Chapter Text
“Take my hand,” Someone whispered. He felt warmth encasing his fingers and soft brushes of a touch tracing over his palm. In the back of his mind, Dazai was sure that whoever this person was, they’d keep him safe.
Dazai woke up and immediately groaned, letting out pitiful noises of despair. “Just one night. Give me a single night without him in my head. Please. Jeez.”
He dragged himself out of his heap of blankets and hopped from one foot to the other upon feeling the cold floor.
Once, the mornings he woke up to were filled with the body heat of 20, 30 children cramped in a small pocket of a rundown town. There, he had nobody but himself; that’s how it had been for the first seven years of his life. Until a boy, whose hair was as fiery as his screams, showed up one day and lit up his world in flames.
Dazai looked curiously at the towering man and the boy in ropes from behind the excited children. If the man had not introduced him as a boy, Dazai would’ve mistaken him for an orange dog. The boy thrashed and screamed. There was only one thing on his mind: freedom. But he was here now—and in this orphanage, freedom had long since become a fairytale, just as impossible as one might think of the fairy godmother or the frog prince.
No matter how the boy screamed his throat hoarse, however, the man did not take him away. He would come around, the man was thinking. They always do. The boy’s continuous screaming did not cease, only growing until Dazai could not hear the ringing in his ears from being slapped around the day before.
“Quiet! Or I’ll throw you down in the basement with the rats.” The man barked, finally losing his patience.
The boy did not stop screaming and struggling. His restraints rubbed bloody red patterns on his skin, but they began to loosen. The man didn’t notice, leaving the boy there at the door, as if he expected the children to calm him down. Dazai stayed in the crowd of chaos and did nothing while the other children covered their ears and cried. The man was closing the door when an orange blur streaked across the floor.
There was a scream, a deeper scream from an older man. The boy clung onto the man three times the size of him with his teeth sunken into a veiny arm. Dazai thought he would’ve been impressed if he knew how to feel.
“You devil of a child.” The man hissed and grabbed the boy by his brightly colored hair and threw him on the ground, a few feet into the hallway. The door slammed behind them, and they were left without the newcomer. The crying of his peers quieted to only sniffles. The older kids comforted the younger ones and whispered reassurances in their little ears. Dazai comforted no one and no one comforted him. He did not need any one of them. As far as he was concerned, they were barely in his life—merely insects who shared his meals and slept nearby.
Yet Dazai spent that night thinking about the boy—his fiery flames of hair licking his crafted features, his eyes burning with determination… they intrigued him like nothing else had before. Someone—something—he wanted was here at last. And it was just under his feet.
It was during lunchtime when Dazai saw him again. With a hand on the boy’s shoulder, the principal walked him around the cafeteria. The boy was no longer screaming, though his eyes still bore an inferno blazing as hot as it had last night. Dazai saw no visible evidence of slapping, but how else had Mori made the boy listen?
Mori said something to him—perhaps a suggestion of what to eat or an introduction of one of the older children. As Dazai neared the two, he was able to examine the boy’s features closer. Small freckles dotted his nose. His eyelashes—a darker, slightly duller color than his hair—were able to shield only the tiniest fraction of his furious glare. The boy made a noise similar to a snarl.
“Now, now, boy. We had a deal, remember?” Mori chided him at the sight of his death stare.
The boy hissed something in a language Dazai couldn’t understand. Mori replied in the same tongue, and only then did Dazai realize it was French. A foreigner, Dazai mused. How did a foreign orphan end up on these doorsteps?
Mori must’ve noticed his curious gaze. The principal slid his eyes over to meet Dazai’s and smiled—the kind of smile Dazai used to see his parents practice with each other, the kind of smile that was all Dazai knew.
“Ah. Let’s find you a friend,” Mori led—well, pushed the boy as they walked towards Dazai.
“Dazai-kun,” Mori clamped a firm hand on Dazai’s bony shoulder.
“Mori-sensei, good afternoon,” Dazai said quietly.
The boy glared at him.
“Introduce yourself,” Mori prompted.
Neither boy knew who he was talking to.
Apparently, a moment’s silence was enough for Mori to get impatient, for he went ahead and introduced them to each other.
“Dazai-kun, this is Chuuya-kun. Chuuya-kun, this is Dazai Osamu. I’m sure Dazai-kun will welcome you nicely.” It was more of a threat than a pleasantry that came out of Mori’s mouth, but then again, when was it ever not a threat when it came from Mori Ougai?
Chuuya, as Mori had introduced, muttered something in French.
“Japanese, please,” Mori said, cheerfully squeezing Chuuya’s shoulder. Dazai was sure that it would bruise into black and blue the next morning.
“He looks snobby.” Chuuya translated in a louder voice. His Japanese did not seem to carry the French accent Dazai had expected.
“You look like you belong in a zoo,” Dazai replied. It was not an answer said with malice, but Chuuya definitely thought it was.
“I’ll leave you two to get acquainted,” Mori said, practically waltzing off.
Why’s he suddenly in such a good mood?
The glare in Chuuya’s eyes kept on roaring with flames, and at the moment, all of the heat was directed towards Dazai. Unfortunately, Dazai had no shield. He laid bare under Chuuya’s scrutinizing scan and waited for the silence to break. Only it stayed untouched. Considering the amount of screaming Chuuya did yesterday, Dazai was tempted to believe that he simply had a sore throat. But the longer the silence stretched, the more Dazai realized it was a competition—a competition Chuuya refused to lose.
Even with a mind that has matured far beyond the age of seven, Dazai was beginning to lose his patience. If Chuuya wanted to win a competition, then so be it. There was something else Dazai wanted: to pick Chuuya apart piece by piece until he was satisfied.
Dazai coughed. It seemed that that was enough for Chuuya, for his glare bore a triumphant gleam. Yet still, he did not speak.
“Let’s play a game,” Dazai suggested.
An ounce of curiosity seeped through Chuuya’s firm glare and Dazai knew he’d gotten him.
“How about 20 questions? I ask a question and you answer. Then you ask one and I answer.”
Chuuya wrinkled his nose, and some of the freckles on his face squished together. “No.”
Simple decline. Dazai scanned Chuuya’s face.
He wears his heart on his sleeve.
Dazai was the opposite. He knew if he made such a mistake, he would have nothing left to defend himself with.
“Then what do you want to do?” Dazai asked, not because he gave up on finding things about Chuuya, but because he was sure Chuuya had no other ideas.
He got up and rummaged through bed after bed in the room. Chuuya came back with a bottle. “You ask a question and I flip a bottle. If it lands upright, I don’t answer. If it doesn’t, I’ll respond. Same thing for you.”
Dazai smiled—the same sly, cunning smile that had interested Mori the first time they’d met. “Okay.”
“Go, then.”
“How did you end up here?” Dazai asked.
Chuuya flipped the bottle. It landed upright and teetered, but did not fall. Triumph lit up once again in Chuuya’s eyes. “My turn,” He announced. He pondered for a moment, not sure what to ask. “How long have you been here?”
Dazai flipped the bottle. It landed flat on its side. Chuuya’s cheeks puffed out with glee. “Three years. Where were you born?”
The bottle fell after a wobble this time. Chuuya huffed, but he seemed to accept his defeat. Dazai leaned in, eager to get an answer.
“I don’t know,” he said simply.
“How do you not know?” Dazai asked, incredulous.
Chuuya shook his head. “I don’t know,” he insisted.
“Fine. Answer another one of my questions then. What was the deal Mori made with you?”
Chuuya frowned, and Dazai realized he slipped up. “Mori-sensei.” Dazai corrected, but Chuuya had moved on already.
“He told me that if I stayed, he would help me get my memory back.” Chuuya said.
His memory?
“Your memory?” Dazai asked aloud.
“My turn again,” Chuuya forged ahead, paying no mind to Dazai’s question. “What’s the one thing you want most?”
The bottle landed on its side again.
He couldn’t very well say that the thing he wanted most was right in front of him, so he settled for the next best thing. “To escape,” Dazai breathed.
“Why haven’t you done it yet?”
“That’s a question.” Dazai said. “And it’s my turn. Are you really an orphan?”
Chuuya’s breath hitched, and he stared with wide eyes rather than glaring. He flipped the bottle, which didn’t even land upright before falling, just landing on its side. “I—” He swallowed and looked away. “I don’t know…”
Dazai let out a sigh of frustration. If he’d known better, he would’ve left himself completely unreadable. “Fine,” Dazai tried not to pout. “What do you know? Or remember?”
“Mori—Mori-sensei,” Chuuya began, a disgusted tone laced in his voice, “said I’m seven years old, even though I only remember a month’s worth of stuff.” Chuuya frowned. “Everything before that—the first seven years of my life is one huge blank.”
“Yet you’re still fluent in both French and Japanese, and remember your name,” Dazai thought out loud.
“My turn,” Chuuya seemed eager to move on like before. “Why haven’t you escaped yet?” He repeated his previous question.
Dazai flipped the bottle, which landed on its side. “This game is designed for me to lose…” Dazai grumbled to himself. “I haven’t escaped yet because I need more information. Mori is doing something to the people in this orphanage, and I’m going to find out the truth. Also—” Dazai was embarrassed to say, “—I’m not strong enough or smart enough to outplay Mori. Yet.”
There was a pause in the air.
That’s why I need you, Dazai thought, not daring to voice it out loud.
He needed to make Chuuya trust him. He needed to make Chuuya want to work with him. He needed time to do that.
Dazai eyed Chuuya’s calloused fingers. On top of that, he seemed pretty strong and fast for an amnesiac seven-year-old. “Where’d you get those? Or is that a pre-month memory?” Dazai asked.
Chuuya didn’t even flip the bottle this time. He seemed just as interested in answering and asking questions as Dazai was. “It isn’t. I spent most of that month swinging around the city and stealing food. I didn’t even know I could speak Japanese at the time,” Chuuya admitted.
Chuuya’s name suggests a Japanese ancestry, but his appearance says otherwise. Hearing that Chuuya’s first instinct was to speak and think in French after the loss of seven years' worth of his life made Dazai think Chuuya was raised in France. But then how in the world had Chuuya end up in a Japanese city and then in its poor, small neighboring town? And what was up with his amnesia, anyway?
Dazai wasn’t lying when he told Chuuya that he wanted to escape. He wasn’t lying when he told himself that he needed Chuuya to escape. But right now, the only thing on his mind was figuring out who Chuuya was. He could only imagine the satisfaction of putting together the dissected pieces of the puzzle that was Nakahara Chuuya.