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Dazai is good at being wanted.
He has always been good at it; has built himself, brick by careful brick, into something people reach for. A mouth that knows what to say. A body that knows how to be looked at. He learned a long time ago that wanting is a language, and that if he speaks it fluently enough, no one ever asks what's underneath the words.
He is thinking about none of this, tonight, curled against Chuuya's chest with his ear pressed to the low steady drum of his heartbeat. The rise and fall of him. The warmth radiating off his skin like a hearth that's been burning long before Dazai ever walked into the room and will keep burning long after he leaves it.
They're tangled together on the couch the way they always end up by the end of a long day— slow accumulation of small movements until Dazai's somehow horizontal with his head pillowed on Chuuya's chest and one leg hooked loose over his. The lamp in the corner throws everything soft, catching in Chuuya's hair until it looks less like hair and more like sunset poured molten and left to cool, threaded through with strands that catch the light brighter when he moves. Dazai has spent an embarrassing number of quiet evenings just looking at it. He doesn't think Chuuya's ever noticed.
Chuuya's hand moves slow through his hair. Doesn't tug, doesn't guide, doesn't ask for anything back. It moves, unhurried, like he has nowhere else in the world he'd rather be than here, doing exactly this, with exactly no destination in mind.
It should feel like nothing. It doesn't.
Dazai tips his head just slightly, enough to study the underside of Chuuya's jaw from this angle; the clean, stubborn line of it, faint freckles scattered, dusted more thickly across the bridge of his nose and the tops of his cheeks. He's always thought it was unfair, a little, how good Chuuya looks doing absolutely nothing. Sitting still in lamplight with his sleeves shoved up his forearms, muscle shifting faint under skin every time he moves his hand, ocean-colored eyes half-lidded and fixed on nothing in particular. Dazai could stare at him for hours. Sometimes does, in the quiet moments neither of them names out loud.
"You're staring," Chuuya says, without opening his eyes further, without even really breaking his rhythm.
"I'm always staring," Dazai says. "You're used to it by now."
"Mm." A huff, almost a laugh, chest shaking faintly under Dazai's cheek. "Guess I am."
His lashes flutter shut at that; slow, heavy, the kind of unthinking flutter that happens when a body simply decides, of its own accord, that it is safe here, that there is nowhere else worth being alert for. He lets himself sink further into it: the drag of Chuuya's fingers through his hair, blunt nails grazing his scalp every few passes, the particular weight of being held by someone with no clock running in the back of his mind, no agenda ticking down toward some expected conclusion. He could fall asleep like this. Has, more than once.
"You're quiet," Chuuya murmurs, chin tipping down against the crown of his head.
"I'm always quiet when I'm happy," Dazai says, which is true, and also not the whole truth, which is also true. There's a version of happy that sits easy in the chest and a version that aches, faint and strange, like a bruise you keep pressing just to feel it's still there. He isn't sure which one this is. He suspects it might be both.
Chuuya doesn't push. He lets the silence sit there between them, soft as the low lamp light pooling gold across the floor, fingers still tracing slow shapes against Dazai's scalp, down along the shell of his ear, back up into his hair again. It's a rhythm with no destination. Dazai has never known what to do with affection that doesn't want anything back. He's starting to think perhaps he doesn't have to know, that he can just let it happen to him, the way rain happens, the way tide happens, without needing to understand the mechanics of why.
A while passes like that. Long enough that Dazai loses the thread of time entirely, drifting somewhere warm and half-lit between waking and sleep, lulled by the drum of Chuuya's heart under his ear and the absent drag of fingers through his hair.
Eventually Chuuya shifts beneath him, careful, like he's trying not to startle something delicate awake.
"C'mon," he says, low, mouth brushing against Dazai's hair as he speaks. "Bath. You're gonna fall asleep on this couch again and wake up with a crick in your neck."
Dazai doesn't protest. He lets himself be gathered up instead, arms looping loose around Chuuya's neck as he's lifted, and feels the shift of muscle in Chuuya's arms and shoulders as he carries him down the hall like it costs him nothing at all. Dazai presses his nose briefly against his throat, breathes in warmth and soap and something underneath that's just Chuuya, and doesn't bother pretending, even to himself, that he isn't fond of being carried like this. Like something worth the trouble of carrying.
♡
The water is warm— Chuuya always gets it right, some small unspoken attentiveness Dazai's never asked about and never will, afraid that naming it might make it stop. He's undressed and settled in before he's fully registered the transition, sitting between Chuuya's knees with his back against his chest, head tipped back against his shoulder, watching steam curl up toward the ceiling like something trying to escape a room it was never meant to be kept in.
Chuuya's arms bracket him loosely on either side, and for a while neither of them says anything at all. The water laps soft against the edges of the tub every time one of them breathes.
"Head back," Chuuya says eventually, voice pitched low to match the quiet of the room, and Dazai obeys without thinking, tipping his head to rest fully against Chuuya's shoulder, throat bared, eyes sliding shut.
Warm water cups over his hair, careful, Chuuya's free hand curved protective over his forehead to keep the suds from stinging his eyes— such a small gesture, so easily overlooked, and yet Dazai feels it settle somewhere unnamed in his chest anyway. Fingers work shampoo through his scalp next, slow and thorough, blunt nails dragging just enough to make something in his shoulders unknot that he hadn't realized was wound so tight. He melts into it, can't help it. His lashes flutter, heavy and slow, threatening to stay shut entirely, and he lets them, lets himself go soft and unguarded under hands that have never once asked him to perform for them.
Chuuya washes him slow after that. Unbearably slow, if Dazai's honest; a cloth drawn gentle over his shoulders, down the long line of his back, over each knob of his spine. Over his collarbones. Down each arm, wrist to shoulder, thumb tracing briefly over each faded scar like it isn't something to flinch from, isn't something to comment on either, just another part of him, worth the same unhurried care as anything else.
Dazai has been touched a great many ways in his life. Grasping. Hungry. Transactional, even when it wore the mask of tenderness— hands that wanted something and dressed the wanting up as affection because affection was easier to ask for out loud. He knows every shape want can take. He has made a study of it, has learned to read the hunger behind a smile the way other people read weather, has learned exactly which expression to wear and which words to offer so that the wanting resolves quickly, cleanly, in whatever direction the other person needs it to go.
This isn't that.
This is Chuuya's hand cupping water over his shoulders, unhurried, asking nothing. This is fingers combing careful through wet hair, not to arrange it into something prettier, not for any eye but his own private, quiet noticing. This is a mouth pressed briefly to the crown of his head, not building toward anywhere, not a down payment on something that comes later. This is Chuuya humming something tuneless under his breath while he works, off-key and unselfconscious, like there's no one here worth performing for, like this is simply what he'd be doing whether Dazai were watching or not.
Something in Dazai's chest cracks open, slow like honey.
"Chuuya," he says, and doesn't know, yet, what's going to come out after the name.
"Mm." Chuuya's hands don't stop moving, over his ribs now, down toward his hip, the cloth warm and soft against skin that's gone pink from the heat. He doesn't look at him, gives him the mercy of not being watched while he works out what he's trying to say, and Dazai loves him for that small, unremarked-upon kindness more than he knows how to say out loud.
"Do you ever think—" He stops, then starts again, quieter, watching blue eyes fixed steady on the work of his own hands rather than on Dazai's face, giving him room to say this without an audience for it. "People have always wanted me for what I could give them. My hands. My mouth. The way I look when I'm smiling at them like they're the only person in the room." There's a short, humorless breath, not quite a laugh. "I got very good at being wanted that way. I stopped noticing it wasn't the same as being— " he searches for the word, finds it, hates a little how much it costs him to say " …loved."
Chuuya's hands go still against his scalp.
"Sometimes I think that's all I'm good for," Dazai says, and his voice doesn't shake, exactly, but something underneath it does. "Being wanted. Being useful in the specific ways people find useful. Everyone always wants something— my hands for a mission, my mouth for a joke, my body for—" he doesn't finish that particular thought, lets it hang there instead, ugly and unspoken. "And I've made my peace with it, mostly, I think, except—"
He doesn't finish that sentence either. Doesn't need to. Chuuya's arms come around him from behind, slow, careful, water sloshing soft against porcelain, and pulls him back against his chest like he's something worth holding onto rather than something worth having.
"You're an idiot," Chuuya says, rough, against his temple. Not unkind, not underneath. "I don't want you for your hands or your mouth or any of that shit." A pause, weighted, and Dazai can feel him searching for the right words the way he always does when something actually matters to him; unpolished, more honest for it. "I mean— I want those too, obviously, don't get a big head about it. But that's not— " He exhales, frustrated with himself, with the impossible task of saying a true thing out loud. "I'd still want to look at you if I could never touch you again. That's the part you're not getting."
Dazai's eyes sting, sudden and humiliating, and he presses the heel of his hand against them like that might stop it. It doesn't. A few tears slip loose anyway, warm against his cheeks, indistinguishable from the damp already clinging to his skin, and Chuuya doesn't comment on them, doesn't flinch from them, just holds on tighter, one hand splayed warm over his chest like he's trying to keep something in that might otherwise slip away.
"I think you're beautiful," Chuuya says, quiet, like it's a confession. "Not— not like that. I mean I think you're beautiful the way you'd think a painting's beautiful. Something you'd want to just look at for a long time. Doesn't have to lead anywhere. Doesn't have to be for anything." A pause. "You've got this stupid mole under your eye I've probably spent hours looking at and I don't even— it's not about wanting anything from it. I just like looking at you. That's it. That's the whole thing."
"That's a very strange thing to say to someone in a bathtub," Dazai manages, thick-voiced, and feels Chuuya huff a laugh against his hair.
"Yeah, well." His grip doesn't loosen. "You're a very strange person to fall for. Guess it fits."
Dazai laughs too, wet and unsteady, and turns his face into the curve of Chuuya's neck, breathing him in, warm, familiar in a way that feels like something akin to belonging. He can feel Chuuya's pulse there, steady and unhurried, and thinks, not for the first time, that there is something almost unbearably tender about being allowed this close to someone's actual, unguarded heartbeat.
"Can we just stay like this," Dazai asks, "for a while?" and it isn't really a question.
"Water's gonna go cold," Chuuya says, but he doesn't move, doesn't so much as shift, just tightens his hold a fraction and presses another slow kiss against Dazai's temple.
"I don't care."
"Yeah." There's a quiet exhale, warm against his hair. "Me neither."
So they stay. The water cools slowly around them, and neither of them minds, and Chuuya's fingers keep tracing idle, aimless shapes against Dazai's collarbone not toward anything, not building toward some later reward, just touch existing entirely for its own sake, the way it apparently can, the way Dazai is only now, at twenty-two, in a lukewarm bath with steam long since given up on the ceiling, starting to believe.
Chuuya presses another kiss to his temple, soft, and Dazai lets himself believe, just this once, just for tonight, that some kinds of love really do exist outside of hunger.
That some hands reach for you not to take anything. Only to hold what's already, impossibly, theirs.
♡
They get out eventually, when the water's gone properly cold and Dazai's fingertips have pruned past the point of dignity. Chuuya wraps him in a towel as though he's something worth being careful with; tucking it snug around his shoulders, rubbing gently at his damp hair until it's more disheveled than dry, curls flopping soft and dark over his forehead in a way that makes Chuuya pause, briefly, thumb brushing one lock back off his brow just to look at him a second longer.
"What?" Dazai says, watching him watch him.
"Nothing." Chuuya's own hair is damp too, sunset gone darker with water, sticking messily to his temple, freckles more visible under the bright bathroom light than they ever seem elsewhere. He looks soft like this. You're just— " He stops himself, shakes his head, huffs. "Never mind. C'mon, before you catch a cold standing here dripping on my floor."
He walks him to the bedroom with a hand at the small of his back, steady and grounding, and helps him into a soft shirt too large, Chuuya's own, worn thin at the collar, smelling faintly of him even freshly washed— before pulling on something dry himself. The lamp on the nightstand throws the same low light as the one in the living room had, and Dazai watches him move around the room with an attention he's stopped trying to disguise: the flex of muscle across his back as he reaches for the blanket, the small furrow of concentration between his brows as he smooths the sheets flat, the particular gracelessness of the way he flops down onto the mattress after, like all the careful composure of the evening finally has permission to drop.
"Come here," Chuuya says, arm already lifting, an invitation rather than a demand, and Dazai goes without hesitation, curling into the space like it was built for exactly his shape.
The sheets are cool against overheated skin, and Chuuya's arms come around him easy, one hand finding its way back into his damp hair like it never really stopped. Dazai presses his face against his collarbone, breathes in warmth and clean linen, something underneath that feels alot like home, and feels unbearably lucky in a way he still isn't quite able to articulate.
"Thank you," he murmurs, half into Chuuya's skin, "for tonight."
"Wasn't anything." Chuuya's voice has gone slow and heavy with the pull of sleep already, fingers slowing their path through his hair. "Just wanted to be near you. Don't need a reason for that."
Dazai's lashes flutter shut one last time, slow and complete, and he lets himself drift under the drum of Chuuya's heartbeat and the unhurried weight of his hand; no expectation, nothing at all except the simple, astonishing fact of being wanted for absolutely nothing but himself.