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The shipping container had a leak.
Dazai had discovered it three weeks ago, on a night when the summer rain came down hard enough to make the harbor look as if it were boiling. Water had slipped in through some warped seam in the ceiling, one fat drop at a time, and struck the floor near his mattress with a soft, patient sound.
Plink.
Then silence.
Plink.
Then silence.
He had spent nearly an hour staring at the slick, dark spot spreading across the metal before deciding it was vaguely entertaining, as far as things in his shipping container went.
The container had been built to hold cargo, obviously. Crates, machinery, contraband, bodies if one was creative enough, and Dazai usually was. It had crossed oceans, probably. Survived storms. Rusted at the edges and still remained basically intact. And yet there it was, losing to rain.
Dazai had thought, with mild admiration, that the leak understood him.
Tonight, there was no rain—just the usual damp cold pressing through the steel walls and the weak yellow light bulb hanging from the ceiling on its exposed cord. It flickered occasionally, as if considering death but lacking conviction.
Dazai lay on his mattress with one arm thrown over his eyes, counting the seconds between each buzz of electricity overhead. The mattress smelled faintly of dust, salt, and old blood. There were razors stained with half-dried crimson scattered near his other elbow, though he had no memory of using quite so many. His coat was still on. His shoes were still on. His bandages itched.
A perfectly adequate evening.
Beyond the metal grave and the shipyard it lived in, Yokohama groaned and clattered. Somewhere far off, a ship horn cut through the harbor fog. Somewhere closer, men of work shouted at each other with the dull, familiar violence of people who believed volume could substitute for competence.
Dazai turned his head toward the wall.
Sixteen, then. How unimpressive.
He had expected fifteen to feel the same as fourteen, and it had. He expected sixteen to feel the same as fifteen, and it did. The body accumulated years the way the container accumulated rust: without permission or ceremony, without becoming anything fundamentally different.
There was probably paperwork about it somewhere. Mori liked paperwork. Dazai imagined his own birthdate sitting in a file in his penthouse office, tucked between reports on murder, smuggling routes, and quarterly revenue projections. It was funny to think of his birthday existing more solidly in a folder than it did in himself.
Rolling onto his side, Dazai closed his eyes. The silence had almost become comforting, like a blanket of darkness closing over a trapped insect—when the guttural groan of metal crushed it as the door to the shipping container was hauled open with enough force to rattle the walls.
Dazai didn’t move.
A slice of harbor-sunset cut across the floor, bringing a cool breeze with it. The bulb swung from the force of movement, its light shuddering over the walls.
And a small, furious silhouette stood in the doorway.
“Oi. You alive in here?”
Dazai sighed. “I died ten minutes ago. You’re too late.”
“Good. Saves me the trouble.”
Stepping inside, Chuuya yanked the door shut behind him. Metal screamed against metal as his shoes hit the floor with sharp, irritated precision, each step announcing that he had come here against his better judgment and intended to punish the world for it.
Dazai lifted his arm just enough to peer at him.
In the middle of the shipping container stood his unfortunate partner and most tedious attachment, wearing a black jacket, a scowl, and a pointed paper party hat.
Dazai stared.
The hat was red. There were gold stripes on it. It sat at a violent angle over Chuuya’s hair, held in place by a thin elastic string under his chin.
For several seconds, the two of them looked at each other in silence.
Then Dazai said, “No.”
Chuuya’s eye twitched. “You don’t even know what I’m doing.”
“The slug is wearing that and he looks stupid,” Dazai said. “Whatever it is, no.”
Chuuya reached into his coat and pulled out a second party hat. Blue, with silver stars. He held it between two fingers like he would hold a dead rat by its tail.
Slowly, Dazai sat up. “No,” he repeated, with more feeling.
“Yes.”
“I don’t want to.”
“Good thing I’m not asking.”
“I’m very busy.”
“You’re lying in the dark like a pathetic freak.”
“Thank you. I’m thinking very hard.”
“You’re staring at the damn wall.”
“The wall, as it turns out, has many things to say. Maybe Chuuya could learn something from my examp—”
“The wall wants you to shut the fuck up,” Chuuya cut in, “and put on the damn hat.”
Dazai’s gaze slid from the blue hat to Chuuya’s face. Chuuya looked really and truly angry, which was not unusual. Chuuya often looked angry; it was one of his more consistent hobbies. What made this evening strange were the paper hats and the small white candle he was now producing from his pocket with a level of aggression usually reserved for knives or fists. There was no cake. Just the candle, naked and ridiculous in Chuuya’s gloved hand.
Small mercies, Dazai supposed.
He blinked at it. “Did the hatrack forget the cake?”
Chuuya’s mouth twisted. “Like you’d eat it.”
“That’s rather presumptuous.”
“Yeah right,” Chuuya snorted. “You’d poke it apart, make some annoying, dickhead comment, and leave it there until it grew mold.”
“I might have licked the frosting,” Dazai said.
“There’s no damn frosting.”
“I noticed.”
“So shut the hell up already.”
Shifting to the floor, Dazai folded his legs beneath him, more out of curiosity than obedience. “Did my loyal dog come all the way here to bring me a candle with nothing to stick it in?”
Chuuya’s face darkened. “Don’t say it like I’m the weird one. You live in a damn empty metal box.”
“Home is where the heart is.”
“Guess you belong here, then,” Chuuya muttered.
Dazai smiled faintly. “And to what do I owe the pleasure?”
With a glare, Chuuya threw the star-mottled party hat at him. It hit Dazai in the chest and fell into his lap. “Put it on. You know what.”
“No thank you.”
“Put it on before I staple it to your skull.”
“I don’t think that’s very nice.”
“Nice, my ass!” Chuuya barked.
Dazai gave a long-suffering sigh. “The slug is tragically bad at birthdays.”
“Says the goddamn suicide fanatic.” Chuuya pointed the candle at him like it was a gun. “You’re gonna sit there, wear the stupid goddamn hat, let me light this stupid goddamn candle, and then you’re gonna make a stupid goddamn wish and blow it out. Then I’m leaving and we’re never talking about it again.”
Dazai picked up the hat by its elastic string. It dangled from his fingers, the shiny silver stars glinting when the weak light caught it, flimsy and bright and entirely out of place in the grey belly of the container. “How, if I may ask, did Chuuya acquire the date that I was born?”
Chuuya looked away, agitation written across his face. “None of your damn business.”
Ah.
Dazai’s smile sharpened. “Did Chuuya break into Mori-san’s office?”
“I said to mind your own damn self. You’ve got enough problems as it is.”
“Wow. So Chuuya really did it,” Dazai mused. “How valiant.”
“Won’t you ever just shut the fuck up?”
“I didn’t know my loyal dog had such a gift for espionage. Should I be worried? Is Chuuya going to start stealing all my secrets?”
Chuuya’s mouth twisted. “I’d rather drown than know whatever the hell secrets you keep.”
“Chuuya wounds me,” Dazai said in mock-offense. “He might find something interesting, and if he doesn’t, then it will be the perfect circumstances for committing a double-suicide.”
“Gross,” Chuuya said, making a face and recoiling just so. “Save that for some sorry lover. I already found your birthdate. That was interesting enough. Turns out you are alive.”
Dazai laughed softly, and Chuuya’s ears immediately went red. The sound of it echoed and settled strangely in the container. There was the harbor outside, the weak electric buzz flickering above, Chuuya’s breathing, and Dazai’s own heartbeat, behaving with unnecessary and inconvenient persistence.
He placed the party hat on his head.
Briefly thrown off by his compliance, Chuuya stared for a moment before recovering with a scowl. “God. You look stupid.”
“But Chuuya brought it.”
“Stupider than I thought you would,” Chuuya corrected.
Dazai adjusted the elastic under his chin. The string pulled lightly against his bandages. “Do I look birthday-like?” he asked.
“The hell does that mean? You look like a corpse at a children’s hospital.”
“That’s very specific.”
“It’s an improvement.”
“I see. Thank you.”
With a huff, Chuuya lowered himself onto the floor across from Dazai, sitting cross-legged with a stiff, annoyed motion, as if the dinged metal floor had personally offended him. The candle remained clenched in his hand. He produced a lighter next, flicked it open, and sparked a small flame.
The candlewick caught, and for a brief moment, the light changed. The bulb still buzzed overhead, washing the container in its sickly yellow glare, but the candle added something warmer and more delicate, a gauzy sort of halo that lit the underside of Chuuya’s face, caught the mismatched tone of his eyes, turned the edges of his hair copper-bright. Shadows moved behind him against the metal wall.
Dazai watched the flame instead.
Shoving the candle toward him, Chuuya said, “Take it.”
Dazai took it.
The wax was already softening beneath the flame. He held it carefully between both hands, upright in the empty space where a cupcake or a pastry should have been.
The whole thing was absurd. A candle without a cake. A birthday without a party. Chuuya in a paper hat, glaring at him as if he could bully celebration into existence through sheer force. Dazai felt a desperate sort of laughter rise in his throat, the sound coming out quietly before he could stop it.
Chuuya frowned. “Quit acting weird. It pisses me off when you do that.”
“I always act weird,” Dazai said.
“Act normal-weird.”
Dazai looked down at the candle. “What now?”
All he got was a stare, like Chuuya was ten seconds from ripping Dazai’s party hat off his head and piercing his neck with it instead. “What do you mean, what now?”
“I mean what now.”
Chuuya’s face screwed up like he was warring between chewing Dazai out for reasons Dazai couldn’t quite understand, or just knocking him out cold instead. In the end, he went with, “You make a wish and blow it out. What the hell else would you do with it?”
“Ah.”
The flame bent gently with Dazai’s breath, then straightened again.
He had known the visual shape of this ritual, had known what it looked like from books he had read as a child. But what to do with it was a different matter entirely. What to do at all, when it came to trying to act like a person, had always been a different matter entirely. Dazai had mostly given up on it.
He waited, thinking hard about his strategy, until the flame-glow wavering in the silence seemed to crack something open in Chuuya.
The expression he wore shifted from irritation to suspicion. “Why are you just staring at it, moron?”
“I’m strategizing,” Dazai said.
“Strategizing what?”
“How to do that.”
Chuuya blinked. “Blow out a candle?”
Well, that too, but— “The wish part.”
Chuuya’s mouth opened. Then closed. Then opened again. “The wish part,” he repeated.
“Yes.”
“You don’t know how to make a wish.”
“I understand the basic grammar of it.”
“That’s not—what the hell does that even mean?”
Dazai tilted his head. “The victim desires something, silently. Then the victim extinguishes the flame. Right?”
Chuuya looked pained. “You make everything sound so morbid.”
“Hm. This feels like the kind of test Mori-san would give me.”
“It’s not a test, you damn freak,” Chuuya said, losing his patience.
Dazai shrugged. “Whatever the ugly slug says.”
Chuuya dragged a hand down his face; the elastic of his party hat snapped lightly against his cheek. “You just think of something you want, idiot. But keep it to yourself, or the wish won’t come true.”
Dazai looked back at the candle.
Something he wanted.
The instruction sat in his mind like an object placed in the wrong room.
He wanted sleep, sometimes. He wanted silence until he had it, then noise until he had that, then silence again. He wanted Mori to stop looking at him like a puzzle he had already solved. He wanted missions to be less boring. He wanted death, obviously, though saying so had begun to feel less like a desire and more like a household chore one kept meaning to get around to.
He smiled. “I’m going to wish for a successful, elegant suicide.”
“You dumbass!” Chuuya snapped immediately. “You said it out loud!”
Dazai blinked at him.
“It won’t come true now! How much of a moron are you, anyway? —Actually, don’t answer that.”
A small, genuine disappointment passed through Dazai. “Oh.”
Chuuya looked like he might throttle him. “Don’t ‘oh’ me. Pick another one.”
“How many wishes am I allowed?”
“One.”
“I wasted it?”
“You fucked it up.”
“I didn’t know the rules.”
“I just told you the damn rules!”
“After I had already begun participating,” Dazai said defensively. “Maybe the hatrack is just bad at giving instructions.”
“As if I’m the problem here!” Chuuya exclaimed, throwing his hands up.
“What if I wish to stop being alive?” Dazai asked, sincere. “Does that count as a different wish?”
“No,” Chuuya said harshly. “If you wish for that again I’ll kick your teeth in hard enough to reset your birthday.”
Dazai considered this. “Can Chuuya do that?”
“I’ll find out.”
The candle flame trembled between them. Wax slid down one side in a thin white line, cooling over Dazai’s fingers. He didn’t move.
“How does Chuuya know so much about birthdays, anyway?” he asked.
In an instant, Chuuya’s expression went guarded. Dazai noticed because he noticed everything about Chuuya—the slight tightening around the mouth; the way Chuuya’s gaze shifted toward the door before forcing itself back. A memory had crossed his face, quick and unwelcome.
“The Sheep did birthdays,” Chuuya finally said, the words rough.
“Did they?”
“Sometimes.”
“With cakes?”
“Sometimes.”
“Candles?”
“Yeah.”
“Presents?”
“Just shut the fuck up.”
“So festive,” Dazai quipped.
“I said shut it before I make you.”
Dazai smiled into the candlelight, deciding not to think about what that might look like. “Was Chuuya popular?” he asked instead.
Chuuya’s hand twitched toward him. “I’m gonna kill your scrawny, bandaged ass before the candle even burns out.”
“That would solve the wish problem.”
“I swear to god, Dazai.”
His name landed—differently.
Chuuya said it often. Usually with disgust, exasperation, rage, or all three twisted together. But this time, the syllables came lower. Still irritated, still rough, but edged with something Dazai did not care to identify.
The candle had burned close enough now that warmth began to lick at his fingertips, wavering shadows dancing across his skin.
“Hurry up,” Chuuya muttered. “It’s gonna melt all over you.”
Dazai closed his eyes.
Darkness gathered behind his lids, red-flecked from the flame. The container hummed around him, the metal keeping the space cool while just outside the door, the heat of the day was just beginning to concede. Beneath his knees, the floor pressed hard—Chuuya was across from him, close enough that Dazai could hear the small impatient click of his tongue, the shift of fabric as he moved, the sharp little inhale he took as he was trying not to say anything else.
Think of something you want.
Dazai thought of Chuuya breaking into Mori’s office for a date on a file. He thought of Chuuya buying party hats and being disgusted with himself for every second of it. He thought of Chuuya holding a candle with nothing to put it in because he had known Dazai would not eat cake, or anything for that matter. He thought of Chuuya barging into the cold, dimly-lit shipping container like a storm and somehow making the place feel less like a coffin.
The wish formed before he could make it elegant, or at least less undignified.
I hope Chuuya doesn’t die before me.
Dazai’s chest tightened.
What a stupid thing.
What a useless, embarrassing, sentimental little wish. It assumed death as the inevitable conclusion and still managed to be greedy about the order. It didn’t ask for Chuuya to live forever. It didn’t ask that Dazai had any part in it at all. It asked only that Dazai be spared the inconvenience of a world where Chuuya had left first.
What a nuisance he was.
Dazai opened his eyes. Chuuya was watching him. The flame reflected in his eyes, bright and trembling.
“Well?” Chuuya prompted. “You done?”
“Do I blow it out now?”
“Yes, dumbass.”
Dazai leaned forward and blew out the candle. Smoke curled upward between them, thin and grey, carrying the faint bitter smell of the extinguished wick.
For a second after, neither of them spoke. Then Dazai looked at the dead candle in his hands and asked, “What now?”
Chuuya frowned at him like he was getting tired of this. “Again, what the hell do you mean, what now?”
“Do we wait?”
“For what?”
“For it to come true.”
“That’s not how it works, you moron.”
“How does it work, then?” Dazai asked, utterly sincere.
“You just—” Chuuya stopped, scowled, and seemed to realize he had no useful answer. “It just does. At some point. Or it doesn’t. But you won’t know if it doesn’t, because it still might.”
“That’s vague.”
“It’s a birthday wish,” Chuuya said, “not a contract.”
“I prefer contracts. My favorites are the ones with loopholes.”
“Shit luck, then,” Chuuya said with a click of his tongue. “No loophole here. Your wish is gonna haunt you for the rest of your sorry life now until it comes true.”
Dazai turned the candle between his fingers. The wick was black now, bent at the tip; a spot of wax had cooled against his skin. “I don’t feel different,” he said.
“You’re not supposed to,” Chuuya snorted, like they had gone over this.
“Then why do it?” Dazai asked. He still wasn’t sure he understood the point of the whole thing. Of celebrating a birthday at all.
What was there to celebrate about another year of being alive?
For a long moment, Chuuya looked at him. Under the flickering bulb, his expression was difficult to read. Annoyance sat on the surface because annoyance always did. Beneath it, something moved and vanished.
“Because,” he said, voice flat, “it’s your birthday.”
Dazai wasn’t sure what face he was making nor what face he should be making, so he kept it carefully blank. The candle sat in his palm, small and ridiculous and warm from being held too tightly.
“I see,” he said.
He did not see at all.
Before Dazai could decide what one was expected to do after successfully completing a birthday—well, he thought he had, anyway, though Chuuya would have likely disagreed—Chuuya dug into his coat pocket again.
“There.”
Something small hit Dazai squarely in the chest. He caught it on instinct before it could tumble into his lap. When he looked down, what he saw was not what he had expected to see—though he didn’t know what that would have been, either.
A little box, wrapped in brown paper.
Dazai turned it over once. Then again. “…What is this?”
Chuuya looked offended. “The hell does it look like?”
“A suspicious package. A bomb, maybe. If I’m lucky.”
“It’s not a—oh goddamnit, it’s a birthday present.”
A birthday present.
Oh.
Dazai looked back down at the little parcel resting in his hands. The paper had been folded with determination rather than skill. One edge sat slightly crooked. The knot in the twine bulged awkwardly off-center, pulled so tight it had wrinkled the paper beneath it. Chuuya had almost certainly wrapped it himself.
The thought caught somewhere behind Dazai’s ribs. He couldn’t picture Chuuya standing in front of a table trying to wrestle brown paper into submission without immediately wanting to laugh. His mouth twitched.
“…What?” Chuuya said.
Dazai glanced up to see Chuuya watching him with open suspicion, arms folded tightly across his chest.
“You smiled,” Chuuya said. “You don’t do that.”
Not unless the smile was a ploy or a threat.
“I did?”
“Yeah.”
How strange.
The container fell quiet as Dazai turned the parcel over again between his hands. It weighed almost nothing. He found himself tracing the twine with his thumb instead of undoing it. His gaze lingered on the knot.
“…You’re supposed to open it,” Chuuya said. He sounded almost irritated by how gently Dazai was holding it.
“In a moment.”
“Huh? What are you waiting for?”
Dazai considered the question. “I don’t know,” he decided on.
Gifts implied familiarity. They required observation. One couldn’t simply purchase something at random. Or, he supposed they could, but—one had to notice what another person gravitated toward. What they enjoyed. What they lacked. What might make them smile. Dazai didn’t even think he possessed the ability to do any of those things, except maybe lack.
His stomach tightened faintly.
Chuuya shot him an irritated look. “Why are you staring at it like that?”
“Because,” Dazai said, not straying his eyes from it. “I’ve never gotten one before.”
That made Chuuya frown, which Dazai didn’t understand either. “A present?”
Dazai gave a small shrug. “I don’t think so.”
He searched his memory anyway— Clinical examinations. Training. Books pushed across desks with instructions attached. Weapons. Bandages. Medication. A coat heavy with secrets and blood. Those had all been given to him. None of them had belonged to him before someone else had decided they should.
Across from him, Chuuya had gone uncharacteristically still. “…Seriously? You’re not just saying that to be pathetic, are you?”
“I don’t remember one,” Dazai said, because he didn’t.
“Huh.”
The room settled around that quiet little syllable, and before either of them had to decide what came after, Dazai looked back down at the box.
Slipping a finger beneath the twine, he carefully eased it loose. The knot resisted for a moment before finally giving way with a soft snap. Chuuya watched him with an anticipatory sort of focus, his jaw set with the rigid determination of someone attempting to appear completely indifferent to an outcome that shouldn’t have mattered either way.
Nestled inside the box was an odd little metal contraption—a tiny hand-cranked music box. It rested in a bed of dark tissue paper, scarcely larger than the center of Dazai’s palm. The silver metal caught the weak light overhead in soft flashes whenever he tilted the box, the little crank against one side glinting. It looked more like the guts of machinery turned inside out than anything categorically beautiful.
Very carefully, Dazai lifted it out. It had a light, pleasant weight to it, cool against the bandages around his fingers. “…A music box?”
Across from him, Chuuya shrugged with studied indifference. He had folded his arms again, though Dazai noticed he’d drawn a knee up and one foot had begun tapping lightly against the floor. “Yeah.” And then he added, muttering under his breath, “At least you actually know what it is.”
Dazai turned it over, examining it from every angle before glancing back up. “It could fit in my pocket.”
“Why—” Chuuya started, and then, with less heat, “Uh. I guess.”
Another silence settled between them. Dazai looked at the music box. Then at Chuuya. Then back at the music box.
“…Why this?”
He couldn’t remember a single time he had ever listened to music on his own, much less told Chuuya that he liked it. They had never talked about music, had never listened to it together. Music was just another thing in the dull world that had never managed to touch Dazai or fill anything inside him.
Chuuya clicked his tongue. “‘Cause you’re weird as hell, and it pisses me off.”
“I see,” Dazai said, though he failed to see the connection.
Glancing away, Chuuya went on, like he knew Dazai did not, in fact, see. “You spend all your damn time in here,” he said. “You come back from missions or meetings, you sit in this godawful depressing metal coffin, you don’t turn on a radio, you don’t go see a movie, you don’t go anywhere—you just sit in this stupid shipping container staring at a blank wall with that vacant look on your face. It’s creepy.”
Dazai glanced around the container. “I happen to like my space.”
“It looks miserable. Like you.”
“I think it has character,” Dazai said, though that was more or less agreement.
“It has tetanus,” Chuuya huffed, glaring daggers at Dazai like he was daring him to retort. Before Dazai could, Chuuya said, “So—I don’t know, I figured…” He rubbed the back of his neck with one hand, eyes drifting toward the floor. “I figured maybe if you’re gonna hide in here all the time like some damn weirdo, you could at least have something to listen to.”
The words were tossed out carelessly, wrapped in irritation so thick they almost disguised themselves.
Almost.
Thumb tracing the edge of it, Dazai looked down at the music box again. “The silence,” he murmured. “I see.”
He thought this time that he actually did. His chest had begun doing something profoundly inconvenient, because Chuuya had noticed an empty shipping container, a flickering lightbulb half-useless in the darkness, and the silence that filled every corner of it. He had found that irritating enough to try and change it.
Suddenly Dazai felt warm. Warm in the same uncomfortable way the candle had been, held too long between his hands.
“Well?” Chuuya demanded, jarring him from his thoughts.
Dazai blinked, dragged out of his mind like being pulled out from a fog. “What?”
“Are you gonna try the damn thing or just stare at it until next year?”
“Oh.”
Chuuya bristled. “The fuck do you keep saying ‘oh’ for?”
“I don’t know,” Dazai said, because he always knew what to say, and “oh” was certainly not a word he had ever had to resort to quite so much.
“Figure it out faster,” Chuuya snapped.
After a moment of consideration, Dazai said, “I believe what I’m experiencing is called confusion.”
He was lucky Chuuya didn’t hit him for that.
“No kidding.”
Dazai held the crank between his forefinger and thumb. The first turn he tried met a little resistance before the mechanism caught. Then the melody began.
Quiet, soft notes drifted into the container as Dazai slowly rotated the crank, delicate enough that the harbor nearly swallowed them. The tune moved with an unhurried melancholy, twisting back on itself before wandering onward again, eerie and wistful. The faint sound of the mechanism clicked faintly beneath the music.
Dazai listened without speaking, watching as with each rotation of the crank, the music slowed or quickened depending on the speed with which he turned it. The silence he had grown accustomed to didn’t disappear—but it had a strange sort of company now.
“…It’s kind of depressing,” he murmured.
“Told you.”
“The slug picked a depressing song.”
“It sounded like you,” Chuuya said, like it was obvious.
Dazai looked over, the music fading to a slow stop as his hand fell away. “Does that mean Chuuya listened to all of them?” he asked.
A light flush dusted Chuuya’s cheeks at once, and with a shrug he said, “There were like twenty.”
“Chuuya sampled twenty different music boxes,” Dazai repeated, like he was trying to make sense of the words.
“I had to pick one, didn’t I?” Chuuya muttered, irate and oddly defensive, for something that shouldn’t have mattered.
“…For me.”
Chuuya’s ears reddened too. “Don’t make it weird, shitty Dazai. I was bored.”
“I don’t make things weird,” Dazai said, because he didn’t.
Another disbelieving glare was shot his way. “You make everything weird,” Chuuya corrected. In the next moment he shoved himself to his feet with enough force to make the party hat wobble dangerously. “Whatever.” He reached into his coat again.
Dazai eyed him suspiciously. “…There’s more?”
“Tch,” Chuuya said between his teeth. He ignored Dazai’s blank, uncomprehending stare and produced two handheld game consoles connected by a link cable tangled around them like ivy. Tossing one into Dazai’s lap, he said, “There.”
Dazai caught it automatically, looking from the console to Chuuya. “…Is this supposed to be like a birthday party? Where you play games after cake?”
“Sure. Something like it.”
“And Chuuya planned it?”
“Unfortunately.”
“Oh,” Dazai said again, which was a pitiful word to be reduced to yet again.
“Quit saying that before I sew your mouth shut,” Chuuya scowled. “And move over.” He dropped down beside Dazai instead of across from him this time, shoulder bumping lightly against Dazai’s as he leaned back against the corrugated wall.
The metal was cold through Dazai’s coat. The proximity wasn’t.
Chuuya snatched the music box from Dazai’s hand just long enough to set it carefully on top of the little cardboard box before handing the console back. “We’re playing Persona,” he said flatly. “You always cheat when we play Street Fighter.”
Dazai, deliberately, did not look at him, or at the music box to check that Chuuya hadn’t broken it in some way. The urge was hard to ignore and he didn’t know why he cared. He wasn’t sure what his face was doing, but whatever expression was there felt disconcerting and unfamiliar, so he kept his gaze down at the console, going through the motions of setting it up without really paying attention. “I cheat at Persona too,” he said.
Underlying threat in his tone, Chuuya warned, “You better not.”
“Birthday privilege?” Dazai tried, hopeful.
“Hell no. Not for a brat like you.”
Dazai paused, thumbs stilling over the controls. The tinny, beeping sound of the console start-up filtered between them, disrupting the quiet that had creeped in again after the melody from the music box had faded away.
Fidgeting, Dazai tried not to look at Chuuya. It was abnormally difficult.
And then—
“…Thanks,” Dazai muttered, the word dragged from somewhere he hadn’t meant to unlock. It felt awkward in his mouth. Unpracticed. His cheeks felt hot, a strange sensation swooping in his stomach like the beating of a thousand wings.
There was a stretched-taut beat of weighted silence between them—or several perhaps.
“…Yeah,” Chuuya eventually said. He scratched his cheek. “Uh… Happy birthday, I guess. I forgot to say it.” He busied himself untangling the cable before Dazai could linger on it for too long.
Happy birthday.
Strange words.
Dazai didn’t know what happiness was supposed to feel like, but he thought that maybe he felt less hollow than before.
Maybe.
He would have to dissect that later.
When he had finally managed to construct the mask he needed to glance up again, Chuuya was wearing his usual scowl. It looked ridiculous paired with the party hat still atop his head, and it was only then Dazai remembered his own, ears heating as he imagined the way he must look ornamented by shiny silver stars. It felt disconcertingly out of place in the bleak void of the shipping container, and even more out of place on Dazai himself.
Still—
“Don’t think this means I like you,” Chuuya muttered, eyes glued to the screen.
“Ew,” Dazai said automatically with a scrunch of his nose—and it was as though with that single expression of disgust, at last the familiar, precarious rhythm between them was being restored, thread by fragile thread. “As if I would want a slimy little slug to like me. I’ll have Chuuya know my standards are higher than that.”
“Bastard—” Chuuya started, then cut himself off with a frustrated jab at one of the controls. “Look, it just—it just irritated me to think about you spending your birthday sitting alone in the dark like some pathetic ghost haunting yourself,” he said, the words rushing out of him like magma flowing down a volcano, like if he thought them through any more, he wouldn’t say them at all. “I thought—I thought I could—fuck, I don’t know—at least make you pretend to be normal for a little while. I thought… maybe it would make you feel less dead. Or something.”
Oh.
“I see,” Dazai said, his tone carefully detached while the rest of him swirled with a million intertwined, convoluted thoughts at once. It was all he could come up with to say in response. But the words Chuuya had said—the admission, really—wormed their way under his skin anyway.
“Just shut up already,” Chuuya grumbled. “We’re not talking about this anymore.”
Dazai was fine with that.
Finally, the game flickered alive, displaying the start screen between them, each of their faces lit up by the colorful glow.
As they played, Dazai accused Chuuya of cheating seven times. Chuuya accused Dazai of being a sore loser eight. The music box remained on the little cardboard box, its silver surface catching the light each time the bulb overhead flickered. Dazai found himself glancing at it between rounds, and each time, the same quiet thought surfaced before he could push it away:
He picked this because he thought of me.
It was a dangerous thing to know. He wasn’t sure what to do with it. So he held the console a little tighter, listened to Chuuya swear at the screen and shove his shoulder into Dazai’s, and let the last few minutes of this strange, alien day called a birthday become just another memory with all the others he would fold deep into his ribs where they couldn’t be tarnished or taken away.
For the first time in the endless hours Dazai had spent inside it, though, the heavy, all-consuming silence of the shipping container skulked insignificant in the hollow darkness of its corners after Chuuya had gone, exiled by none other than the quiet, ghostly melody of a gift that would one day follow him into the eternal silence of his own vacuous death.