Work Text:
The crisp mid-November air tastes like ash on melting snow—yet to arrive in Yokohama's grayish landscape as autumn’s leaves are carried away from the grimy streets down to the sunset-touched shore—and a familiar headache blooming on his temples. Dazai fiddles with the cigarette hanging limp from his lips, damp and unlit, busying his hungover mind with the glassy, untroubled nothingness of finding shapes in the clouds dispersing above him. He flicks the lighter on his hand, but the flame blinks to life only for a moment before being carried away by the wind.
He’s been coming here more often lately, spending days, spending nights; never with a clear head or a mellowed heart, though even if he tried, Dazai doesn’t hold out hope for either. The bitterness of the past does not — and could never — nudge out the familiarity of the sea, the smell of rust, cheap alcohol, and industrial smoke on deck; and somewhere there, planted gently like bookmarks between the pages of smells, the whole gamut of the ship’s kitchen, the ever-so-present aroma of fish soup, sticking to Dazai’s clothes weeks after he gets off, his soles meeting the familiar land, the kind he discovers anew every time he comes back, homesick.
Somehow, Dazai’s always managed to dive past the only real cure for homesickness he’s ever known.
“Dammit.” He spits a curse under his breath when the lighter refuses to listen to him again, to the disharmonious symphony of his hands, trembling from the dying day’s unceremonious wind. It’s always been colder by the sea, but now that he’s not in the middle of it, the weather is sharper on him, less merciful, gracious, the kind of embrace that culminates in a dagger stuck between his ribs, veiled with smoke, hugging his sieved lungs like a mother hugs a child who, yet loved, burdens her to the brink of loathing.
Dazai is well aware that his body is in an eternal battle against itself.
It wouldn’t hurt to see it cooperate with the rest of him though; for his limbs to match the speed of his thoughts, cloudy as they are as memories flood all the empty pockets, the ridges and crevices, and he almost laughs. He doesn’t let the melody break past the barricade of his lips. Time heals all wounds, or so the enlightened claim, yet his body agonizes in this hauntingly quiet reminiscing, too much for an empty stomach to bear, half-dressed on a strange hotel room’s balcony, unfamiliar rules plastered all over the place. His fingers twitch, resigned to snapping the cigarette in half, but Dazai thinks better of it. A grimace stains the placid, fabricated puzzle of his clean-shaven features, and he closes the door behind him, the handprint left on the glass something close to a promise.
He realizes that some of his bandages have come loose from all the nervous fidgeting, edges fraying around his wrists where the scars are older, a lost language. Thin, white mounds and entombed stories, though Dazai guesses his arrival here will force a shovel on his hands, knees down to cursed earth to dig back up the ancient grievances. Fresher gossip and ghost chatter draw a haphazard maze of swollen wounds waiting for a blessing that won’t ever come, red and angry and weeping, for Dazai never takes the time to grieve his sins after the fact. He is no believer after all—he couldn’t dare ask for forgiveness, and his knees already carry the weight of a fragmented lifetime, torn between the land and the sea and all the hailing rain in between. His eyes skim over his own cruelty, almost petty with his eyes narrowed and lips pursed, careful not to waste more of the strips of cloth than he can afford.
It wouldn’t do good to expose himself like this, saltwater in the air, for everyone to see.
On board, there was never enough time to call for God—and so he never did. Praying always comes at a cost. He could stop at some moments, take a breather on deck, out into the night, his cold, calloused hands resting atop the rusty metal railing wishing it would sink deeper than shallow flesh, his shirt wrinkled and greasy from sweat after a long day of work, his heart turned inside out, an origami bird with all of its corners folded, dirty with ink from smudged words. The sky was always the clearest out at sea, and Dazai loved watching it the most—at night, when everyone else was fast asleep, when he had to wake up in three hours himself, on the doorstep of the first sunlight, another restless day of taming the many storms but the one that was raging under his skin.
It had seemed the wise thing, the noble thing, the right thing back at eighteen—to run off to the sea; Dazai knew he wouldn’t be a surgeon (as his parents wanted), a lawyer (as his girlfriend at the time wanted), or an artist (as Odasaku wanted); he knew it all, he had a list already composed in this head, a list of all the people he would disappoint with his decision, but as long as his name felt alien in his own mouth, put next to any profession, his soul could not rest. A want lay within him Dazai could not ignore, giddy with it, desperate. One night, he sat down on the floor in his room, shrank into himself, folded his shoulders inside like a tired, rainless mountain, closed his eyes, took a deep breath, and asked himself what he wanted to be; if there was anything, anyone he wanted to be in the first place.
Chuuya’s skin had always smelled of the sea. The salt left his shoulders and forearms dry, drier than before, barely visible creases crawling all the way up to his neck, unexplored itineraries that Dazai felt he could taste on his tongue if he just kept looking at them for a bit longer, up close, as close as Chuuya allowed Dazai to wrap himself around him. Chuuya rubbed some drugstore lotion into his skin, the artificial smell of strawberry and coconut imprinting itself into Dazai’s semantic memory, but he’d simply laughed it off, claiming that it wasn’t big enough of a deal, not memorable enough, and the joke tells itself. Nothing was ever a big deal to him. The next day, after school, he came back to the shore, stripped off his clothes, and ran straight in, headfirst, against the cruel waves. Dazai stayed on land—God, how out of character it was to him back then—sucking on his cigarette as he sat on the sand and struggling to remember prayers he could utter for Chuuya’s safety.
The sea had always painted Chuuya’s hair a color deeper, a color darker than it really was, russet turned into unruly curls bleeding red into the sea. It seemed like battling with the waves never tired him—he could spend hours like that, even in the port, where the water wasn’t the cleanest, where the foghorns, hums, and creaks of the ships were too loud for Dazai to hear the violent thunder of his own heart. He preferred it that way; he was sure that his heart had something important to tell him, but if he tried to listen to it, he would betray everything he’d agreed to believe in. And so he didn’t listen, merging with the industrial noise instead, with Yokohama’s crowded pier, and, of course, with the sound of Chuuya’s laughter once he finally got out of the water and sprawled on the sand next to him like a starfish, his naked, soaked body, trembling and bursting with life, something scandalously alive next to the unmoving dark matter of Dazai’s coat, a sentence that wouldn’t finish itself.
Later, that laughter would haunt him between oceans, far away from the shore, echoing in every wave that would throw itself against the unshaken vessel. Dazai would hear Chuuya’s voice in the bottomless depths, unearth it like a relic from the sand, catch it reverberating off the cutlery in the dining room; he would then tell himself he was just hallucinating things, something he wanted the most getting stuck to the underside of his thoughts, like a fishbone in his throat. He would convince himself he’d gone mad from loneliness—or, better to say, his own futile attempts at recycling it into solitude. Chuuya was everywhere.
Perhaps that had been his mistake; to look for Chuuya in the unwithering pieces of him, tracing the feel of his dimples under smooth fingertips back to the open, unyielding sea. Perhaps Dazai had been running from him and could only sit with the stinging regret making him drunk and homesick for someone that had never been his, for Chuuya was free and Dazai was a man in chains—be it out at sea or with his feet on dry land, always unsteady and flitting between wanting and missing—, seeking an imitation of comfort in reminders of what they used to be. Dazai can’t help the smile that breathes the first hint of life into his lips; reserved, lax if only for the fading sketch of Chuuya’s carefree features in the orange glow of a nevermore sunset, carrying the bittersweet aftertaste of forcing an unused heart to remember.
He grazes the beige coat lying on the unmade bed with his knuckles, cracked and tender from months of exposure to saltwater and a spiderweb map of doubts, almost too afraid to jostle what remains of the past sewn in it like an unwitting promise; the curse of those who collect mistakes like broken seashells, and Dazai keeps plenty of those in a room that hasn’t seen him in nearly five years of running. Falling in love with the sea had been an inevitability, even if Dazai had certainly treated the sudden warmth in his chest as if it were an ailment, a disease, and thus, no more than a coincidence on a turbulent night carrying the scent of strawberries and coconut all the way back to him—though Dazai refused to utter his name even in humid solitude, a sailor can never refuse a compass pointing north.
The screen on his phone lights up with yet another notification. His parents Dazai had blocked months before he stepped foot on the plane back home, fatigued and weary and dreading the questions, always questions and never answers with them, mapping out his life in inquiries to present the illusion of choice, but Dazai is no fool. Where will you go to college? Surely nothing less than Tokyo University, yes? A tilt of his head, freshly chopped bangs on his eyes. When will you stop hanging out with that half-breed delinquent, Osamu? Nails digging crescents on his palms, a retort sitting on the tip of his tongue. Why do you keep doing this to yourself? Blood dripping from his bare wrists, taping his last razor beneath his drawers as the family physician stepped into his bedroom, never quite a sanctuary, as cold as a cemetery on the coldest winter night. Dazai eyes the contact name, a hoping heart despite his mind’s refusal, but it is only Odasaku and a string of emojis he has no energy to decipher.
Five years is a long time, longer still while freefalling into the endless dark, always wondering—not that Dazai isn’t good at that; the labyrinth of himself, to rediscover—and always coming up short of a suitable solution.
A quiet breeze of hesitation washes over him as he reaches for the coat, caught in the softness of it beneath his fingers, worn and weathered, just on the other side of too small for his lithe frame. A growth spurt at nineteen, alone in a foreign cabin with only an unopened letter to keep him company through the seasickness, as his shoulders widened under the inflexible weight of solitude, the very first three hundred and sixty-five days without Chuuya since he first met him at nine years old feeding seagulls by the shore, every bit as beautiful as the fairies from Dazai’s books. Beautiful and untroubled, with a piercing gaze and a brazen mouth and eyes made of foreign galaxies. The heart always knows.
He settles to carry the coat folded over his arm; though it might be cold enough to wear it, the garment carries still the engraving of their last fight before Dazai left to an unknown destination, his back to Chuuya’s body folding over itself, tears glistening but unshed on his amber eyes; an anger he couldn’t face, even now, a lifetime later of clinging to scattered fragments of them so the wind can’t steal them from Dazai’s feeble grasp. The clock on the screen flashes a quarter to seven. Time used to mean something, he muses, eighteen at twenty-three, lost even with his two feet on solid ground, back home, back where it all started and ended and started again, for him. Dazai sighs, keenly aware that he needs to leave this suffocating box of a hotel room before it kills him. Lucky for him, a mind like his could never forget the way back to the shore.
For the longest time, Dazai used to be at peace believing that Chuuya is somewhere far away, that they could never lie on the same shore together again. After all, it would be convenient; out of sight, out of mind, except the ghost of him is in every other redhead in the street, persistent, the plane of his freckled shoulders, the straps of his formless tank top. The first time Dazai landed a kiss under the wet, saltwater-soaked fabric, the contrast of cold with the brisk warmth of Chuuya’s lower stomach, he didn’t want to run anymore. He didn’t want just any vessel, carrying him away in his obedience. He wanted to stay and keep the moment longer in his mouth, like a lollipop; the moment his tongue traced a wet strip over Chuuya’s skin, hot and salty and sweet at the same time, making him shudder and giggle.
It was a game. Everything was always a game to them. When they kissed, clasped together like hands in a promise, in pantries, behind the ice-cream stalls, in the alleyways near the port, Chuuya always sealed their kiss with a smile. “You smoked again,” he would say. Or, with less confidence, on a broken exhale, “You had that brandy again, asshole?” And Dazai would laugh, laugh in despair, crease the lower part of his poorly shaven face, looking away, as if Chuuya was someone who could humble him, strip him of his skin and the muscles beneath, because the bones never lie.
At times, his teachings felt too much, a self-proclaimed preacher who thought he knew better how to live, except none of them knew better—they were all broken in their own unique ways; Chuuya was chasing dreams that did not exist (“I’ll find a way to show mother the world”), and Dazai was running off to the sea, where no one was ever welcome, let alone someone like him, liquor-soaked youth with a broken heart. If you survived your first sail, the most you could gain was a pat on the head; maybe a bottle of the cheapest port wine. Long story short, everything he’d ever got from his first love—just in a different currency.
Lately, Dazai has been chased by weird visions. He can’t quite explain them. Something—or someone—is constantly tugging at the back of his shirt’s collar, fingers hooked and anchored, pulling him away from the sea. He’s tried taking his shoes off, soaking his ankles; he couldn’t stomach a step, watching the waves washing over the hems of his pants, a damp cigarette between his teeth, the sea as indifferent to him as it has always been. Ghosts, sensations. Sometimes, walking through the buzz of the port market, the stalls with fresh fish and exotic foods from afar, a dark stain of his coat over the splashes of color (fruit, so much fruit!), Dazai thinks he hears a familiar voice calling for him, but when he turns around, the crowd is too dense, and he can’t discern a single familiar crown of hair.
It could be anyone; anyone from school, from his old friends, his old life, those who know—and those who don’t—that he’s rarely, if ever, on land. And yet, his heart has only ever responded to the maniacal idea of Chuuya, planted in his head early on, a tumor that you cut out a thousand times, but it keeps coming back. If it’s not Chuuya calling for him, reaching into the maze of him, Dazai doesn’t want it. His own, exquisite kind of seasickness.
A whispered premonition, the sort of epiphany that drowns you in the throes of endless, agonizing sleep paralysis; a disembodied cacophony with no source, no golden string to light the path out of the labyrinth, and so Dazai chases shapeless shadows in his waking hours. Cruel, nightmarish even, but if he can blame a higher power for the sins of his broken heart, seeking out Chuuya where there might be nothing but wind carrying away sun warmed sand on an empty beach, then Dazai feels no remorse in throwing away his years as an impostor to try, futile as it may be, to undo the mess of knots he left behind without looking back. He’s never been one to believe in signs; magic numbers surely can’t open doors jammed shut before he ever had the chance to knock—doors Dazai closed himself out of sheer, unrelenting lovesickness, a sort of fear that shapes the worst of him in fractured clay, always reaching out for the ocean so long Chuuya was there to catch him, wrap a callused hand around his scarred wrists, smile like the world isn’t vicious and ruthless, like it is worth it to be needlessly kind to someone like Dazai. Friends, once, then more, so much more it became an act of sacrilege to name their scattered escapades of intimacy.
This isn’t about him, Dazai tells himself. Quiet, tentative, a threadbare murmur in the empty room, as if the dust and faint traces of aged whiskey in the air could betray his desires. He leans down to tie his shoes and remembers he hasn’t worn his old pair of sneakers since he left for the uncertain song of the ocean; worn soles and grimy around the seams, full of scribbles in Chuuya’s messy handwriting—vestiges for a future in the making, sweet yet poisonous lies, a question mark suspended on the crown of his head; looking forward with his feet facing towards a different path; a path unknown so easily traversed by freer souls, footprints in the shape of Chuuya’s determination. Now, Dazai wears cheap loafers from a nearby department store, the only one in this little shoe-in-the-box port town, tight in the middle but it’ll have to do. This isn’t about him, Dazai reminds himself once more, but a mantra can only be so powerful, and his voice is a weak current, flatlining under the weight of a longing so pitiful it makes him laugh.
Dazai has Chuuya’s contact saved; an empty chat and a missing heart emoji, but it’s still there flashing on the miserable screen of his phone. They haven’t talked in years, not in person, eye to eye, though Dazai has certainly monologued to him in his seasickness, a soliloquy on penances, and so he could be anywhere in this cursed excuse of a hometown, but Dazai knows better. He would know him in a landscape of erased memories and aching melancholy; out of all the places one like him could only ever inhabit, the sea, their second home in place of pillow fortresses and games of tag. No one pays him any mind as he exits the hotel, sneaking a weary smile at the girl behind the front desk. Once, there was confidence in his gait; unhurried and purposeful, once, before he dared break the only treasure Dazai ever called his. The past haunts him, vivid, yet Dazai manages to saunter back to the deserted streets of this mid-November morning, and all he has to do is follow the smell of saltwater and hope.
It is still over a week before his next sail. Over a week before he, worn out of his solitude and his skin, will return to the deck, to his logbook, to the endless creases of the waves, each dictating his fate. Tonight, however, he is still one with Yokohama, he still has nowhere to rush, which means he can allow himself to roam. The moment he steps outside, embarking on his night walk into nowhere, with no particular purpose, he puts a cigarette in his mouth and flicks out the lighter; a spark of the flame next to his face—but it never makes it to its final destination, dying out in the dark, Dazai’s hand freezing, helpless, and falling back down to the inhospitable hut of his pocket. That’s because he hears music.
Down the beach road, the last of the streets lined before the pier, there is a congregation of pubs—always open, always loud, buzzing with the swarms of youth, mostly the sailors, pouring alcohol, playing cards, and sucking on their damp cigarettes; wearing their sweat-soaked shirts, the shoes that are falling apart, and pants whose pockets are overflowing with coins, cigarette packets, wrinkled cash bills, and pictures of their loved ones. Dazai has never had a picture to put in his own locket; it has been guarding the inner world of his coat pocket, uninhabited, lonely like himself, staring back at him with its blurred and scratched metal whenever he flicks it open. Lockets are for the loved ones; they are also for keeping secrets. To him, Chuuya has always been the periphery, the fine line between the two, and anyone else? He’s never loved anyone else. But a sailor who doesn’t love anyone cannot be out at sea, or else he might decide to never come back. What does it make of him?
But the music, yes, the music attracts him; the only door that is open, wooden and heavy, and the inside of the place, its hungry mouth, is filled with so much life that it contaminates the outside, seeping onto the tar, mixing with sand and chipped sea glass, all the way down to the shore, where another cargo ship is about to be unloaded. Dazai puts the cigarette away, fixes his coat, flattens his hair—as well as he can—and worms his way inside, where life is the loudest. Elbowing through the crowd of drunkards, navy men and navy boys, just like himself, he ends up at the bar and hooks his fingers in the air for a glass of his standard choice—brandy, on the rocks. While drinking, he turns around on a shaky, wooden chair, squeezed and shoved from both sides by someone’s knees, elbows, and shoulders, the tempo of the place weaving his ill-stricken body into itself, whether he wants it or not, and Dazai can’t help but chuckle a little into his glass.
His smile is just as fleeting as everything about his life; he doesn’t have the time to savour the sensation on his lips when it is already punched out of him, spat away like a rotten tooth. His eyes make out a distinct figure, a crown of tousled red hair in the crowd: tucked into the corner—but extremely prideful about it—Chuuya is winning a poker party against a much older sailor, and Dazai is sure that he’s winning, both because it shows clearly from the way his body behaves and because… well, it is Chuuya. His shoulders are relaxed, his back melting down the chair, and his hands are flicking the cards out like bullets, quick and punchy, each one hammering a nail into his opponent's coffin. There is a load of people all around their table, watching, and cheering, and swearing, and praying, but Dazai can only see him, glimmering in the distress of his enemy, sighing with the biggest relief and triumph of his life once the party ends, and he comes out of it a winner. He’s in a ripped t-shirt, gray and stained, sliding down one shoulder, and his loose hair is doing a poor job of covering the sharp plane of his collarbone, where his skin tastes of the saltiest sea. What is he doing here, Dazai is asking himself, thoughts running wild, he is not even in the navy.
But then, as Chuuya stops counting the bills and pockets his cash, sealing the victory with a definitive slam of his hand against the table, he finally looks up, and immediately—so immediately it feels like a punch—hunts Dazai down with his unwelcoming eyes, the hook of a smirk in the corner of his mouth, vengeful and bloodthirsty. Dazai starts drinking faster, brandy burning his throat. He watches Chuuya get up from his chair and snake his way out, as fast as one can be in this mishmash of drunk bodies, without turning his head. Dazai’s grip tightens on the glass; his body pushes him forward the way it once pushed him toward the sea—without asking for his permission, feet marching to the tune of his own doom.
Outside, at the door, he watches Chuuya struggle to light a cigarette, spitting curses under his breath. Up close, he is even less recognisable, which is strange, because proximity tends to familiarise. Dazai keeps scrutinising him, not uttering a word, like he’s some exotic creature in a glass terrarium; they are both wary of each other’s presence, painfully so, two devastating fires with nothing to extinguish them, and yet—they do not act upon it, for the longest time just pretending that they wound up where they did by sheer coincidence. Until Chuuya speaks. Until he, dammit, speaks first.
“You, fucking bastard,” sieved through the teeth, almost a whisper instead of a desperate shout right in Dazai’s face.
The sea is listening, Dazai has to remind himself, watching the horizon over Chuuya’s shoulder, because if he looks at his bare skin for a minute more, he is a dead man. He forces out something that feels like a smile on his lips. “I missed you too.”
In the months that watched over his inopportune arrival back to the city—a hawk’s unblinking gaze on a set of wide shoulders hunched over themselves in a midnight clad cabin, watching as Dazai sifted through memories of old in the museum of his melancholy—he’d practiced rounds of flowery speeches drenched in purple prose and ugly yearning; apologies and an array of the same pathetic excuses Dazai had fallen asleep to like prayers to a God that wasn’t listening, though those he never quite managed to adorn with enough sincerity for even a stranger to believe him. And wasn’t Chuuya exactly that, a stranger in a body Dazai knows better than the stars out in the open sea? He swallows the familiar aftertaste of alcohol and everything unfinished, every genesis at the seams of his lips meeting its exodus on a shaky exhale, and then nothing. The tip of Chuuya’s cigarette glows orange, and Dazai does not look at his sinful mouth.
There are things Dazai recognizes in him; the same unruly bundle of russet curls, now longer, tied in a messy ponytail, the fading trail of freckles in his shoulders, the same whiskey-amber of eyes and the same callused hands, all so carefully mapped once by Dazai’s own—the picture before the locket, before he ever came to realize what memories were worth while worlds away from everything they never were. And even though he sees the remnants of the boy he abandoned, vines have spread their roots in the planes of him in such a way Dazai stumbles back at the sight of everything new, everything wrong in this Chuuya that isn’t a mirage, so tragically tangible yet so mournfully distant even though he’s here, just two steps away from him, curled inward as to avoid looking Dazai in the eyes and failing. As unconquerable as gravity, two magnets shall never fail to collide once more in the wide, unfathomable expanse of the universe.
Dazai almost smiles, a tease more than a proper curl of his lips, lifting a hand to the evidence of life on his chest.
“Not by a long fucking shot, no,” Chuuya sneers around the filter, a note of mocking laughter in his voice, but he was never good at pretending. His nose flares, eyes narrowing just a fraction as Dazai shifts to stand at his side, and he’s a fish out of the water, flailing on the cobblestone path, begging for Chuuya’s mercy without so much as speaking his gospel like a fool. He continues without a hitch, without glancing up at him, without moving, “I’d say you have to care about someone to miss them.” Smoke billows in the air; tobacco and a hint of vanilla, and Dazai knows for a fact Chuuya has never rolled his own cigarettes in his life—he has to resist the urge to snatch away the offending appendage and taint the damp crease left by Chuuya’s mouth with his own. He has no right in this world to let the claws of this bitter, ill-mannered jealousy take hold. A quiet breeze ruffles Chuuya’s hair, and it should be Dazai’s hands rediscovering him. “And I don’t even know who you are anymore.”
“Yet you’re still standing here,” Dazai hums. Yokohama hasn’t changed much in his absence, not in any way that matters to him at least; still the birthplace of pain and joy alike, dirty streets and pubs, the smell of saltwater and secrets trickling down and back to the shore. The night whispers a promise of chill as the temperatures drop, but Chuuya radiates a sort of heat that engulfs Dazai without meaning to; a lullaby on the shared summer nights falling asleep on a backyard’s hammock, a wordless tune to Dazai’s hammering heart, bandaged, reaching out blind. He tilts his head, and he wonders if it’s casual when Chuuya turns enough for his tanned skin to catch on the fresh bandages. They shared a language once, a lifetime ago; now Dazai is left with a book to decode that which isn’t anymore. “Chuuya has never been one to suck up to my whims. And so, you’re still here. Interesting—”
Laughter, dry and wrong and so, so distant. Dazai flinches.
“Whimsy. Is that what this is?” Chuuya quirks an eyebrow, the one with the little scar on the arch where a piercing didn’t heal right. He purses his lips, and Dazai can see the curses taking shape as teeth bite down on chapped lips, though Chuuya doesn’t utter a single one—he isn’t worthy, Dazai realizes a step too late, five years too late, too many miles between them too late, and he misses it. The fighting and the bickering, the barbed words, the jabs at his ego; if not for the thrill of it, then the utter elation of being known by Chuuya, of being bared without fear of what lies beneath. Dazai clenches his fists. Chuuya shakes his head; the cigarette hangs limp from the corner of his mouth, burnt almost all the way down to the filter, tobacco and vanilla and distance between them. “You’re fucking unbelievable.”
One week. Dazai is set to leave again in exactly seven days, and perhaps it will be the one that whisks him away from this city for good, away from the only good thing that never quite belonged to him. A measly, insignificant one hundred and sixty-eight hours of undiluted torture; standing in Chuuya’s presence, ever the coward, without properly facing him. He itches to touch the sun-warmed skin, clasp his hands behind Chuuya’s neck and lean down until their noses brush. No, that isn’t quite right—his cravings are not so innocent, the fantasy of a fantasy; Dazai is but a pitiful and starved creature, lost in the same labyrinth as he was when he left, chasing and never the chased, always on the edge of another mistake.
“I heard a rumor. About you.” It is only a half truth, but Dazai’s lips are almost a mockery of conviction shaped with clay.
Chuuya spits the cigarette and puts it out with the tip of his shoe—only to reach for another one immediately, lighting it in his mouth; he’s always been rather greedy, seeking abundance in the smallest things, the abundance barely compatible with his background. After all, they come from a similar place, a similar kind of poverty, except Chuuya has never decided to act on his, comfortable while lingering in the unknown tomorrow; he was always the better of the two at dealing with uncertainty. “There are way too many rumors about me flying around this forsaken port,” he says, sparing Dazai a quick glance—too quick, but enough to send an electric shiver down his spine, his cutthroat eyes always sharper than he, perhaps, means them to be. “Which one?”
“You’re planning to join the maritime forces of the JMSDF.” Dazai knows it’s a big deal. He used to think about it, too, before he decided that at least somewhere his life ought to take a calmer course. Who is he to defend an entire country, should the need arise, if he can’t even protect himself from a certain redhead who looks at him like he’s come to collect a debt that’s five years overdue? “Don’t you think you’re a bit too old for that?”
Chuuya smirks, looking away, ignoring the wind as it slaps his cheeks, as it tries to pull the cigarette out of his mouth, as it throws his loose hair into his face, and he looks almost ridiculous like that, smoking against all odds, except Dazai won’t find it in himself to laugh. “Certainly not too old to be taking it up the ass from shitfaced swabbies, aren’t I?”
Dazai makes a face, his eyes on the horizon. He remembers it all too well, the cruel final year of high school, their fates misaligned, unidentified; someone had let a rumor fly that Chuuya was getting ready to do some maritime training and join the navy immediately after graduation, which made Dazai chuckle from the thought alone—in private, covering his mouth with the sleeve of his coat—because he was the only one who knew how untrue it actually was. Then, it happened—like a storm they’d all expected but still dreaded it coming.
A group of assholes from the parallel—at least six guys, if not more—all envious and bitter in the face of possible competition, which was bizarre, to say the least, since they did not even consider Chuuya capable of being a worthy rival. They all thought he was too short, too thin, too scrawny, with arms like the thinnest tree branches, naked in early spring yet already barreling into summer. Once again, Dazai was the only one who knew better. He knew exactly the force those thin arms of his held, he’d learned it by heart by then. Chuuya was much more than his looks let show—it would’ve been utterly foolish of anyone to conclude otherwise, and yet, they did. So, this is who’s going to entertain us during long sails, one of the guys grinned as he took a step closer and caught Chuuya’s face with his hands, caging his chin between his fingers, forcing himself not to avert his gaze, fatten up sometime, will you, I wouldn’t love to be clinging to bones as I’m fucking your brains out. All of them laughed, nodding like one in agreement—and Chuuya just took it, he just fucking took it, all of this humiliation, staring at the ground with glass-veiled, dead, unresponsive eyes, but he was not resigned.
You surely are prettier than some of the port’s whores.
Dazai wanted to leap. He had no chance against all of them at once, and his bravery would’ve equaled resigning to coming back home a bag of broken bones, but. But, always a pause, lingering, seething, waiting. A nameless urge, too complex for his lovesick vocabulary. His fists tightened along his body, his teeth clenched, his heart simmering in a boiling pot of injustice. But then, Chuuya had suddenly looked up, spotting him standing there, behind their backs, still unnoticed, and flashed him a glare that could only mean one thing—don’t you dare. He knew the assholes wouldn’t have touched him; after all, they needed his pretty little body intact for what they were planning to do to him on board. But Dazai—Dazai was a different story; should he have tried to stand up for him, he would’ve regretted it immediately. I bet your mouth must be good, little slut, I’ve heard redheads take it well.
And… that was it. That was how Chuuya gave up on the idea later, and it was ridiculously out of character for someone like him. Hence Dazai’s sheer surprise once he found out that the old desire seemed to have reignited itself within him; at the same time, though he’d rather slit his own throat than admit it, he could not have been happier—if there was a sight he wished to witness more than Chuuya sleeping in his bed, next to him, it was Chuuya chasing his dreams. “They joke about it too,” Dazai finally braves saying. “With me.” Because he’s the youngest on deck, fairly good-looking, and, most importantly, obedient and well-behaved, he can’t afford to be anything else if he doesn’t want to be randomly thrown overboard on a moonless night.
Chuuya only rolls his eyes. “Clearly not like that.”
In a way, it’s almost like going back to that pocket of normalcy they used to share; always a set, always in pairs, do not separate—as if there could be a force strong enough to pull their orbits apart without the enormity of such departure reshaping their world for the worst. Almost, because Chuuya’s laughter is a string pulled taut, waiting for the inevitable snap of remembering Dazai made an almost out of their always. The gap between them is in the vast infinity between one and two, a manmade, limitless black hole full of possibilities snuffed out in a single night, and Chuuya only looks at him with guarded amber and a hint of creases beneath his eyes, half turned away from Dazai, lower lip worried between his teeth as if mulling over an attempt at keeping up the farce. He’s grown up.
That Chuuya’s choices have led him back to Dazai is but an artifice; glistening porcelain, spiderweb cracks dotting its foundation, only this time there is no gold to fill the gaps and mend Dazai’s sins, and yet the animalistic longing filling his chest cavity nails his feet to the sidewalk. A cigarette might keep him busy long enough to come up with yet another excuse to keep his moon from wrecking his ill-mannered tides, but he remembers the defective lighter in his pocket and thinks better of it, smiling the same tug of lips as a statue posing for a painting. Decorative, broken. Certainly not the true depth of his heart.
“Chuuya must have at least been thinking about me,” Dazai declares, meaning it like a fact yet finding a spring of lead blooming on the tip of his tongue; airy in the early vowels of this crafted confession, bright perhaps, in the sole wanting it to be true, right until his nerves betray him. His years in the sea have taught him to grind such selfish impulses down into a fine dust, a sort of film to be worn on rare occasions, and he’d never once felt quite so unsettled around Chuuya that it’d elicit the same cold shivers from spending his nights above deck charting the sky until he fell asleep. The same fear. Not once; not for their first kiss, the first time they held each other in sacrilegious intimacy, not when his ship arrived just this morning in Yokohama. To his credit, Chuuya only hums an acknowledgment, and whether he cares enough to keep listening, Dazai finds he can’t tell with the same clarity of those lost years. He clears his throat. “Making such decisions.”
“You’re insane,” Chuuya crows, almost laughing but not quite, lips wrapped around the filter of his cigarette, and Dazai averts his gaze a fraction of a second too late. Endeavors such as remembering with your body cannot be escaped the same way even wayward waves are meant to return to the shore. It’s painful—sharp, traveling from his fidgeting fingertips to Dazai’s own sandpaper mouth; and he could’ve said something better, smarter, acceptable in the context of their relationship, or lack thereof in this scenery that once saw them uttering promises to each other, vowing under the same starlit sky, and only now does Dazai recall that looking at the stars is looking at the past, and so drinking in the sight of Chuuya is engaging with the once was. Maybe Chuuya sees it in him, the war in his eyes and the hesitation in his hollowed-out cheeks, huffing out a curse and stepping into Dazai’s crumbling, inner circles to look up at him through his lashes. “Listen. It’s cool that you decided to… I don’t know. Drop by, I guess.” He holds his gaze for a moment longer, straightening his shoulders before adding, quieter, “But I’m not interested in whatever you think is happening right now. I’m leaving.”
Dazai despises how seemingly easy, how frighteningly simple it is for Chuuya to turn around and stalk back into the street, emptier than it was just a couple of minutes ago, as if setting the stage for their Greek tragedy, and Dazai is left on the cobblestone path without a mask, lines forgotten, blinking a sort of bitter stupefaction from his features. Wasn’t this to be expected, this ending between them? He balls his fists, nails short of drawing blood on his palms, and he follows without a care for logic; better to follow through his selfish desires until it bleeds him dry than stay wondering for the rest of his years. If the rumors are true, then, maybe…
Chuuya was always the fastest out of the two. Even now, Dazai struggles to match his pace through the winding streets of their little hometown, remembering what it was to chase Chuuya down the same paths when the stakes were flimsy and nonexistent. His legs ache, but Dazai doesn’t stop until he’s able to track Chuuya again with his eyes; following without so much as opening his mouth to speak, for words fail him, and it is striking in the most heartbreaking ways—even when they fought, argued, tested each other’s limits; they always did it facing each other without remorse, and now Chuuya trudges down the beaten path with his back to him, all tanned muscles and no care for the fractures in Dazai’s world, and why should he care? Dazai snorts, but the back of his throat tastes salty like unshed tears; he keeps pace, aware of the rising anger in Chuuya’s frame, the years of absence catching up and leaving Dazai breathless. Out of his depth. He runs a hand through his hair and finds his forehead wet with a sheen of sweat, sticky, messing up his curls.
“Okay, okay. I get it,” Dazai tries, and it comes out with a hitch to his voice that betrays a broken spirit, and even though Chuuya isn’t looking at him—forlorn eyes, seething red—Dazai stands up straighter, holding himself together with nothing but sheer, all-consuming hope. At least that’s what Dazai believes the shard lodged between his ribs to be hope, or something akin to it. Something just as destructive. He sighs; the chase wears him down to a single thread on a fraying carpet, never stopping out of fear he’d lose Chuuya somewhere down cowardice, taking sharp corners, mindless, though he should know by now exactly where his whirlwind of a never was is taking him. Perhaps Chuuya is doing it on purpose, he thinks, to torture him long enough to see him give up for good. A wavering hand hangs in the air between them as if reaching for the neckline of Chuuya’s shirt, to tug and bring him back home. He doesn’t, though, fitting himself in the space between them instead, a light breeze tickling his cheeks. “I thought we could at least be friends. Again, I mean.”
“Fuck’s sake. Friends? Are you fucking joking?” Chuuya whirls around so fast Dazai’s axis tilts, but he catches himself before the imminent fall. He’s already plummeted enough tonight, and the sheer rage stark and gorgeous in Chuuya’s face is arresting; wildfire consuming everything in its path, impatient, impartial as it burns through the remnants of them, everything holds in his cupped hands. The fire licks at his desperation, and Chuuya licks his lips, sardonic. “I’ll let you figure that one out.” He spits, and he hugs his sides suddenly. Dazai could hold him if he understood the value of bravery, touch him perhaps and find him as cold as a sheet of ice, yet he remains rooted in place just as terrified, a child again; only ever that innocent creature when it comes to Chuuya. Them, whatever they were once. A hiccup breaks the silence, and Chuuya is so young, devastatingly so, bare before Dazai in ways he doesn’t know how to hold. Chuuya doesn’t cry, no, but he comes close, and Dazai hates himself for it even more. “I don’t care, jerkface. I don’t—I don’t care anymore. I don’t want to fucking care about you ever again.”
Is it because I left? No, Dazai has to remind himself with a metaphorical slap across the face—or maybe something harder, fiercer, like a punch, breaking his own nose and staring down at his blood-smeared palm—not everything in the world revolves around him. But then, once again, what if this one thing does? He is on the very edge of his patience, patience like a shore with no pier, and his heart is left stranded, searching for a lighthouse, but all the lights are gone save for the beacon of Chuuya’s hair, a special shade of auburn in this gentle afterdark, the flashes of the port and upcoming ships dancing in his strands, the life he’s never claimed marking him its own. Dazai knows this certain kind of gaze with which Chuuya stares at the sea as he turns around—longing, but a spiteful type, you’re not mine and I hate you for it, and Dazai understands it better than anyone else, because whatever Chuuya feels for the sea, Dazai feels for Chuuya.
It is just that simple. An uncanny, egregious hierarchy of their incompatible lives. And when Dazai feels, as it often happens, that Chuuya is about to slip away, his hand reaches for his last resort, feeling for the wondrous shapes on a string, hidden under the fabric of his coat’s inner pocket, the home to everything he prefers to keep away from the world—his navy ID, an empty silver locket, and the spare change he usually spends on cheap, bitter coffee at one of the port stalls whenever they dock early in the morning. This time, however, there is also a token of one of the many feelings his heart harbours for Chuuya—it could be any of them, from love to hatred to greed, but he decides to go for the safe choice—gratitude.
“What’s that?” Chuuya makes a face of genuine confusion as Dazai offers him a necklace—makeshift, seashells on a string. He is ashamed to admit he made it himself—put together all the little conches he’d ever found that in one way or another reminded him of Chuuya—and so he doesn’t, biting his tongue instead. “Where did you get that?”
“It doesn’t matter,” he just says, shaking his head, and his hand jerks once again towards Chuuya’s suspicion, his humbling lack of acceptance. What did Dazai expect? For Chuuya to throw himself at him, back to being happy and in love, as they once were? “Take it. Please. You’ll do me a favor.”
Chuuya scoffs—but does—his careful, squeamish fingers brushing against the shells. He fidgets with them for some time, looking at each one up close, his frown growing deeper the further he goes down the string. “Are you a child?”
Dazai keeps looking at him, biting down a stupid smile. Not a word escapes his chest, not even when he sees Chuuya—accompanied by his own resigned sigh—put the necklace on, over his head, immediately hiding it under the sweat-soaked fabric of his t-shirt, torn in many places, stained, more resembling an old rag than a piece of clothing. Dazai knows he does it because he doesn’t want the rest of the world to see, to clock, somehow, this possessiveness, the fact that Chuuya’s wearing the shell necklace Dazai made for him might mean something, even if Dazai’s locket remains empty, this might just establish some sort of connection between them, a relationship, you are mine, a claim all over, like beads on a string, but Chuuya’s overt shame does not humble Dazai—in fact, all he can think about is how those seashells, crooked and with dents in them, imperfect, are now in direct contact with Chuuya’s skin, the residue of sweat and seasalt, the realisation of it more intimate than any kiss could be, it kicks Dazai at the back of his legs, weakening his knees. An indirect kiss of sorts. Chuuya is carefully avoiding his glare, staring down at the ground instead, at the grains of sand scattered over the tar, the cigarette butts on the pavement. Chuuya snorts, then. “Thank you, friend.”
As an unwelcome, bitter impasse draws closer with every breath shared in this unlikely night, Dazai wracks his brain for just another excuse to keep Chuuya from pulling back his anchors; a single, pitiful reason to justify and draw out this doomed exchange. Always the best at reading every single, minute shift in his gaze, but with Chuuya’s eyes facing the cobblestones Dazai can’t track the comings and goings of the waves there, bursting with things unsaid neither of them dare to utter, even with the silence stretching—daring them, perhaps; fertile land for crops to bloom, though Dazai is tongue tied and scared, a seasoned sailor scared of the tide. Chuuya fiddles with one of the seashells, thumb brushing over the ridges, and he does it with the kind of care as a devout kneeling before a shrine; slow, deliberate, chest heaving to the rhythm of Dazai’s own uncertainty. The makeshift jewels fit just below Chuuya’s collarbone, and Dazai’s cheeks flame red.
He wants to say something witty, something memorable in this preamble of a farewell, to soak himself in enough confidence to breach five years of absence and fix what has been broken, but he’s never been one to mend with his hands, callused and scarred, made to rupture and never repair. If he’s honest with himself, he should’ve known better than to make himself known like this, to Chuuya, to this cursed town, and so the spark dies before a proper genesis takes place in his throat.
After what feels like an eternity, Chuuya raises his head. He carries himself with a defiant tilt of his chin, yet Dazai is able to see the places where his facade begins to crumble, or is that wishful thinking? That he’d break first, cave, yearn, throw himself back to Dazai’s arms like a proper homecoming? Dazai’s knuckles crack under the force of his palms, breaking the almost sterile quietness of the night, and this isn’t them; who they were together, eons ago, when they believed themselves holders of a rare knowledge. Dazai braved to call it love, once, more a breath tucked against his chest than a proper declaration, but he’d tried right when it didn’t matter anymore. The breeze picks up suddenly, ruffling Chuuya’s hair, and Dazai can’t help himself; he reaches out to tuck a wayward lock behind his ear, feeling more scarred tissue in the slope of the cartilage, lingering there long enough that Chuuya coughs out a curse, or maybe Dazai’s name, both would certainly be fitting. His fingertips burn once he pulls back, a sheepish smile on his weary, unused muscles, and Chuuya stays; stance dripping with careful compliance, feet planted on the dirty streets to allow for a quick escape, but he stays.
Dazai doesn’t know what to do with himself, really, with his hummingbird heart and his too human, too fragile hopes.
“Don’t look at me like that,” Chuuya groans, running an open hand through his face, down his nose and over his neck, settling on the necklace draped askew on his throat. It feels like coming back to who they were before the ocean cast them from their own universe; the kids that sealed promises with their pinkies and built their lives on the unshakable foundation that they would brave it all, together. And now they’re here, in this limbo of undead wishes and stained remembrance. Dazai knits his eyebrows, thinking, but Chuuya beats him to it with his arms pushing into Dazai’s chest without warning. “Stop it. Stop doing that, you jerk!” The citrine of his eyes flashes wild and dangerous, then a smudge of odd warmth follows the display, and he half turns his face away and clicks his tongue, as if he could ever hide anything from Dazai, anything in the slightest. Dazai has not wanted to touch him quite so desperately as he does now—a sudden jolt through the crown of his head and spearing him into the crux of feelings overflowing freely, a spring in the middle of the desert. Chuuya warns, “You.”
“What? I’m not doing anything,” Dazai quips, meaning it for once; he can see Chuuya looking for the telltale signs of deceit, and he, too, is reacquainting himself with the vocabulary they built together. Life used to be so simple, back when all of Dazai’s worries fit in a grain of rice, the world so full of wonders, so full of Chuuya everywhere his eyes cast their gaze. “Really. I have no idea what Chuuya is blabbering about.” He drinks in the sight of him, all feisty curls and stories told in freckles, shadows dancing on the planes of his exposed flesh; he’s beautiful like this, and Dazai itches to touch him everywhere the yellow glow of the lamppost can’t reach—nails on fading bruises, to leave an imprint of himself to last them the next eternity apart, for it could be definitive and permanent. He leans closer, enough to startle Chuuya but not enough to warrant more than an unspoken question; eyes level with Chuuya’s, following the arrow of his compass back home. “Chuuya needs to use his words.”
It’s a long time before Chuuya opens his mouth to speak, arms crossed over his chest. “I think. I guess I wouldn’t mind a friend coming over for a bit. For a cup of coffee, or—” Lips pursed, he cards his fingers through his hair, laughter heaving dry and high-pitched from his chest; a welcome melody for a lost sailor, a desperate one. Dazai mirrors his posture without intending to; they’ve always been one and the same after all, translations of each other in disappearing ink, maybe not quite the same but irreparably the same lexicon regardless. They’ve been standing by the sidewalk of a residential area that Dazai recognizes from a leaflet quoting redevelopment left by the front desk of the hotel. Some buildings he recognizes, some he doesn’t, and Dazai doesn’t know which one hurts more. Chuuya’s mouth parts, hesitating as his hands dip into the pockets of his jeans, blinking slowly. “Or something.”
Chuuya takes him to his apartment—well, the apartment he’s currently renting, as he’s never truly in one place all the time, not his style—and it reminds Dazai a bit of his very first cabin on his first ship. The worst of all, cramped and old, with rust on the walls and mice-eaten carpets, but hey, it felt like home, and in a sense, it was, it was a strange sensation of never wanting to be anywhere else, and he might as well Stockholm syndrome-d himself into thinking it was everything he needed, just like he did with Chuuya, but the truth was—he didn’t care.
There is no coffee. But, then, in the end, how could there be? Chuuya takes his clothes off, everything but his pants, and leaves for the bathroom with the loudest slam of the door; Dazai could’ve thought he was annoyed, but the truth is that Chuuya’s real annoyance was always silent. What he is right now is a bit of an understatement: he is lost, something he desires with a sense of almost carnal starvation gnawing at the back of his throat, the back of his thoughts, and it makes his body act beyond his volition. Hence the noise. Hence the slamming doors. Hence his own mind, resisting against the desires of his skin. Skin is the surface. Like water. For Dazai, Chuuya will forever and ever remain a distant, unexplored sea; there is nowhere to drop the anchor; no sand can keep him at bay, no pier.
He spends the longest time in that shower, and water is running constantly. Dazai manages to smoke three cigarettes on the balcony, rinse his mouth in the kitchen sink, and drink a glass of cold water; he runs a wet hand down his face, trying to soften his features, trying not to look as grim as he feels. He’s almost afraid he might scare Chuuya away, but then, after all, he’s still just a boy—the same one who fell in love with him in middle school, chased him along the shoreline, never actually dipping his feet in the water, as if it was acid or liquid lead. Some seas are better explored, not touched; never touched.
“Hey, you.”
But Dazai might want to touch one, especially when he sees Chuuya like this, torn open like an envelope with a love letter inside, naked at the doorstep, with a towel wrapped around his hips—bony, shockingly thin. But this is not what catches Dazai’s attention at all. In fact, he can barely force his eyes down, lower than the shell necklace circling his neck like a saint’s halo, and in the dimmed fog of the room, it illuminates Chuuya’s face like a relic, its pearly light on his noble, clean-shaven face, and Dazai suddenly unlearns to breathe, unlearns everything he’s ever known, because his hands are itching to be put where they belond—at one shipwreck. He’s never thought he could call a shipwreck beautiful.
They lie in bed together; as cheap and dysfunctional as it looks, Chuuya’s bed is the comfiest one Dazai has slept in a while, if ever; it is certainly better than those sturdy metal cots on the countless cargo ships. Still, on land, Dazai is mostly insomniac; he finds it hard to fall asleep without the familiar rustle of waves down below, carrying his body farther and farther away from everything that can hurt him. The sea’s lullaby. Right now, his lullaby is the sweet caramel of Chuuya’s voice right next to him, telling him how nice it would be to sail away, to discover the distances yet unattained, to unravel the knots breaking him and the shore apart. He’s saying all that while staring at the ceiling, unblinking, his beautiful eyes like two stars in the dark of the room, and Dazai can’t help but wonder how far into the past he’s staring right now. When did Chuuya stop dreaming so fervently? When did he give up everything he was so desperately striving for?
At some point, the talking ceases; the silence of the room is like a heavy cloud all over Dazai’s thoughts, his peace of mind, but then, after all, he’s a fool for searching for his peace of mind where Chuuya is. It could never be there. Chuuya turns to him on the pillow, face-to-face, prompting the kind of honesty Dazai is not yet ready to give him. And he doesn’t—instead, he kisses him on the lips, and it’s everything and more he could ever dream of, because Chuuya kisses him back right away, starved for it, starved the same way he is for the sea, and his saliva in Dazai’s mouth tastes like saltwater. He’s being pulled all the way down, unanchored, and when he topples them over, putting Chuuya on his back, there is a storm to conquer.
“No,” Chuuya manages to whisper through parted lips, his stare, full of hunger unseen before, all over Dazai’s face. “Not… not like that.”
He overpowers him; he can do it, he is strong enough, especially when Dazai allows himself to let his guard down. In the next moment, he’s on his back, their roles reverse, and there is no better feeling than sinking—god, there is no better feeling than sinking, right into the mattress, the feathery abyss of Chuuya’s loneliness and sorrow, and Dazai can tell—or he just desperately wants to believe—that he is the first person Chuuya brings into this bed in many years; he wants to believe in the kind of loyalty that only exists in fiction, my wife has been waiting for me on the shore for nine months, first-time sailors would brag on Dazai’s long cruises, and everyone else would laugh at the naivety, this youthful conviction, clinking their rum bottles and grinning with their crooked teeth, and Dazai would be the only one to fake his laughter, the ratchet of it, turning his gaze away, into the corner of the cabin, and thinking solemnly, but nine months is not that big of a deal.
Chuuya has been waiting for him for nine years. When he’s on top of Dazai in bed, riding him like his life depends on it, the only thing Dazai can see clearly, his fingers clawing at Chuuya’s hips, is the shine of the necklace on his neck and collarbones, the way it scatters down their sharp cliffs like tidal waves, trembling with every exhale Chuuya lets out, every moan, every wrinkled, tremored variation of Dazai’s name. When he climaxes, hands imprinted into Dazai’s shoulders until his palms leave red marks, the necklace shivers with him. A storm in the open sea. An avalanche. Dazai leans closer, taking one of the shells in his mouth, tasting it on his tongue, letting it knock against the back of his teeth in little punches, loves me, loves me not, loves me, loves me not; there is Chuuya’s heart down below, thundering with all its boisterous climate, restless and foolish, and when Dazai looks up at him through sweat-soaked strands of his hair, he only sees a deity he’d worship until his last breath.
They light their cigarettes afterwards. Both of their bodies are battlefields of bite marks and kisses. Too much for inviting an old friend over for coffee.
It’ll be dawn in a matter of hours; time slips like saltwater and seaweed through Dazai’s fingers, and he watches it happen, enthralled with his own tragedy, how it almost feels like a comedy were he to don the mask once again. He traces the imprint of Chuuya’s teeth on the juncture of his shoulder, counting each divot into his skin the way he would a mantra at the mercy of a rainstorm’s inclemency during monsoon season in the open sea. Chuuya is his own serene painting, still and quiet with his gaze fixed everywhere and nowhere at the same time, though Dazai sees in him an echo of what could be—an openness that isn’t a coincidence, much less a display of accidental weakness; he doesn’t offer the full lyrics but rather a sample of them, evidenced in the map that Dazai made of his body, and that fractured one way street of old suddenly has room enough for two. So Dazai wants to believe, and believing is the only shot at sanity against rebellious waters and an uncertain future.
He takes a final drag of his cigarette and leaves it next to Chuuya’s in the handmade ashtray on the small table, call it a souvenir, for Dazai knows better than to hope when an ending approaches stubborn and unpredictable; an inevitability, and so he knows better than to fight back.
It is ingrained in him; it should be; a sailor never stays long enough in one place, or else the skin becomes jittery, bones aching and desperate to taste the starry skies again, but fantasy bleeds right into common sense with all the flair of a sixteen-year-old discovering the true meaning of love. In his mind he sees the ends of a faded, knotted red thread hanging in suspense between them meeting once more, if they ever did at all; a worn thing, wrapped around the two of them as they collected stories in their years apart; Dazai’s sea shanties and Chuuya’s handwritten ballads, all the fights and arguments missed and lives spent as parallel lines without hope of colliding again, yet here they are. Maybe this is the universe conspiring, a sort of Big Bang threading the pieces of the same atom, and Dazai knows this want will haunt him for the rest of his days.
“So,” Dazai coughs out, shame crawling red and itchy up the nape of his neck, littered as is the rest of his body with Chuuya’s learned language of devotion. It isn’t often that Dazai finds himself quite so parched; at a loss for the right words when it used to be so easy, so simple to share a look of mischief and fill in the gaps without effort, and for a seasoned sailor Dazai is but lost in Chuuya’s ocean, adrift and maybe a little scared. The thing is, Dazai doesn’t regret his choices—no, he’s quite satisfied but not at all fulfilled, not when the pieces of him lack an instrumental chunk to complete the puzzle. “Do you also let friends stay the night, perhaps a little cuddling—” He wiggles his eyebrows, hoping for a laugh and coming face to face with narrowed eyes, but Chuuya hasn’t kicked him out yet. Yet. The pause between right now and forever. If he said the words, if Chuuya dared ask of him the impossible, would Dazai cave? The taste of him coats his lips still; vanilla and reckless desperation, and to go without him another lifetime would drive Dazai mad, but. But, the breath of uncertainty. He pouts. “Or is that only reserved for the worst of the worst, Chuuya’s one and only mortal enemy?”
He knows exactly what he’s implying. Perhaps, if Chuuya scorned him for good even after what they just shared, the two of them in the same wavelength when it all seemed lost, bodies flush into each other, sweating, curses spilled from willing mouths—if Dazai could leave knowing his old life has ended for good, perhaps that would be sweeter than spending his nights wondering. Dazai knows exactly what he’s implying, and he knows with the same bitter confidence what he isn’t saying, oh how it burns at the back of his throat, and he bumps Chuuya’s shoulder as if to turn the tide into something calm and easygoing.
“Y’know. I needed you to be a damned stranger,” Chuuya concedes after callous, endless seconds, a hum more than a sigh, and it could be enough to hope if Dazai was less of a coward. He’s a dream in Dazai’s rumpled shirt and patterned boxers, shivering against a backdrop of old buildings and a scatter of graffiti, the navy sky bleeding into lavender, a smudge of moonlight drawing the shape of him in silver. It would only take a brush of his hand on Chuuya’s collarbones over the necklace, and Dazai would be sated. It would be enough, he convinces himself, to touch him one last time and go, and still his feet are lead stuck to the cold balcony floor. Chuuya lifts his chin in beautiful, open defiance. “It was survival, because hating you meant I cared and I didn’t… I really didn’t want to give a flying fuck about you,” he says simply, and it’s the sort of bitter truth Dazai had been avoiding for over five years. More, perhaps, as if he knew from the beginning their paths would diverge, as if he had convinced himself that fate was ironclad, a spell written in blood. The truth, it seems, eludes him. Chuuya wraps his arms around his quivering frame, though his eyes are pure mercury flashing in this night that seems to have cast a light on a stage just for them, and them alone. A play with no witnesses. A promise and no wind to carry the sound. He tilts his head, and Dazai watches as something washes over him; resignation maybe, or is that Dazai’s own projection in Chuuya’s body? Not knowing is an ache drilled deep in his heart, and Chuuya knows exactly where the weakest spots lie. “I wasn’t very successful, you—you asshole broke my heart.”
Slowly, Dazai crosses the ashen distance that separates them. He brings Chuuya into a feeble embrace, growing bolder with every breath as wild, uncharted waters do; irreparably, maybe even irresponsibly, but Dazai thinks he might be done praying his penance without fighting back at least a little. “I’m afraid I’m going to have to break it again,” he murmurs against Chuuya’s skin; a confession for him alone, in the cocoon Dazai’s made for them to last them longer than the sorrow of abandoning his best friend, for this isn’t the story where the sailor picks the land over the sea. Regardless, though, Dazai doesn’t want to go another lifetime with this bridge broken between them, a plunge straight to icy, depthless waters; if he were to be given a choice, even if only a single one, Dazai is loath to make the same mistakes. This time he’ll walk out of the underworld without risking his Eurydice. Chuuya’s chuckle dissolves into muffled laughter fed to Dazai’s chest, a warm melody, and Dazai is much too undeserving of it, of him, but this selfishness fits around him like a shawl, tentative but there. Nose wrinkled and teeth gnawing on his bottom lip, Dazai adds, “If it’s any consolation, I was miserable for a long time. Without Chuuya.”
“Not long enough,” Chuuya giggles, pinching a spot on Dazai’s lower abdomen, earning a yelp. Dazai tries to complain, but Chuuya is quicker, smarter, readier to attack than he could ever be; the years lost in the sea have dulled his senses, but he can’t quite complain when he has Chuuya in his arm in a way he’d never managed to hold him before—wholly. Chuuya’s voice comes louder this time. “Seriously. You’re telling me you had no phone signal fucking ever? Huh? Did you chuck your stupid cellphone into the sea or what?” He rises on his tiptoes, only barely catching himself before letting Dazai envelop him with his arms, gaze hidden from him, though the taste of his laughter is enough to have warmth bloom even in the darkest crevices within Dazai. He doesn’t know if it’ll ever be enough to fix what has been broken, or if he wants them to be fixed at all; there’s beauty even in tales that are still writing themselves after all. The pain and the heartache, it is all worth the journey to find this Chuuya, all the hatred and all the love between them to guide them through the tempest. “Could not even write a fuckass letter. I bet you unlearned how to write, with how fucking stupid you are. You’re lucky you’re cute.”
With Chuuya’s fingers threaded through Dazai’s, they make their way to the kitchen, stumbling through the apartment like drunk teenagers sharing their very first kiss. Dazai’s stomach rumbles first, but he tries to hide it in a complaint about Chuuya’s showerhead and the vast collection of plants scattered all over the apartment, cheeks warming with every cheeky glance Chuuya offers his way, a silent response threaded in the shape of his lips, and Dazai has to pull him closer to kiss him all over again and relearn what remains obscured. They eat frozen pizza and share a single can of diet soda, and for a sacred while they’re teenagers all over again—not to undo the future that came to be, but rather to revel once more in that which they thought could never be theirs again. And Dazai does spend the night, wrapped in Chuuya’s blankets that smell like eucalyptus and something so intrinsically his it makes him shiver, holding Chuuya’s waist as dawn creeps through the curtains.
For all that fairy tales preach happy endings, Dazai would never trade this askew story of theirs, for he realizes their paths could never diverge again even if they tried. A week isn’t long enough to refine their broken melody, but Dazai has his own rhythms to write there in the wide, waiting seas that claim a part of him. It just so happens that this time Dazai’s compass is fixed to bring him straight back home, wherever Chuuya may be.
Some shipwrecks collect dust in museums.
Some, like theirs, find meaning in the broken pieces.
And that is more than enough.