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They were sixteen, sitting on the rusted rooftop of an abandoned factory that overlooked the entire port. The city lights below flickered like dying stars, too dim to guide anyone, too bright to let the darkness swallow them whole. The night smelled of salt, metal, and the faint sting of blood.
Dazai dangled his legs over the edge, kicking at nothing. “Hey, Chuuya,” he said, voice too casual for someone staring down a drop that could’ve ended him. “Do you think we’ll ever make it to thirty?”
Chuuya scoffed, lying back against the cold concrete. “Why wouldn’t we?”
Dazai shrugged. “People like us don’t last long. We just pretend we do.”
Something in his tone made Chuuya sit up. Dazai wasn’t joking. That alone was unsettling.
“What’s your point?” Chuuya muttered.
“My point,” Dazai said, turning to him with a rare, eerily steady gaze, “is that if we ever reach thirty and we’re still miserable, let’s just end it together.”
Chuuya stared at him. At the boy who laughed at danger, who treated life like a puzzle missing half its pieces. At the boy who, despite everything, was the only one who understood what it felt like to be hollow in places that shouldn’t be.
“That’s stupid,” Chuuya said, but his voice was softer.
“Everything we do is stupid.” Dazai grinned, but it didn’t reach his eyes. “So? Deal?”
Chuuya looked down at the harbor, at the quiet ripples on the water that reflected nothing clearly. Thirty felt so far away. Happiness felt even farther. And Dazai, in that moment, felt like the only real thing he had.
So he stuck out his pinky, half mocking, half serious. “Fine. If we hit thirty and life still sucks, we kill each other.”
Dazai’s smile finally warmed. He hooked his pinky with Chuuya’s. “Deal.”
Their hands dropped, and the night swallowed the sound of their laughter—reckless, broken, young, and already old.
They didn’t know then what twenty would do to them. Or what thirty would take.
They just knew they weren’t afraid, as long as the other was there.
A promise made on a rooftop, under a bruised sky. A promise that would follow them all their lives.
And in Chuuya’s case, far beyond.
-
As years of their twenties passed, they distanced themselves from one another and eventually lost track of their lives. Until the morning of Chuuya’s 30th birthday, when Dazai shows up at his doorstep step not even ringing.
“Is it a happy birthday or should we proceed?” he says in lieu of a greeting.
“How did you find me? I thought-” Dazai shrugs.
“We made a promise. You have my word, it’s a deal.”
Chuuya exhales a sigh so deep he has to grip the door to keep his balance. He contemplates his life: the alarm to wake up for a work he hates that he had just turned off, not to mention the paperwork awaiting him instead of going out on his birthday. He isn’t happy; he has just become more numb.
Which is why he didn't understand what he said next.
“Give me a day.”
“With one condition,” Dazai says, folding his arms over himself. “I thought i was travelinc here for today, so i don’t have a place to stay, see.” Unsure, Chuuya still agrees.
He tries to remember his friendship with the man, and how weirdly they found /temporary/ comfort in each other. But then he also remembered the dangers, the joint toxicity, and the chaos surrounding them whenever they're with one another.
With a surprising longing for the taller, Chuuya called in sick for work. He called in sick to spend a day with Dazai Osamu, the man who’s going to end his pathetic life.
-
Chuuya was almost embarrassed by how easily his body remembered the shape of Dazai beside him, like no time had passed at all, like they were still sixteen and stupid and full of promises they thought sounded romantic.
They spent the morning walking the city the way they used to roam Yokohama back then: aimlessly, endlessly, like maps didn’t apply to them. Dazai talked too much, and Chuuya talked too little. Some things never changed.
“Do you ever think we cursed ourselves?” Dazai asked while they stood on a pedestrian overpass, watching cars streak below like veins of light.
“Because we made a promise when we were kids?” Chuuya scoffed.
“No,” Dazai said softly. “Because it was the only thing we were sure about.”
Chuuya felt something splinter in him. Maybe it was a memory. Maybe it was a wish.
They ate cheap food from the convenience store. They laughed, quietly, like they were afraid too much joy would ruin the fragile truce between them. Dazai bumped Chuuya’s shoulder once. Chuuya didn’t shove him back.
By afternoon, the exhaustion began to settle into Chuuya’s bones, not the kind that sleep could fix, but the heavy, sinking kind, the kind that had been creeping up for years. He wondered if Dazai could see it, if he understood.
Maybe he always had.
When evening painted the room dim, Dazai sat on Chuuya’s couch, elbows on his knees.
“So?” he asked. “You’ve had your day. You don’t look any happier.”
Chuuya swallowed. His throat was raw.
“I don’t know what I feel,” he whispered. “Maybe that’s the problem.”
Dazai stared at him with something unreadable, something like sympathy, something like mourning.
“You give the word,” he murmured, “and I’ll keep the promise.”
Chuuya closed his eyes.
Everything in him said go. Everything in him said stay. Everything in him said tired.
He exhaled.
“Dazai,” he said, “I—”
When he opened his eyes again—
Dazai was gone.
Not gone like he’d walked out.
Gone like he had never been there at all.
The couch was undented.
The food wrappers they’d left on the table had vanished.
The extra pair of shoes by the door, shoes Chuuya swore he saw this morning, weren’t there.
Chuuya blinked once, twice, breathing turning sharp.
The apartment was silent.
Too silent.
He stood abruptly, the room spinning, and stumbled toward the mirror hanging crookedly on the wall.
His reflection stared back at him, pale, trembling, eyes rimmed red.
And behind him, in the glass, was no one.
There had been no footsteps at the door that morning.
No voice saying Happy birthday.
No Dazai leaning on the frame with that half-smile.
No one to spend the day with.
Just Chuuya.
Just Chuuya, alone on his 30th birthday.
He remembered his own voice from earlier—
Give me a day.
He had said it out loud.
He remembered answering himself.
He remembered pretending it was someone else.
His hand drifted down to the heavy, cold shape in his pocket, the metal he had slipped there in the gray quiet of morning, his only real plan for the day.
The day he had spent with Dazai.
The day he had spent alone.
He sank to the floor, knees hitting tile with a hollow sound.
The truth settled slowly, cruelly, like ice in his veins:
Dazai hadn’t come to fulfill the pact.
Dazai hadn’t come because there was no pact left to fulfill.
Dazai hadn’t come because Dazai hadn’t been alive for years.
Because Chuuya had known that.
Because his mind had simply refused to accept it.
Chuuya’s fingers curled around the object in his pocket, knuckles white.
The promise they made at sixteen echoed in his skull like a cruel lullaby:
If we’re not happy by thirty, we’ll end it together.
Together.
But Chuuya was the only one who remembered.
Or maybe he was the only one who was still here.
Tears burned hot at the corners of his eyes, not for Dazai, not for the promise, but for the bitter, final truth:
The person he had been waiting for
The person he thought could pull him back
The person he spent the day with—
Had existed only in his mind.
A hallucination born from an illness he’d spent years ignoring.
A desperate attempt by his dying mind to give him one last day of comfort before the end.
Chuuya’s breath hitched as he pressed the metal to his chest, forehead bending to rest against his knees.
There was no Dazai to save him.
No Dazai to kill him.
There was no Dazai at all.
Just Chuuya, the silence, and the ending he had already chosen long before today.
And the apartment stayed silent.
This time, it stayed silent for good.