had avoided for a while. Like being startled out of a long sleep, that is where the nightmare had ended, and beyond it lay an empty reality.
Chuuya noticed the changes, of course he did. The way your gaze had grown eerily distant, the tremble in your fingers while loading your gun. The way you no longer asked for clarification or talked during meetings, only took the order to kill if necessary like a machine on autopilot. As if you were both present and elsewhere entirely, your mind had simply closed itself off from all that it could see.
If it had been as simple as shaking your shoulders and telling you to snap out of it, he would've done so long ago. But even he knew that some things cannot be undone. Still, those days you found him being around you a little more than he usually did—lingering around after hours, tagging along with you on missions he wasn't even assigned to, staying up late with you in your room when you couldn't sleep. His efforts were obvious enough, even though he didn't know if any of it helped.
Everytime you asked why he was being so strangely nice to you, he would just deflect with sarcasm, or answer with a plain 'because I want to. Got a problem with that?' He wonders if he should have been honest then. If it would have changed your mind about leaving the Port Mafia.
Leaving him.
It's just a stupid thought he has now, he knows. There was no keeping you here. It's the kind of stupid thought he has late at night sometimes, when he's had a bit too much wine and your contact number is too bright on his screen.
He knows it doesn't work anymore.
The ringing of the dial tone stretches out into the long night.
three. He knows you aren't really gone. For a while you went into hiding, and Chuuya helped where he could—he held off suspicion until he was absolutely certain you were gone. It wasn't what he wanted to do, but being honest would've only put you at risk. At best, you would've been captured again. At worst you could've ended up as a wet splatter on the cold walls of Port Mafia's basement dungeons.
There was the possibility that he would be the one forced to pull the trigger on you, too, if that happened.
Just the thought of that made him want to throw up.
More than anyone, he knew there were no second chances for you. Life had a weird way of being cruel to him like that. So he did what he could do—kept his mouth shut and his head down.
Chuuya would've rather he never saw you again than have you dead because of him.
Until the situation calmed down and you were written off as just another unresolved incident, he didn't try to reconnect with you. Long after the chaos had died down, he tried to find you again. It wasn't an official order, but rather something that had happened out of the records entirely. A personal investigation, only to know if you were still alive.
Naturally, you were replaced in the chain of command, although he never bothered to get to know your replacement very well. It wouldn't be right to make the same mistake twice. Or was it thrice?
After all, Dazai was gone, and so were you.
Chuuya was going to be just fine by the end of it all. It didn't matter how, he simply had to be. There was no room to grieve, and no purpose in remembering what he's already lost. It never affected his work, either. It's only a little inconvenient, he'd told Mori then.
Nobody asked further.
But he could never figure out that odd feeling he had while walking through those long hallways of the Port Mafia headquarters, like he had been left in the bone of memory. Like an old photograph he did not belong in, the present had seemed then like a graveyard of the past. Something was missing. Something had been lost, and he had remained the only constant.
Chuuya tried not to think too much about it.
He couldn't afford the price of loneliness, anyway.
four. Even Chuuya was tempted by curiosity sometimes. He wanted to find you, eventually, if only to quell the last of the nagging feelings in his mind, the ones that gnawed at somewhere deep within his chest late at night. After a month, he did find you, though never in the same place twice. It was less risky to never stay in one place for too long.
Half of it wasn't even intentional, even if he did try to have atleast a general idea of where you were. Sometimes it was simply a matter of chance. A point of synchronisation. The act of passing you by under the dark eaves of an alleyway, or perhaps brushing against you in the crowd of the city's centre. Even after blending in so well with your surroundings, for some reason he could always tell. If a sudden feeling of recognition suddenly hit him like sparks up his spine, then more often than not he had the feeling that you weren't very too far away. It was instinctual, just as the way he'd whip his head to look you in the eye. A shared, restless moment, that lasted all but the fraction of seconds.
Even still, if on a moonless night you and him passed each other on the street, then he would pretend that you were never there. For your own good.
But the eyes never lie, do they?
Eventually, he tried to communicate with you again. A risky idea that he knew for a fact would be stupid, but nonetheless couldn't resist anyway. At first, it was slow, precarious. Hidden messages. Carefully encoded phone calls. But eventually the rhythm was set just right, and it became easier for the two of you to leave notes in places that only you could find. When Chuuya finally saw you in person again—properly, not just in stolen moments of time—he didn't know what to do with himself. He was mad at you, of course he was, but there was so much else that he had felt in that time that all he could do was stare, unsure of what to give into first. Worry, regret, guilt, grief—all the pent up emotions he hadn't once given himself the chance to properly process. Once reality had come back into centre focus, all he could do was grab you by the shoulders into a tight hug, because for the first time in a long time you were finally within reach.
He hardly ever talked to you in the daylight hours. Some things can only happen at night, Chuuya knew, but it never seemed any less strange to him. Under the neon lights you felt like a floating dream, a dizzy apparition; by the morning you were nowhere to be seen. Even so, he always showed up on time, under the dim street lamps in the small hours. When things got particularly busy, and he couldn't make it, Chuuya still left a note on the park bench you two met at often. As if he knew how fragile his connection to you had become, that if he dropped the cord even for a moment, you would've faded from his life forever.
One night, sitting on the swingset of an empty playground, you and him shared a cigarette. The flicker of the lighter and a distant streetlight was the only thing that illuminated the field, but it was enough for you to make out each other's faces in the darkness. Chuuya had a silly thought then of what you would've looked like in the sun, but didn't try to imagine it. You took too much space in the pictures that were pinned to the back of his mind anyway.
Yet, he's somewhat happy tonight. There's a smile on his face, and it's softer than what most see or expect of him. All those familiar patterns were resurfacing again, and he knows he doesn't want to make the same mistakes again, but it's so easy to. He gave into that hollow sense of safety, not because he believed in it, but because he wanted to allow himself to be careless for once. It's always been easy to be around you, and despite how Chuuya knew that he should be careful, he couldn't help but want to make the same old mistakes.
Even though circumstances had changed, your friendship still felt comfortable.
It's only a shame that despite everything, Chuuya's always waiting for the other shoe to drop.
It's only a shame that when you told him that you might have to leave for good, he expected it.
five. People are often the biggest obstacles to their own happiness. Chuuya isn't an exception.
Yet, even when it doesn't make sense to hold out hope anymore, he tries to hold onto the last fraying end of that cord of connection as much as possible. If only to have some lasting memory left behind that he would inevitably turn in his mind later.
For those few months, your nocturnal friendship had become easy, something neither of you thought twice about. Midnight motorcycle drives, quiet conversations outside of a konbini and unrestrained laughter—to some extent, you were glad for it too. It gave a dangerous, uncertain life a sense of normalcy, even when it was fragile. Under the neon lights and an inky sky, those few hours were like a solace before the world was thrown into the chaotic throttle again. The days passed by quickly and restlessly, but the nights were infinite and slow. A drawn out, continuous memory. Thinking back on such a time, it all seemed like a blurry, indistinct dream, dizzying to the core. Those memories of fleeting joy and affections rested on the fuzzy edges of reality.
He still wonders if you would've even thought of coming back if he tried to ask then. If anything would've turned out differently if he could've swallowed his doubts.
…No, it probably wouldn't have changed anything, not really, but perhaps he wouldn't feel as heavy as he did now.
But that would be then, and right now, even the briefest flickers of a shared existence was enough for him. Those summer nights were the last drop of the sweet wine before the bottle empties.
six. The last note before you left Yokohama was a simple one. On the park bench, the note was left on the side you sat in, marked with clear, unmistakable handwriting. The ink was still fresh, and it was clearly written in a hurry.
I'm sorry. I wish I could've done things differently. I wish I knew how. You'll always be my best friend, you know that, don't you?
For a moment, he wondered what it would be like if he threw that note away and took off after you. If he dropped everything, threw caution to the wind, and tried to catch up with you before you left for good. Would he have made it in time? If he acted on reckless abandon, if he had finally been honest with you, would anything have changed?
Would he have felt less heavy?
The minutes passed in silence. The ink was smudged by silent tears.
You were probably gone by now, too.
Years after, he still kept the letter with him. By that point of time, the ink had faded, but those words never really left the back of his mind. Strangely enough, it didn't seem like you had completely forgotten him either. Every year on the date of his birthday, an anonymous bottle of his favorite wine would show up on his desk somehow. His name would be scribbled on the bottle in a handwriting he would've known anywhere. He never opened those bottles. They were kept separately in the cellar.
After all, it was one of the few things he had left of you. Chuuya always felt like that taste should be saved for better days. But in the end, it never touched his tongue, left in wait forever.
seven. Chuuya Nakahara is your best friend. For the better or worse, this will not change. So, when the thought of you inevitably crossed his mind, he chose to remember you by those neon lit, blurry nights instead of the bitterness of parting and the empty space it leaves behind. As though looking through a dusty window pane, the past was something he could see, but not touch, and what he could see was fuzzy, indistinct. After all, that era had passed. Nothing that belonged to it existed anymore.
Yet, sometimes when he looked out at the bright and colorful lights of the bay city's skyline, the thought of you still put a smile on his face. If only because of the possibility that somewhere in the world, you would be looking at the same sky, safer than you had ever been beside him.