Work Text:
Chuuya startles when his phone rings; he rarely gets calls on his personal cell, and to be entirely honest, he’s forgotten how his ringtone sounded.
He fishes it out of his pocket with some amount of a struggle. As if it isn’t already hidden by the fact that he’s wearing layers, but it’s lodged in there, too, covered in lint, buried under a handkerchief and loose change from his lunch that he has to feel around for before he manages to untangle it from his inner vest pocket. It vibrates against his fingers while he fumbles to flip it open.
The caller I.D. flashes Atsushi’s name (complete with a little heart emoticon (<3) that he had added shortly after their started dating, much to Akutagawa’s disgust) across the screen. Of course, he should have guessed as much. Atsushi has his work number, too, but he prefers Chuuya’s cell; something about not wanting to use the Mafia’s cell data on the grounds of feeling badly about that, which sounds silly for any number of reasons, but Chuuya finds it endearing all the same. He smiles to himself for the first time since he got to work all day, accepting the call and pressing it close to his ear.
“Hey beautiful, what’s up?” he says first, beating Atsushi to the punch.
“Ew. Is that how you always greet him? That’s gross, you sound like a pimp,” definitely-not-Atsushi answers him, gagging into the speaker with all the maturity of a grade schooler.
Chuuya growls into the microphone, slamming his hand down on his desk. Pens rattle and he pays them no mind. “What the fuck Dazai?! Can’t you call from your own damn phone?!”
Dazai sighs, tinny and thoroughly annoying. “Not that Atsushi isn’t attractive. He’s a strapping young man,” he goes on, ignoring the question. “But you’re disgusting when you flirt. The sugar in your voice is giving me a heart attack.”
“You would fucking love that, wouldn’t you?” Chuuya scoffs. If only it WOULD give him a heart attack. “Maybe you should call from your own number and then you won’t have to hear it. I sure as hell ain’t stopping on YOUR account.”
As if he’d stop crooning toward his boyfriend just because Dazai is too immature to stomach the sappy shit. Chuuya is an openly affectionate man with the people he cares about, the man that he’s IN LOVE with, and Atsushi says he loves that about him, thank you very much. The stupid smelly mackerel isn’t going to shut him up. If anything, his bitching makes Chuuya want to fawn over his boyfriend MORE than he already does.
“You blocked me,” Dazai deadpans, clicking his tongue.
Chuuya rolls his eyes even though he knows Dazai can’t see him. “Because you pull shit like this. You have about ten second to tell me what you want before I hang up on you-“
“You’re so impatient, hatrack,” Dazai cuts him off and Chuuya pulls the phone away from his ear to end the call before- “But Atsushi got a little banged up on a job today. Yosano wants him to go home so I THOUGHT I would call you to pick him up, but then my call bounced back because you hate me, so I had to swipe Atsushi-kun’s instead.”
He only registers about half of what Dazai says as he goes off on that tangent: the important half. He’s already pushing his chair back and rounding the front of his desk before he manages to put the words together between his teeth.
“What do you mean banged up? What happened?”
“Pesky ability user with a matter transformation ability,” Dazai sounds bored, and Chuuya can hear him scratching his head through the microphone. He’s seen that enough times that the mental image of Dazai’s dandruff while he paws at his head makes Chuuya think he probably looks something close to a dog right now, if only out of spite. “He was trying to rob a jewelry store and wound up giving us a tough time about it. Atsushi-kun caught up to him and captured him, but he took a beating first.”
Chuuya reaches for his car keys in the back pocket of his pants. “Is he okay?”
“Tired,” Dazai replies. “But fine. The Tiger took care of it before Yosano even got to the scene.”
The Tiger’s regeneration is a blessing not only for Atsushi, but for everyone who cares about him. Chuuya can’t even count on both hands how many times he’s been buried in near-death experiences only for the Tiger to pull him back out, and that’s only counting the ones he’s been told about. Atsushi is far from some weak little thing, no matter how he may appear, timid and gentle and oh-so sweet. Now that he’s one a proper diet with three square meals a day, he’s packed with lean muscles and broad shoulder, and there are very few fighters in Yokohama, hell, probably the entire world, that could match up to his strength. Even without the Tiger, he’s a force to be reckoned with, and the thought alone makes Chuuya swoon like a schoolgirl, loathe as he’d ever be to admit that to DAZAI. The combined force of Atsushi’s self-taught fortitude, and the Tiger’s healing, keeps him safe, very safe, and that helps Chuuya sleep at night tenfold.
That doesn’t mean Atsushi doesn’t need to rest just like everyone else, though, and it doesn’t mean he’s any less worried about him getting hurt, either.
“I’m on my way. Is he back at the Agency?” he asks, making for his office door without ever looking back.
Dazai grumbles something incomprehensible. “No, he’s on the moon,” he says, mocking and entirely unnecessary. Chuuya can’t wait to wrap his fingers around the mackerel’s throat when he gets over there. “Of course he’s at the Agency, where else would we have taken him, numb nuts?”
Chuuya’s can both hear and feel the shell of the cell phone begin to crack under the weight of his fist.
“What the hell’d you just call me?” he growls, pausing in the doorway. Thin veins of shattered marble crack beneath the gravity pulling suddenly on his feet.
“Numb nuts,” Dazai says it again, not a care in the goddamn world. “You know, because you’re stupid, and you’re chibi sized, so by that logic you also have a small di-“
The phone shatters in Chuuya’s hand to a point of complete obscurity. The call cuts when the line dies.
Chuuya tosses the remains of tiny circuitry and cracked plastic still in his hand onto the carpet by his feet. It doesn’t fucking matter. Atsushi was injured and he needs to go home and Chuuya doesn’t need his goddamn phone for anything more than being told to come and get him. Nothing else Dazai said even mattered, let alone did it make good use of his time. ‘Hey, I’m asshole and I’m calling to harass you on your boyfriend’s phone because nobody loves me so I have to indulge my insecurities with worthless babble. Oh, also, your boyfriend got hurt at his very dangerous job so he’s with the doctor and he’s been prescribed rest.’
Chuuya growls at nothing as he marches down the hallway towards the elevator to the parking garage.
He’s going to beat the mackerel into an unrecognizable mass of pulp once he gets there-
After he’s checked on Atsushi, of course.