Chapter Text
Yokohama, Japan
The cold of the snow rebelled against the heat of sorrow. It burned inside a corpse whose body no longer belonged to itself. It swindled the human mind. The complete annihilation of the beat inside the ribs. Even so, the coursing of blood never ceased. It lived within the skin, drowning everything in its path; surging with such great force. Salvaged remained the state of mind, away from the crown. It lie far away, running from fate. It would make you feel a sort of craze; no longer living in the cage whose whole purpose is to keep you alive. You could feel the bile rising up your throat with no throat to rise up to. It would die in your heart, dissolving with no other release.
Except, the gall was never there. Acrimony tainted your tongue. It made you feel. Wavering under the crushing reality. The protagonist of thousands of stories; the soul of one too many centers of the universe. One small delay, and you felt it in the back of your teeth. It crawled up the palate and trascended into the nasal cavity, poisoning the air you've refused to inhale. Suffocating; hogging the part of you whom you refuse to acknowledge. Desperation clogged inside the sinus, pushed down to the larynx and ascending all the way to the vision. There was only black. The refusal. The iris only darkened with the lack of light, being overcome by the rush of a dilating pupil, defending any sort of threat posed to the inner eye of the mind. Despair only traveled to the deepest part of the skull. It vitiated the code keeping the structure steady. Anguish weakened even the body's reflex to defend itself, immersing in the addictive feeling of turbulent waters.
Dazai could see it. He could perceive even the concealed parts of Chuuya. He could see how his system encrypted new feelings into a library of memories. He knew every little step chuuya took. He could see it when he became part of his life. The way he refused to even think about what the code told him he was. It seeped into his mind like a plague destined to end his uninitiated life. Every part of his body was the token the people in his life left him. He rampaged about how he was stronger than anyone else in the world, yet he never even got the taste of having a designated identity. His mind leapt through title after title; name after name, yet he never found one that he chose. How his body reflected the pain he had gone through, buried under all the muscle he honed to hide the misery. The uncalled twitches spasming uncontrollably along his essence, reminding him of how much longing his body had engraved inside of him from trying to find the antidote solving his never-ending anguish. Yet, even when calamity erupted through his blood and rushed along his veins, hope stilled inside his head.
When a snowflake landed atop of chuuya's nose, he understood. Dazai saw what even chuuya himself couldn't recognize. He could see the roots that lived inside of his soul. The immediate shivering that followed when his body processed the disturbance. He saw the human that came before Arahabaki, but that was merely a shadow in Dazai's eyes. The one everyone claimed to be the true Nakahara Chuuya was merely the vessel who worked to anchor Chuuya's core. To Dazai, Chuuya had the trace of humanity carved in his brain. He held the light of one whose heart never stopped beating. Of someone who had loyalty lay below his layers of skin. He didn't only see A2-5-8 standing before him, he saw his partner. The man who had taken on the job of tying Dazai to the earth. He labelled him as stability; despite the irony. Chuuya could undress the layers covering dazai in an endless realm and never end. He would create new parts of Dazai and tie them undoubtedly to himself. Years ago, he would've denied any existence of the sort. But now he would feel incomplete without Chuuya corrupting his being. He acknowledged everything he threw towards him and swallowed it. He absorbed everything and anything that would whisper Chuuya's name without him even realizing; merged them both. Absentmindedly, he grasped the true meaning of his maneuver. And he thouroughly welcomed it. He let his deeds be rewritten with a lingering trail of heat, causing an altercation within his body. He let his own code be tainted by the sorrow dominating the arena, leaving it to burn his insides like nothing ever before. Dazai sunk his eyes onto Chuuya's, being dragged without care inside of his barrier.