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Sprawled out on the couch, Dazai deliberates between triggering a pain-induced faint by digging his finger into the healing bullet wound or– the much more painful alternative– fixing this mess. It’s a tough choice. He has about as much fun trying to untangle Chuuya’s emotional constipation as he does being shot.
A particularly loud thud makes him flinch further into the cushions, and he hisses through his teeth at the reflexive pain in his shoulder. It’s followed by the sound of a second bang reverberating through the drywall.
He swallows a sigh. Unless he wants the apartment to collapse on them both, Dazai needs to get up and deal with this now.
It takes monumental effort to push himself sitting, and he bites through a mantra of ow ow ow the whole way up. It’s a bit dramatic, sure, but when it comes to being shot he’s out of practice.
On his way down the hallway, Dazai picks at his bandages to make sure they’re all sitting where they should. When Chuuya had caught him scratching at them earlier today, Dazai’s eardrums nearly burst from all the yelling. He wonders if evolution gifted every tiny person a voice box loud enough to reach space as an evolutionary defense mechanism or if he just got profoundly unlucky.
The bandages look okay-ish. The blood that’s speckled through them will be swallowed in the pitch black of Chuuya’s room regardless.
He opens the door to the sound of his partner’s muffled, incomprehensible murmurings. Dazai’s hand tightens involuntarily on the doorknob. The sleep talking is a tell that the nightmare hasn’t progressed too far yet, but by the time the screaming starts, there’s no point in interfering.
His footsteps creak loudly over the wooden floor as he pads closer.
Despite Chuuya’s constant state of extreme hyper-vigilance, Dazai hasn’t been enough to trigger his defenses for a long time– not since they learned that trust is forged, not born. Save someone’s life enough times, they’ll give their back to you; save someone’s humanity, they’ll drop their heart in your hands. In fact, Dazai’s presence tended to weaken Chuuya’s subconscious defenses, not just bypass them.
Once on a past mission, Chuuya had been hit by an ability that had no outward effects. Dazai worked himself into a paranoia-induced frenzy because when he used his neutralization, he didn’t feel that usual biting surge. It was smaller. Different. Dazai never did well with unknowns. In the middle of the night, he had snuck into Chuuya’s room to take up night-watch by his bedside like a doctor watching for time of death. It ended up being a false alarm, much to his relief. Dazai didn't come across a lot of those in his life, so he tried to muster up some gratitude about it.
Come morning, Chuuya was baffled that he hadn’t woken up from Dazai’s presence. He was a notoriously light sleeper, and the vulnerability that encased the truth was impossible for either volatile teenager to swallow. His partner had never slept through someone entering the room before. Dazai had made a joke about claiming another one of Chuuya’s firsts that didn’t land particularly well, as was evidenced by the bruise he carried on his arm for the rest of the week.
Standing by his bedside now, Dazai’s concern is more justified than it was those years ago. He’s seen the gore dreams can mar in people. Dazai has come to associate sleep with powerlessness. An insomniac by choice. Chuuya called him crazy for it; he probably won’t after tonight. His partner’s face is etched with deep lines of agony.
Research came to the conclusion that it’s worse to wake someone in the middle of a nightmare; there’s a higher risk they’ll remember the traumatic dream instead of letting it pass in their sleep. That advice, however, was meant for people that dreamt in the traditional sense. Not much about his partner is traditional, and Chuuya refuses to refer to it as dreaming at all. All of Chuuya’s nightmares are memories. His body, drifting between wake and sleep, relives the memories for him. It wipes straight from his head the second his eyes open, but the feeling of it lingers even if his recollection of it does not.
Dream or not, Dazai has a responsibility to do damage control— he’s watched an entire table fall to dust under Chuuya’s sleeping fingers.
Chuuya might lash out at him, but Dazai always takes his chances. Rubbing a soothing hand over his partner’s shaking arm, he calls out a soft, “Chuuya.”
It doesn’t work.
He brushes the curls off Chuuya’s forehead, wet with cold sweat. His partner’s face twitches minutely. Dazai uses his shirt sleeve to dry along the planes of his face and calls his name again.
Surprisingly, Chuuya rouses slowly, blinking his eyes open heavy and dazed as if seeing through water. Dazai continues sliding his hand up and down his arm slowly while waiting for Chuuya to surface.
There’s a deep breath— weighted with all the death that sits between them— and then Chuuya's face shatters all at once. The rush of emotions is nearly impossible to pick apart, but Dazai has had years of practice studying the creases of his partner’s face. The shifts of it go something like fear, guilt, anger, before it all settles on shallow relief.
When Chuuya’s eyes fly up to meet his, the look in them is shiny and cut up. Soft in the way that if you grind up metal fine enough, it turns into glitter. Soft in the way it’s not soft at all.
“Fun dream?” Dazai smiles, not stopping his ministrations along the skin of his arm.
He almost immediately regrets the question– Chuuya’s attention zeroes in on his bullet wound. It’s covered under a layer of shirts and bandages, but Chuuya’s sharp attention gives the illusion he can see right through it.
“Does it hurt?” Chuuya asks. It’s half a question, half misplaced regret. Remorse is not an emotion he wears well.
Dazai flicks his hand in a nonverbal command for Chuuya to shove over on the bed. His partner obeys, sitting up and scooching to what has become ‘his side,’ even though Chuuya would rather swallow his own tongue before ever admitting to this level of familiarity. They sit shoulder to shoulder against the headboard.
“Does the bullet wound hurt, you asked? No, it feels wonderful. I’m so glad Chuuya made sure to get me in both arms. Keeps one from feeling like it’s missing out on all the fun.”
Chuuya drops his head into his knees and rubs a hand up the back of his neck. “You’re such an asshole,” he huffs quietly.
“So you’ve said. And here Chuuya is, agonizing over me anyway.”
At that, his partner slowly lifts his head to give Dazai a once over, obviously thinking.
“Back when you were in the mafia,” Chuuya says, working his jaw with an audible click, “I used to always stand on your blind side to prevent stuff like this. Didn’t like the idea of people using your eye to get the jump on you, especially since your ability does jackshit against bullets. It’s not fighting fair.” And what he means is, I didn’t fight fair. What he means is, This time, I was the one behind the gun.
“You still do,” Dazai corrects.
“Huh?”
“Stand on my blind side.” He turns more fully into Chuuya now. “You never stopped.”
A bit embarrassed, Chuuya curls his hands tighter against his knees. “Bad habit.”
Dazai lets his grin flourish into something more genuine.
“Chuuya has worse habits.”
“Whatever.”
The apartment walls whistle in time with the storm raging outside. The rain is coming down hard enough against the window pane that it sounds like knocking, and it's loud enough to dampen the endless stream of Yokohama sirens into a dull echo.
“Not going to talk about the dream?” he prods. Curious, more than anything. Dazai’s been poking at all of Chuuya’s open wounds as of late, desperate to recreate the ones that made them double-black. Some immature part of him thinks that if they cut each other up enough, the scar tissue will grow over that gap between them, healing them together again. Look where that got him though– the bullet in his shoulder hurts like a bitch. He thinks the fights only worked as kids because the cuts they made were really incisions. Desperate attempts at pulling back the skin to see what sat underneath; to understand each other in ways they’d never let anyone understand them before.
They understand each other now, and maybe that’s the problem.
“I don’t fuckin’ dream.” Chuuya’s glare heats up, burning through his remorse. That’s better, Dazai thinks.
“You see moving pictures behind your eyes as you sleep. Every dictionary on earth disagrees with you defining it as anything else. Since when did Chuuya care about semantics?”
“I don’t know if I see anything! I never remember. You know that already.”
Dazai rolls his eyes. “But you still feel it on you. You know what your dream was about. You just want to be miserable by nitpicking the details.”
“That’s rich coming from you,” Chuuya bites.
“Or maybe like recognizes like.”
The room goes quiet again, and Dazai thinks this would go a lot easier if Chuuya wasn’t trying to escape this conversation by bowing his head between his knees like an ostrich burying its head in the sand. The behavior used to bother him when they were younger. Dazai hated Chuuya turning away. Always the attention whore, always waiting to be seen like a bomb with the fuse lit.
Dazai pats the spot in front of him on the sheets. “Come sit with me. Just like old times.”
“Oh fuck off,” he mumbles.
“Come on, slug,” Dazai whines and then gasps dramatically as he holds his shoulder. “It’s painful. I need emotional support.”
“That’s none of my business. Deal with your own shit,” Chuuya says, all the while inching closer until Dazai half-manhandles him the rest of the way. Chuuya sits with his back flush against Dazai’s chest and bracketed in by his bandaged legs. Dazai locks his hands over his partner’s heart just to feel the staccato beat of it against his knuckles. He ignores the burn from the wound.
“The plan worked out. No harm, no foul. It’s not like you to be so hung up on the collateral damage.”
Chuuya tenses in his hold, and his heartbeat speeds.
“There was harm. I shot you. You’re not collateral damage, jackass.”
“Now who’s the one with emotional issues,” Dazai teases.
Chuuya doesn’t bite. “I meant what I said when I told you I don’t dream. But I can still feel the ricochet from the gun going off in my hand. I can still hear the sound you made when the bullet ripped through you.”
“It’ll heal,” Dazai rationalizes. “Everything heals eventually.”
The laugh Chuuya chokes out is covered in sardonic misery. “Not everything.”
“This will.” We will.
“Since when are you an optimist?”
Dazai presses a smile into Chuuya’s naked shoulder blade. “It's not optimism. It's the truth. My predictions are never wrong, you should know this by now.”
“You are also a pathological liar,” Chuuya replies easily.
“Oh, how you wound me, but I wouldn’t lie about this. And, I mean, honestly,” he whispers quietly, but it's impossibly loud with Chuuya’s shallow breathing, “I’d let you do it again. Not saying I’m a masochist who gets off on being shot, but we do what’s necessary. I made the plan and I trusted you to follow it. I always trust Chuuya.”
They’re building over the dust of a crumbled empire, but trust has always been the foundation of their partnership. They’ve weathered worse storms than the one raging outside tonight.
Chuuya leans back harder into Dazai, almost like he’s trying to sink his way through the fabric of his body and straight into the heart Dazai would willingly carve out for him with nothing but gloves and a scalpel. Dazai thinks, somewhere distant and darker than here, he might’ve tried. Sick and desperate thing he is. Lapping up Chuuya’s attention off the ground like a dog.
Absently, Chuuya mindlessly picks at the edges of Dazai’s bandages from the hand still resting over his heart. Chuuya’s skin is so warm. It makes him remember his own part of their executed plan.
“Not sure if you’re convinced it was a dream since you’ve been having a lot of those recently, but I also did drown you,” Dazai says.
“Shut up with the dreaming bullshit.” Chuuya groans. Then, as if the memory of it rushed back all at once, he curls himself tighter. “Christ, that was awful. Fuck you for making me listen to that mushy nonsense while I was nearly breathing water through my lungs, by the way. As if my last moments couldn’t be any more miserable.”
Embarrassment crashes into him like a semi-truck. His hold on Chuuya involuntarily tightens.
“I can admit I may have let my melodramatic tendencies get the better of me. We don’t need to discuss this anymore. This is about you. Let’s go back to the shooting thing.”
“Like hell,” Chuuya bites back, and then his face scrunches into a thoughtful expression. It seems something dawns on him. “Don’t you have a lot of nightmares?”
“Why are you asking?”
“Stop answering my questions with a question.”
“Stop policing my sentences.”
Chuuya pushes against Dazai’s chest hard in a deliberate knock. Pain instantly shoots through his shoulder.
“Ow,” Dazai whines. “Fine! Yes. That hurt, dog brain.”
Content with his answer, he leans his weight off again.
“Have you had any nightmares about it?” Chuuya’s voice holds something strange as he asks.
Dazai considers lying but relinquishes that idea to the dark and dying part of himself he refuses to foster these days. He wants to be better for whatever that’s worth.
“A few. My dreams don’t usually end with holes in walls, however.”
“Didn’t put any holes in the walls this time.”
“No, Chuuya did not.” Dazai presses a quick kiss against his temple that Chuuya squirms against for show. “Maybe I need to stay over longer just to make sure.”
“You’re so full of shit,” Chuuya says, abandoning all pretenses to yank his face further forward and slot their mouths together in an uncomfortable angle neither of them mind.
When they pull apart, Dazai leans back and presses his forehead to the top of Chuuya’s spine. Both of their heartbeats are too quick, pulses uneven and jumping. There's a lot of tricks they’re trying to relearn with the time before them now.
“Do you think we’ll make it?” Chuuya asks.
And it’s a question Dazai doesn’t want to answer because he has the logic part of his brain trying to eat through the last remnants of his soul. The answer to the question forms a decision tree in his head of the million bad choices Dazai is yet to make for himself, and it makes his throat go tight. Dazai has a way of being a negative constant, always fucking up the entire equation.
And yet.
“Yes. We’ll make it,” Dazai says because his heart refuses to breathe blood into any other future.