Chapter Text
Nakahara Chuuya couldn’t say this was degrading. Hell, he didn’t know what to call it.
How long had it been since he’d had seen colours?
Fuck, he realised, his heart sinking; he had no clue.
Chuuya was starting to doubt colours existed in the first place, maybe they were just a part of the hallucinations that plagued him every day. Maybe everything in this world was a hallucination. What was reality, anyways? He liked to think he was lucky enough to see reality–if this even was reality. It had been like this since Chuuya had been kidnapped from one of his Port Mafia missions. It was supposed to have been easy. It was supposed to have been a simple shipment. It was supposed to have been something a freshly 18-year-old half of the dreaded Soukoku could do on his own.
Now, look at him.
Fuck it. Chuuya had tried, okay? More so than any normal person, he’d tried to hold on to sanity while locked in a padded room of white, white, white where there was nothing else to feel or see. For the first few hours (days? weeks?), he had screamed as loud as he could to try and get some response, some reaction.
Anything at all...
But since when had he been that lucky?
Clawing, biting, scratching, everything and anything to escape this mind numbingly white room. Nothing worked.
Even Arahabaki had gone silent.
Arahabaki—that had always been there—as a low, constant static at the back of his skull, ugly and enormous and his. Somewhere between the fourth day and the sixth (if he could even trust his own fucked up internal clock), it had gone completely quiet. On any normal day, he would have been ecstatic to find that the literal God in his head was quiet. But this wasn't a normal day and he hadn’t marked the moment he'd lost it.
He hated that he hadn't marked the moment he'd lost it.
In this room with nothing but white all around, Chuuya craved any sign that he hadn’t gone insane. The hum in his head was a sign he hadn't gone insane. And now it was just... Gone.
His clothes were white, and someone kept drugging him to colour his hair white too. That was the part he hated most. The only two colours he could see were the never ending white and the colour of his own skin.
(The white rice he occasionally got was maddening, but it was food.)
On the occasions he could work up the energy, Chuuya tried to use his ability. For some strange reason, though, Upon the Tainted Sorrow didn’t even spark at his fingertips. His attempts at Gravity Manipulation simply.... Didn’t work. The first few times, he’d had a panic attack. Now, he was wondering if it was ever real in the first place. Perhaps it had something to do with the food, or maybe the gas that knocked him out, or...
What had he been thinking of again?
(Fuck, he really was going mad, wasn’t he?)
This was somehow worse than when he’d been 7 and woken up in the ruins of a lab without a clue as to who he was. This was somehow worse than when Verlaine had tried to manipulate him into believing he was nothing more than a clone of an original Chuuya. This was somehow worse than the idea that he was nothing more than 2383 lines of code written by scientists.
Because at least he’d existed.
Now, he wasn’t so sure anymore.
Chuuya was teetering at the edge of the abyss of madness, and he craved any sign that something existed beyond the endless white. He’d taken to clawing at his own skin to reassure himself that colours existed with the reddened marks. But someone must have kept trimming his nails every time he was drugged unconscious—that was the only explanation for why he could never truly break his own skin to check for blood.
He was seriously considering activating Corruption—the ultimate form of his Ability. Sure, without (Dazai, his partner, his friend, his-) the stupid mackerel around to nullify it, the power would kill him, but at least he’d know he was real.
Chuuya let his head thunk back against the padded walls of the white room. The thought sat in his mind like a stone, heavy and strange.
Was he truly thinking about dying just to prove he existed?
Chuuya stared at his hands. His too-pale hands against the too-white floor. He didn’t have his hat on. He missed it more than rationality should have allowed. Then again, rationality was the last priority of a man stuck in an empty white room.
Dazai would laugh at him.
The thought arrived unbidden, and Chuuya latched onto it with an almost embarrassing desperation. Dazai would call him a chibi, would say something insufferable about how a partner of his couldn’t even handle a little sensory deprivation, would joke about another method of suicide, would smirk with that particular brand of condescension that made Chuuya want to introduce his fist to his face—
He was smiling.
Faintly. Barely. But it was there.
When had that started happening?
The thought of Dazai Osamu—the most irritating, melodramatic, insufferable person he had the misfortune of knowing—was the first thing in however-long that had made Chuuya feel anything other than the slow dissolve of himself into nothing.
He hated that. He hated that.
(He also didn’t let go of the thought, not even a little.)
Chuuya pulled his knees to his chest and pressed his back against the padded white wall, and he thought; desperately, angrily. He thought the same way he would normally spar—with the knowledge that stopping meant giving up and that the cost of that peace was way too fucking high.
He thought about red. His beloved hat. The burgundy-almost-wine colour of it, the way it looked against the grey of Yokohama skies when he stood on a rooftop. He knew that colour. He remembered it. That meant something. That meant—
Colours were real.
He thought about black. Dazai’s coat, his bandages—all wrapped up for no good reason—the ink of Port Mafia documents under his hands when Mori assigned them a joint operation and Dazai would lean too close to the paperwork and breathe on his neck just to be annoying—
The anger that sparked in his chest at the memory was so viscerally familiar that Chuuya almost choked on it.
He was real.
The anger was real. It was his. It had always been his, and would always be his. This specific brand of frustrated and fond and furious was something exclusive to Dazai, and no white room could take that.
No white room could ever take that.
Chuuya exhaled slowly. The sound of his own breath was still the only sound in the room. Nothing had changed. He was still here, still trapped, still without his Ability or his hat or any colour that wasn’t the white-white-white or his own skin.
But something had shifted, somewhere small and stubborn behind his ribs.
I’m going to get out of here. I’m going to find whoever built this room. And then I’m going to—
He paused, and considered just what he would do to them. He remembered Dazai’s torture-room victims. He remembered cleaning up the aftermath of one of Mori’s sessions. He remembered blood and violence and feeling so damn alive and—
Yeah, he knew what he’d do.
His nails were trimmed too short to break skin, and Arahabaki was silent, and the rice was still white, and nothing had changed.
But Nakahara Chuuya had been a weapon since before he had a name. He had survived a lab and a lie and a God taking root in his bones before he was old enough to understand what surviving meant.
He could survive a white room.
He could survive until—
(until someone came, until Dazai came, until—)
He pressed his thumbnail into the soft skin of his wrist. Still real. He said it again, because it helped. “I’m still real.”
(Again, and again and again and again. He just had to hold on until-)
“I’m real...” Chuuya repeated again, branding the memory (it was real, it had to be) into his mind. Dazai’s black coat, the brown of the mackerel’s hair, the pink of (Albatross’s) Chuuya’s bike, the red of his own ability.
“I’m real, I’m real, I’m real...”
(As if saying it enough times would make him believe it)
He repeated the words until they nearly lost their meaning, a nonsensical string of sounds from his mouth that he used to not go insane.
Hah...
Dazai would have teased him if he was there...
Chuuya clung to that idea like a lifeline. He had to stay resolute and believe in his own existence, or his stupid partner would never let it go. Dazai—infuriating and annoying and so damn frustrating—had become the only reason he kept some semblance of his sanity in this place.
But... He didn’t change it.
He just had to... Wait it out.
Yeah, that’s it.
No white room could ever make him forget the insufferably punchable face of one Dazai Osamu.
(Fuck... Chuuya really hoped he’d make it out of here...)