Chapter 1
Notes:
This first chapter is pretty brutal so beware of death and blood
Chapter Text
Dazai may be leaving him behind these days, but he has at least always stayed until Chuuya falls asleep.
Today, however, he gets a call from that damn new partner of his, Kunikida, the one who's obsessed with his notebook. Dazai sounds urgent, phone pressed tight to his ear and his face pinched and white with alarm. His hand is on Chuuya's pulse point.
The next minute, Dazai is putting his phone away, murmuring, "Sorry, chibi, I'm going to have to leave sooner than expected today," before he stands up to his feet quickly and turns and begins to leave.
Something's wrong.
Chuuya realizes it too late.
Usually, he passes out soon after using Corruption, but the abnormally excruciating pain in his internal organs seemed to have fired up his awareness for a bit longer.
Shit, it hurts.
Chuuya strains his throat as he watches the back of his ex-partner's tan coat grow smaller and smaller in the distance, trying to call for him. He grits his teeth and turns his head into the dirt when nothing comes out, when he can't hold his neck up too long.
The pain keeps building, deepening; blazing waves that leave him horribly nauseous, his fingers clenching and unclenching, a gasp clenched behind his teeth. It hurts, it always hurts, but it has never hurt like this.
"Dazai..." Chuuya's voice comes out too tight and small, unlikely to ever reach Dazai. His hand lifts shakily, in some dazed attempt to stop him. There is panic wild and fast in his chest, the beginnings of hyperventilation, his breaths shallow and quick.
Something's wrong, something's wrong—
This hurts too much, it's not supposed to be like this—
His vision is blurring. His head is taut and aching with the stress and anxiety and so much anguish that he can barely comprehend it.
The last of Dazai's hazy form disappears, far in the distance.
Chuuya rolls over to his side, frantic, gasping. He can feel coppery blood welling up in his throat, thick and fast, throwing it all up in agonizing jerks. The motions tense his stomach up so much it is cramping even worse, and he is lightheaded afterward, heaving, his forehead cold and his body shivering.
His phone.
He needs to call someone to come and get him. It's late, he knows that, and usually he drags himself back home, preferring not to bother his overworked subordinates just to have them pick him up (and the poor bastards would just have to stew in their anger and annoyance about it in silence, not able to talk back to an executive), but there is no other choice left now.
It's hard to move and it takes him too long to manage to pull his phone out of his pocket.
He curses through a wheeze, his broken phone slipping out of his shaking hand.
***
Chuuya doesn't remember passing out and isn't entirely sure how long after he wakes up again. It's still dark, so it can't have been too long.
Fuck. This damn mission just had to lead right in the middle of a clearing in the woods, and that stupid bastard piece of shit Dazai just had to be in some kind of hurry to leave him here today.
Whatever. Fucking whatever. He'll get himself the fuck out of here on his own, one way or another.
He just needs to get to a hospital. The nearest one is not Port Mafia affiliated and Mori's going to be pissed if some problem comes up that he's going to have to deal with, but it's all he has. The nearest Port Mafia affiliated hospital is way too far away, and the headquarters even more so. His apartment is impossible to reach in this state.
Chuuya trembles and grinds his teeth and pushes himself up on his arms and hands and shifts to try and get to his feet —
Oh fuck. Oh fuck it hurts.
He ends up throwing up food and bile and blood from the exertion and agony, heaving and gasping.
No standing. No walking. He can't…
He crawls across the ground. Tainted Sorrow isn't activating much, with his brain so scattered and unfocused and dazed, but the little it is is giving him some help. If he were in any position to give a shit, if his entire brain wasn't just being consumed up by the anguish of forcing himself through this state, he would have felt humiliated imagining what Dazai would say about it. Oh, now you really look like a slug. As it is, he can barely think straight enough to dwell too long on anything other than this, one second to the next.
It feels like he has been doing it for a long time. It feels like he must have made it far enough. He can barely calculate or sense anything with the pain firing up all his nerves and consuming his brain; space, distance, time, nothing.
It's only when Chuuya drops to the ground, half-involuntarily, that he looks back through a hazy gaze.
And finds that he hasn't really made it that far.
Where Dazai had left his coat and hat folded up for him was just a few feet away. The trail of blood he has made from there to here is not so long.
That's the first time he finds himself letting out a sob, barely there from the lack of air and energy.
That's the first time he feels his resolve begin to wilt.
***
Like that, Chuuya's goals grow smaller. At first, he thought he'd make it to a hospital.
Then he thought he just had to make it out of the woods and to the road. It's not safe. For all he knows, he can be found by an enemy or someone who'll just mug him or something, but he has no other choice left. It's the only chance he might make it out alive.
He passes out and comes back more times than he can count, drifting in and out. He has a high pain tolerance. He has the most stubborn will that has lasted him through the worst of sicknesses and bodily weaknesses. And he thinks he may not be entirely human, or that at least Arahabaki has something to do with how he's still alive at all, considering how this really feels like he's dying.
Barely three steps out of the clearing and into the woods, his body gives up entirely.
It doesn't matter how much pain Chuuya can bear, and it doesn't matter how strong his resolve to survive is, and it doesn't matter that Arahabaki may be the reason why he's still breathing. His body just falls and no matter how much he begs himself to get up and keep moving, it doesn't. It's no longer in his control. He can smell blood in his mouth, stuffing up his throat, the cold numbing him.
I might not make it out of here.
It's a whisper in his head, quiet, hazy. The realization is heavy, and hollows his chest out with despair.
Nobody's going to come looking for him until morning, when he won't show up for work. The men at the extraction point are under orders to remain where they are only up to a certain hour, and to stay away from the mission site where it can be dangerous, since many of them are non-ability users.
Chuuya is forced to lie completely still to minimize as much of the pain as he can.
Is this really how he's going to die? So pathetically?
It's so fucking dark here too. Oh God.
The trees are blocking out all the moonlight, covering the sky above. He can feel the anxiety and terror creeping up his spine. He's trembling but there's no one reason anymore for why he is; the cold and pain and fear. There is nothing all around him, and it's as if he is on the cusp of nonexistence. He can't see anything. He squeezes his eyes shut and tries to focus on what he can hear and feel.
The least Chuuya wishes he can see are the stars.
He and Dazai used to do that after missions sometimes. Chuuya would pull up his car somewhere nice and they would just lay on the hood, passing a bottle back and forth, watching the stars and talking shit, sometimes talking about things they'd never be able to say in the light of day.
They had a good thing, back then. Sure they fought a lot and were annoyed to hell with each other, but there was no doubt about it to either of them, even if in secret. They had a good thing. Dazai broke into his apartment most days and Chuuya made sure he ate and didn't hurt himself and Dazai patched him up and spiked his drinks into forcing him to sleep when Chuuya overworked himself and they shared beds some worst nights and—
And now.
The laugh that leaves him is bitter, thick with tears and blood, breathless.
And now this.
After the defection, leaving and bombing up his car and not thinking him worth even a proper goodbye, and just the general distance between them now… what did he expect?
Why should Dazai not leave Chuuya behind in a split second if it came to helping one of his agency members?
Why should he do anything for Chuuya if they're not friends or partners or anything anymore?
This is what he began to tell himself, every time Dazai left him behind after Corruption, waking up to the open sky and a heavy feeling in his chest and a sore body.
As long as Dazai isn't saying fuck it and letting him keep going through Corruption even after the job's over, he's doing his part, isn't he? They're not partners. It's not his responsibility to take care of him anymore, to keep him safe when he is vulnerable and defenseless.
Still, would it have killed him to at least call someone for him, if they were going to be in a situation like this? At least today, when Dazai couldn't stick around long enough and they were in the middle of fuckwhere like this, he could have...
But now such thoughts always circle back to this; it's not Dazai's job to do anything for him. He said it himself, the very last time Chuuya asked him to take him home or to the extraction point after.
I don't get why you don't just call one of your subordinates.
Don't...wanna...bother them.
Ah, but Chuuya can bother me, right?
(Chuuya never asked again.)
Another thought occurs to him then.
Did Dazai let him go on too long this time too, like he did with Lovecraft? Is that why it got so bad this time?
He knows the bastard probably thought of it as a joke and didn't actually mean for it to go this far, but maybe that says a lot about what he feels for Chuuya now. He just thinks of him as a fucking joke.
***
It's so dark. Shit. He's breathing too fast and it's making it all worse and—
Everything hurts. Everything hurts it hurts it hurts it hurts it fucking hurts oh God he doesn't know what to do with it or his body or himself—
It hurts so bad that he wishes it would end already. If there's no way out of this, he wishes it would just fucking end already.
But instead he is still here, going in and out, with sudden bouts of terror when he remembers he's in pitch-black darkness and there's nothing occupying his imagination.
Chuuya skips between emotions; inexplicable and overwhelming terror, and hatred and rage, sending curses out to Dazai in his head and wishing him dead.
And then grief; for what they once had together to what Chuuya is to him now, when the good memories of him rush by. They had a good thing, and he…
Shit.
Chuuya swallows, coppery and thick, and closes his eyes, and hates himself.
He loves that bastard. He has loved him since they were sixteen and Dazai had laid him across his lap for the very first time, smirking down at him and making all his stupid jokes but the way he held him and cleaned the blood off his face with a washcloth was gentle. It was the gentlest he had ever been up until then. Chuuya remembers just staring up at his face beneath the bathroom light, half-lidded and weak, listening to his voice even though he could barely register half of it, and feeling his heart swell with tenderness in his throat, his fingers curled slightly around Dazai's black coat.
He still loves him even though he can't for the life of him remember why right now.
Grief, also, for the fact that he won't be able to say goodbye to his Ane-san, maybe the Akutagawas if it matters to them. Chuuya cares about them and considers them friends, but he understands they may not see him as anything beyond their executive. Sometimes the lines between respect for his authority and genuine care blurs, and with those two, it's hard to tell which one it is when they're not very expressive. Whatever it is… well, it's likely just the former, but he doesn't hold it against them.
In the Port Mafia, such deaths of people are not exactly so important to most people, even of those that are as high-up as him. Chuuya may be the only fool, as Dazai would call him, that takes such things so hard to his heart. When people die, there is a grand funeral, but ultimately in his observation everyone just focuses on dealing with the ruckus and troubles that person's death causes. It's not the kind of environment where people get attached, feel something.
When people die in the Port Mafia, nobody grieves for them. They just deal with the 'inconveniences' left behind by their deaths. When the Flags died, that fact had nearly driven him crazy; that nobody seemed to care enough, that nothing stopped. By the second time he'd lost his friends, he expected it. It didn't help or hurt less, to lose them and see the world go on without a pause for them. It just meant he knew to reign his own emotions and grief in.
Chuuya imagines his death as a lot like that. He was useful. He knows he was useful. He takes pride in that fact. He maintains order and keeps all processes running smoothly and is one of the biggest protectors of the organization.
Ultimately, however, his death will cause a lot of instability and disorder and chaos, and no one but his Ane-san will think of him beyond this, beyond the inconveniences he will leave behind.
He's never thought about it before.
But what a lonely thought.
The last person he thinks about is Osamu. Chuuya wonders if it would matter to him but all he can see is him not really caring either.
***
The cold and numbness has settled deep into his body, his mind full of delirium and on the verge of shutting down, no longer registering any sensation.
Through his half-mast gaze, the sky is orange-red with dawn.
It's beautiful, the bright streams of the rising sun peeking through tree branches, creating shards on the trunks and the grass.
His breaths are a wisp, rasping barely through his lips.
In those woods, with the trees rustling above him, Nakahara Chuuya takes a breath, small as a newborn's first.
And exhales it for the very last time, the movements of his chest ending on its fall.
Chapter Text
By the time Dazai made it to the scene, Atsushi had ripped himself apart a good amount.
He got hit by the ability in the mission Kunikida and Atsushi were taking care of; someone who makes the abilities of the person they touch for five seconds malfunction and go out of their control. Dazai would have been a better candidate for the job, but he heard of the mission that Chuuya would be on, and went with that.
It was a good excuse to spend some time with the hatrack. They bantered and made a good team, but somehow something felt missing and Dazai knew it was clear to both of them; nothing was really the same. Dazai knows how he feels about Chuuya, so he is certain this sense of distance is coming from Chuuya. He does not feel the same kind of closeness with Dazai as he used to.
Dazai guesses it's fair. He has hurt Chuuya too much now for things to be that way again.
It doesn't make it hurt less, something so tight and painful that it makes him want to withdraw completely from Chuuya to protect himself. And yet, he can't do that either. Not completely.
Still, as much as the distance between them is achingly wide, it's good to have him some of the time, to just be with him (no matter how much Dazai whines and complains outwardly about being forced to work with him).
When Kunikida's call came last night, Dazai's mind flooded with alarm; Atsushi had gotten hit with the dysfunction ability. He couldn't control the tiger and had already harmed Kunikida (not life-threateningly deep but a pretty long gash across his chest), and was then trying to redirect all the uncontrollable attacks towards himself, essentially ripping himself apart.
It's lucky that, though erratically so, the regeneration part of his ability was still working, sometimes in great bursts even. It was what kept Atsushi alive for so long; long enough for Dazai to nullify the ability user Kunikida had knocked out and tied up so Atsushi could return to normal. His regeneration healed him pretty much an hour later, so nothing went amiss.
It just meant he had to leave Chuuya behind sooner than usual and without doing a thorough look-over with his hands, but they had gotten the mission complete on time and Dazai had gotten to him fairly soon (contrary to what Chuuya believes and Dazai lets him believe as a joke, he never lets Corruption go on longer than it has to just for his own entertainment. But of course! How can he ever tell chibi that when he's serving him such a good opportunity to mess with him on a silver platter?). Dazai gave him a quick lookover with his eyes, checked his breathing and felt his pulse.
He knows Chuuya is always fine. Chuuya is strong and heals fast, most likely in part to Arahabaki. What takes people weeks to recover from, he does so in days.
He didn't think much about it after. He went home and read his book and didn't bother trying to sleep, just stayed up staring at the ceiling pondering on various things, including Chuuya, or maybe at least 50% being Chuuya and 50% being death and other things, sometimes all of it at once, either skipping quickly between them or the topics stacked one over the other, images of Chuuya and how he might harass him next time and how pretty he is when angry or something or the other, his cursed brain going haywire until he fell asleep two hours before it was time to get up and get ready for work again.
How could he have predicted what the morning will bring? If he had any idea, he may never have gotten out of his bed at all, just so he could ignore and never find out what he does.
***
"The Port Mafia wants to meet," Fukuzawa announces, "The location they chose is peculiar, but Mori is insistent. He has explicitly asked that you be there, Dazai-kun." He looks right at Dazai. Dazai is already prepared to refuse just to spite Mori. Fukuzawa is not one to force anyone into anything, something he likes a lot in contrast to Mori.
"What is the location, Sir?" Kunikida asks, pushing his glasses up his nose.
"The same location as Dazai-kun's last mission with Nakahara Chuuya, I believe," Fukuzawa says.
Peculiar, indeed.
Why that location?
Why is Mori so insistent about it?
It's possibly related to the mission. Maybe there was something they've missed, but this is unlikely. Dazai hardly ever misses things, and as far as he knows, the mission was a success.
The second possibility is that it can be related to Chuuya.
And if it's Chuuya, well… how can he refuse?
***
They are standing on the pathways, each organization's leader with a small assembly behind them; Tachihara, Gin, Akutagawa, Hirotsu-san, Kouyou behind Mori, and Dazai, Atsushi, Yosano, Ranpo and Kunikida behind Fukuzawa.
"Chuuya-kun was found dead," Mori is the one to speak, his hands in his coat pockets. "Here in this very field where he and Dazai-kun worked together last. We have scoured the area. There were no signs of any new persons coming here since last night. Dazai-kun was the last person to have seen him, whilst he was seemingly in quite the horrible state. We suspect murder by willful neglect."
The silence reigns, a second, two.
The first one to break it is Dazai, laughing. He sees Tachihara jerk forward, furious, Kouyou holding him back. It's all quite the thorough performance.
"What's this new scheme of yours now, Mori? If you wanted to break the alliance, there were other ways than to pretend I murdered one of your executives." Dazai stares at him coldly. "Chuuya isn't dead. I saw him last night, and he was fine."
"And this occurred nearing the time of dawn, by my estimations," Mori says, "Chuuya-kun is dead. His body lies here as proof, if the agency requires."
The first sign of that sickly, horrible feeling begins there. He glances around and sees Akutagawa standing there quietly, his eyes hollow and wide and bloodshot, hauntedly staring at nothing. Gin's eyes are also full of similar grief. Tachihara's face is ablaze with barely repressed rage, trembling, his grip tight around his knife. Kouyou's eyes are red-rimmed, even as she stares right at him with cold composure. Hirotsu-san is solemn and weary.
They lead the way through to the clearing. There is the trail of blood, and there is…
Oh God.
The noise that comes out of him is tight and wounded, gutted.
"He was found by the trees that way," Mori comments, as they gather around the body, "it was quite dark there, so we had to bring him out here into the daylight to be examined."
"Oh fuck." Yosano's breath hitches, startled.
Everyone else is stunned into silence. Dazai is frozen where he is, and for the longest moment, he cannot move. He is just standing there, staring at the corpse covered in so much blood they can barely see anything of his clothes, his bolera. Chuuya's face is pale and clammy, his eyes sunken and still half-mast, staring vacantly into the beyond, the wide trickles of dried blood down his chin and at the corners of his mouth.
"This is unfortunate," Kunikida says, "We are sorry for your loss, but I must assure you this was not anything willful on Dazai's part…"
He is explaining the entire situation, but Dazai isn't listening to any of it. His hand is out, reaching blindly, trembling. His wide eyes are fixated on the body and he is moving, suddenly, of his own accord towards Chuuya—
Something swift, red and sharp slashes in his way. Dazai halts instinctually, stumbling back.
"Akutagawa!" Atsushi yells, and by the next second, he is next to Dazai, gripping his arm to steady him.
When he looks up, it's into Akutagawa's eyes, hollow and red.
"You will not touch our executive."
"Now, now, Akutagawa-kun," Mori says, "he can hardly harm an already dead man. So let it be."
"But Mori-san, he--"
"It's okay. This is the last of our concerns right now, isn't it?"
Akutagawa's hands clench at his sides, but he doesn't stop him this time, when Dazai is lowering down to Chuuya and gripping his biceps and pulling his body up gently, very gently, against his chest. He can't seem to keep his eyes off of him. He can't…
"No," he whispers, because now he can feel it; how cold he is, oh God, he is so cold— "No, no, no, no…" there is no pulse beating when Dazai touches the side of his neck. There is no rise and fall of his chest, once the motion he was so fascinated by, falling asleep counting after forcibly wriggling into Chuuya's bed under his arm when they were sixteen and seventeen and eighteen.
He feels the sob rise in his throat, pushing and suffocating, grinded back behind his teeth in a suck of air that ends up a sob anyway, dropping his forehead to Chuuya's, hands shaking and tight as he grips him sideways to his sternum, brushes the red hair off his temple.
"Chuuya," he whispers. He has never felt this small and fragile in his arms before, not ever.
"—How do we know that this wasn't caused by something else entirely? Dazai isn't exactly a doctor, and he said Chuuya looked fine when he left him. But what a shame that you are one, Mori, and you instantly go to the first superficial and baseless conclusion you can reach."
Mori smiles at Yosano patronizingly, "But how can you say that when you don't have the entire picture?"
Yosano raises an eyebrow.
"Have you heard of Corruption?" Mori continues, "Nasty little thing. Useful, powerful, but ultimately takes a horrendous toll on its user. It is the god, Arahabaki, at its fullest power, causing utmost destruction, fueled by rage until it eats up the entire body. Chuuya-kun is not aware when in such states. Dazai-kun is the only person who can bring him out of it, and when he does, it isn't a very pretty aftermath, often to the point of internal damage even. So tell me this: when Dazai-kun is fully aware of the physical consequences of such an ability, being the closest and most intimately familiar with it, and still decided to leave him there in the field, is this not a kind of willful neglect? Why did he not call someone if the situation was so urgent?"
"As we have explained the situation," Kunikida says, "although unfortunate and untimely, this cannot be considered murder and does not violate the conditions of our alliance. This was not deliberate by any means."
"Willful or unwillful, this neglect is murder," Kouyou pipes out, her voice low, brimming with many emotions; cold anger and grief at the forefront.
"You know, if you really valued Mr. Fancy Hat's life here," Ranpo says, "then why wasn't one of your men sent here to make sure he'd made it out alive? Dazai's not his keeper. He's not his partner, or even his friend, from the way Fancy Hat kept insisting… so why should this be on him?" He looks everyone from the Port Mafia in the eyes. "Where were you all when he was lying here drowning in his own blood?"
Akutagawa recoils, wide-eyed. Tachihara glares down at the ground.
"Corruption is not exactly something we can flaunt about," Mori says, "it's a secret weapon, our last resort. People may have some idea of it, but the less is known, the better, so that it's not spread around. It's only now that he's passed that we can speak of it so freely. Dazai, of course, was the one who had to know the full extent of it. No one else here knew."
"That's a bullshit reason if I've ever heard one," Ranpo points out. "You could have done way better than that. If you'd told even one other person from your side here, this could have been avoided."
Mori turns to Fukuzawa, ignoring him. "As Kouyou said, willful or unwillful, this neglect is murder. Our organization will be in disorder with the sudden death of an executive. Thereby, this alliance is off, unless a price is paid."
"Say we agree. What do you ask for?" Fukuzawa asks.
Mori smiles twistedly, "A member for a member, perhaps. Only, that instead of death, he comes to work for us and fix up the mess he has created, someone to bring back stability again." He looks at Dazai, his purple eyes glinting. He lowers himself down to his knee like an adult before a child, before the tangle of Dazai's desperate clutch around Chuuya and his face buried in his red hair, "Doesn't that seem fair, Dazai-kun? Only the people here know of the circumstances surrounding Chuuya-kun's death. If you take the executive seat again, we will cover it up for you. If you don't, well… we have no choice but to expose your crime, and you will face severe retaliation."
"So this was your plan," Dazau grits out, "huh?" He lifts his head, and he is so full of hatred and disgust that it burns like acid up to his throat, "First, Odasaku, and now you fucking take him away from me too! What did you do to him, Mori?"
Mori smiles, "I didn't do anything to him, Dazai-kun. That was all you. I am simply trying to make the best of the situation, one that you caused, for the benefit of my organization. But I understand; the urge to deflect blame when you can't bear it." He stands to his feet. "Your choice. This alliance is in your hands now. Think about it."
***
It is the hardest thing, when Mori forces him to let go of the body. He sits there holding Chuuya's body, hollowly staring at a patch of grass as he feels himself outside his body, watching it happen.
"We do need it for his funeral, you see," Mori says calmly, and that's when it becomes real. That's when it really becomes real.
That moment of realization is simultaneously the most surreal and most vivid thing Dazai has ever experienced, alongside Odasaku's death.
The realization that this, right here, is the very last time he will ever hold Chuuya, or see his face, or touch him. He will never hear his voice again. Chuuya will never yell at him and curse him out and insult him, his face flushed with anger as red and pretty as his hair. He will never hear him talk about the things that mattered to him, the way they did once, best friends one minute and rivals the next, the two of them lying on the hood of his car, or with their faces to each other on the bed, smiling. They will never pass each other on the streets now, Dazai always seeing him from afar and pretending he is headed the same way, and then as if he is disgusted to have run into him, only to follow him for ages to bother him.
Who will I bother now, slug?
He takes his cheek in his hand and looks into his face for a long time, and everything around him is drowned out but for the face in front of him and its memories playing in his mind, once healthy and full of life and now smooth and white with death, and he can't stop looking; lost in it all, his eyes gone afar, a small knit between his brows.
"Dazai-san," Atsushi whispers. He is kneeling beside him, his hand on his shoulder. "They need to take him, so he can be honored the way he deserved to be. Please."
"Let go of him already, for fuck's sake!" Tachihara explodes, abrupt, as if he can no longer keep silent. "You shouldn't even be touching him! I swear if this goes on for another minute—"
My fault, my fault, my fault …
"Tachihara," Hirotsu is saying, "let me handle this."
Hirotsu kneels before him.
He speaks to him, almost kindly, "I'm afraid it's time, Dazai-san."
"I can't," Dazai chokes out, "How can I…"
How can I let him go?
(He remembers this. Odasaku, his best friend and the only one who had ever cared about him with an open, unapologetic heart.
Now again, the love of his life.)
"You will have to. We will all have to now."
It is a long and slow moment, the sound around him cut out by the ringing in his ears. Someone is harshly untangling his fingers from Chuuya, and they are taking him away, but almost of their own accord, his hands aren't letting go; they grip on to the end, until Chuuya's fingers are forcibly tugged away from him. There will be blanks in his memory of this moment. All he remembers is watching Chuuya in Tachihara's arms, legs hung over one arm and his head and shoulders and arms over the other, growing smaller and smaller in the distance until he has disappeared.
All he remembers is looking down, wide-eyed and blurry, and discovering that he is covered in Chuuya's blood.
Chapter 3
Notes:
TW for suicidal ideation and planning (but no attempt - it gets stopped)
Chapter Text
The day after, Fukuzawa sits Dazai down in his office and tells him that he does not need to do anything he doesn't want to. The loss of the truce is a great blow, but it is not worth maintaining at the expense of his individual freedom and right to choose.
"Whatever happens after this," Fukuzawa tells him, "We will deal with it."
It's not comforting. It's not comforting to have anyone be kind to him when he knows it's not what he deserves.
The office is silent with him, and that's fine, because he's barely really there anymore. His mind is just stuck on that moment; the very moment he turned away from Chuuya, and not looked back.
Why didn't he look back?
The third day, Dazai doesn't go to work. He lays in bed with his eyes open and stares at the ceiling, and over and over, he pictures the entire scene as vividly as if he was there to witness it himself. When everyone left, Dazai sat there at the place where Chuuya died for a long time, mapping everything out until there was nothing he didn't know about it, and then stared at nothing until night fell, to see what it must have looked like in the hours Chuuya was dying so slowly.
Every detail and observation is now branded into his cursed mind, and it all comes together to build up the entire scene for him.
There was the trail of blood from the hat and coat and broken phone, all the way to the inside of the bundle of trees where Chuuya took his final breath. There was the blood on his clothes, so much of it that it was hard to see anything beneath it, that he died in pain, a lot of it, burned in it all through the night until dawn. There were the marks on the grass and soil, where Chuuya must have dragged himself across trying to get to a hospital or the road, and the fact that the nearest hospital was not Port Mafia affiliated and he knows Mori would have given Chuuya a lot of trouble for putting them at risk like that.
How dark it was at night.
Chuuya was so afraid of the dark.
Chuuya was so afraid of dying alone.
When he told Dazai that at sixteen, Dazai said to him, seeing as we're partners and I'll probably be there, I don't see how you will.
What a lie.
Dazai's eyes are unblinking on the white cracked paint above him, burning.
The place was cold at night. Chuuya was so cold when Dazai was holding him too. There were dried tracks of tears down the corners of Chuuya's eyes.
What had Chuuya been thinking of that made him cry?
For the entire day, that's all he does.
Dazai just lies in bed and his mind runs through the scene over and over, going haywire, thinking about Chuuya and Chuuya's death and death itself, and for the very first time, wished he could delude himself into believing in the existence of an afterlife, just so he can believe he will see Chuuya again.
He thinks about Mori a lot too.
Did he poison Chuuya before the mission? Mori was deft at such things, perhaps a poison that was somehow triggered by Corruption.
He thinks about the possibility that Mori did nothing and that it may just be the fault of Dazai's own carelessness—
Willful or unwillful, this neglect is murder.
But I understand; the urge to deflect blame when you can't handle it.
No. There's no way. Mori is more than capable of such things with a single, lazer focus on his agenda. He did it with Odasaku. But the question is, why someone who was so vital to the mafia? So useful and powerful? He said it himself; losing Chuuya was a great blow to the organization. Was he really so sure he could have Dazai back in the executive seat to fix everything and rescind the impact of the blow?
As Dazai lays there in his bed, he thinks about dying. He no longer cares about a clean suicide and when he thinks about who he might hurt, he finds that he can't imagine he matters that much to anyone that the damage would be irrevocable. Maybe it will hurt, maybe it won't, but they will all be over it in the end. Maybe no one would care at all, considering how little they seem to when he does bring the topic of his death up. But that's all the better for him in the end, and all the better for them too if Mori's right about the Port Mafia's oncoming relentless attacks.
His death would assuage their grief and vindictiveness enough that they wouldn't attack the agency with the same ferocity.
If he could just move — if he can just get to the terrace, or grab a gun or a knife... something instant and painless, slicing right through his consciousness before he can feel any of it.
From seven am, his phone rings and he doesn't answer. He doesn't know what he'll say to them, and he's not in the mood to hear Kunikida yelling at him for neglecting his work.
In the afternoon, Kunikida uses his notebook to copy his key and get into his dorm. Dazai notices vaguely but feels so outside of himself that he can't even formulate a reaction.
Kunikida doesn't yell at him. Instead, he sighs and silently makes his way to the kitchen where clunks and clangs are heard until he is coming back with a bowl of okayu. He pushes him to eat and it takes Dazai forever to muster up the will to comply; keeps forgetting himself and Kunikida and to bring the spoon to his mouth, so lost inside his own head.
"Don't make me spoonfeed you like a child, Dazai," Kunikida admonishes.
People come and go. Yosano comes by with takeout and a bottle of alcohol, forces him to eat a few bites and pours him a glass, and they drink until she passes out beside him in his bed. She never tries to talk to him. None of them do, really. They just stay with him, at least one person, all day long.
One day it's Atsushi, and Dazai tries a bit harder to — to act right, to be better — because he looks like he's about to cry, seeing Dazai be this way, but it's the hardest and most exhausting it's ever been to pretend, and for once, he doesn't manage for long.
"I'm sorry, I don't mean to, um..." Atsushi wipes at his eyes with the back of his hand.
"It's okay, young one," Dazai rasps, and tries to smile, "I'll be back to normal in no time." He is talking about this as if this is just some kind of flu, and he can tell Atsushi is seeing right through it, pressing the back of his hand to his eyes again.
"I'm sorry. I'm just not used to seeing you like this... but it's not about me. Of course you're sad. You lost your friend, after all." His smile is a wobbly attempt, and he lays his head on Dazai's bed with the top of it pressed against his side, and all Dazai can manage is to put a hand on his silver hair. It's awkward for him but Atsushi seems okay with it. "I guess I'll be more prepared next time. Sorry. I really do want to be here."
Ranpo comes by too and sidles up on the other side of the bed with Dazai's back turned to him, playing his games and dropping a snack from his pile in front of Dazai every few hours.
"You smell awful, by the way. Just saying," Ranpo says, still mostly engrossed in his game.
Kunikida drags him into the shower the day after. It reminds him of Chuuya and it stings something horrible, but he does end up clean at the end of it.
Fifth day is the day he knows they will be holding Chuuya's funeral, the funeral he is not invited to and would not be able to attend, guarded heavily on Port Mafia grounds. He is alone with his thoughts, and they are louder than ever. Yosano called to say they will be coming a bit late, because the mission is needing all hands on deck. It's fine. It's the opportunity Dazai has been waiting for.
He finds himself with his heels rooted onto the outer side of the balustrade of the rooftop, still in his pyjamas and exhausted, as if getting here took every bit of the little energy he had.
And yet, something is pulling him back.
He wants to die.
He wants to die more than anything.
He doesn't find revenge to be necessarily worth prolonging this suffering.
But he wants to know what happened to Chuuya.
He wants to know the truth.
What had Chuuya been thinking of that made him cry?
Was he thinking of Dazai?
Did he think Dazai just didn't care?
That's the thought that keeps him teetering on this thread; between death and life.
Dazai can know the truth for him, and end it after he knows, but what does it matter? Dazai can only uncover the truth for his own selfish consolation, but Chuuya died beIieving those things, and nothing can ever change that.
He has spent his entire life not wanting to live. He lived until now searching for a meaning, then for Odasaku's words, then because he was right and the world felt a little more beautiful when he was on the side of the good, and always, for Chuuya; to tease him, to find ways to make him react to Dazai, the way he made Dazai feel alive and real and like the child he had never been, the way he made him feel.
But Odasaku is dead, and Chuuya is dead, and living in this world doesn't seem all that great without either of them in it.
So who is he living for now?
"Dazai-san!" somebody cries out.
Dazai lifts his head.
It's Atsushi's voice, the rapid steps of his running nearing behind him.
"Dazai-san, please," Atsushi is whispering, his shaky hand reaching out, "Please come on to the other side, please—"
Dazai stands there for several seconds, staring down at the ground. He wants to be buried next to Chuuya, or Odasaku. Someone he loves. He wants to be six feet under.
"Dazai-san, give me your hand," Atsushi says, his trembling hand held out when Dazai looks back. "Let me help you climb over."
There is so much distress and terror in Atsushi's voice that it has become a mental barricade, and Dazai knows he can't do it in front of Atsushi. He can't leave him to feel like he should have done more to save him, the way he felt about Chuuya.
Maybe another time then.
Dazai takes Atsushi's hand with a sigh, and when he nearly slips on the edge, Atsushi frantically grabs at him with his eyes wide.
"Careful," Atsushi says softly.
When he reaches safe on the other side, Atsushi is suddenly hugging him, cheek to his chest, still jittery with fear. Dazai holds him and pats him gently on the back of his head.
"You'd break my heart," Atsushi tells him in a voice on the verge of tears, quiet, "You'd break all our hearts, if you left."
"I'm sorry."
"Nobody blames you, Dazai-san," Atsushi says, "Nobody at the agency... the people of Port Mafia are grieving and want someone to blame, and they blame you because you are the closest thing they can have for it. But that doesn't mean it was your fault."
Dazai feels something jump and tighten painfully in his chest, and he thinks if he wasn't so numb, he might have cried. He doesn't believe it's true, but he wants it to be.
But he knows. He can't fool himself. This is another curse of his mind.
Mori wasn't wrong. He knows there is a part of him that wants to deflect blame because he can't handle it all being on him. If on the off-chance it turns out Mori or anyone else had nothing to do with it, that there is nothing greater than himself to blame, he would not be able to live another second with this.
He also knows, from firsthand experience, the kind of emotionally manipulative bastard Mori is. Dazai learned from the best. It's not so far-fetched either that Mori's interference might be involved.
"But if you want to blame someone then you should blame me. You had to come save me and that's why you couldn't save him." Atsushi gulps down tears, letting Dazai go and stepping away.
"That's nonsense, Atsushi-kun," Dazai says with a weary kind of sternness, sitting down against the balustrade. "I have no regrets about saving you. I only regret not saving him. There are things I should have done that I didn't before leaving."
"You wouldn't have left him alone there if you knew. I know you wouldn't."
"I shouldn't have been leaving him alone like that at all."
Atsushi sits beside him. He doesn't seem to have an answer for that.
They sit in silence for a while.
"Dazai-san..." Atsushi begins, "tell me about him."
Dazai stares ahead, unblinking, until the cold wind makes his eyes burn. The memories rush through him and he watches them play out; stealing Chuuya's hat and running away just so he would chase him and pin him by the wrists, face flushed with anger, and so beautiful, and all their bantering and bickering, the good times in Chuuya's apartment, at the arcade, when they were soukoku on missions, exhilarating and powerful and so perfectly in tune with each other it almost felt insane, surreal. There were so many moments that did not seem to matter when they were happening, that are precious and painful now to remember.
But mostly it's the little things about Chuuya coming to him, the strangest things; the curl of his fingers around the handle of his bike, the way he smirked around the rim of his glass, the way he laughed with his whole face when he was genuinely laughing, his love for hats and chokers and fine wine.
Dazai finds himself talking about him for a long time, one memory leading to another, one fact accompanied by a story, this and that, the things he liked and hated, the way he was so loved and could never really see it enough. He doesn't notice the smile he has on his face, frayed at the edges by a grief nearly forgotten in the memories he was speaking of, and unbelievably, ineffably fond. Atsushi just sits there and listens until he goes quiet.
When he looks at Atsushi at the end of it, there is a small smile, as sad as it's soft.
"You loved him. Didn't you, Dazai-san?"
Dazai startles.
No one has ever said it aloud before. Not even himself. Especially not himself.
But maybe, he thinks. Maybe he should have.
"I did," Dazai says, quietly. "I do."
"Did he know?"
"Not really." It comes out sounding unexpectedly strained. It takes a minute for the feeling in his throat to settle, before he can say, "I never let him."
Atsushi doesn't say anything more after that. He just lays his head very lightly to Dazai's shoulder, while Dazai stays still. They are both as awkward as they are starved for touch, but it's nice. It's comforting.
Chapter 4
Notes:
Warning for self-destructive tendencies and a manga spoiler for Tachihara's ability!
I would just like to clarify once more that this is not a permanent death fic and that Chuuya WILL come back in the story completely as himself I promise!!
Chapter Text
Dazai decides to live for a while longer after that, for Atsushi and the others who came by the entire week, stayed with him to make sure he didn't hurt himself, cleaned up his dorm and made him eat.
He decides that, while he lives for however long he can manage it now, he may as well go find out the truth.
He comes to work the next day, withdrawn and lost in his planning for what he will do about Mori.
Within the first fifteen minutes, Kyouka runs up to him and wordlessly tucks a flower into his hair before running away back to her desk.
Dazai smiles slightly. "Thank you, little one."
When she goes out for an errand and comes back, it's with even more flowers and a crepe for him.
By the end of the second hour, there is a collection of small farm animal drawings by Kenji and snacks that Ranpo keeps throwing onto his desk. Kunikida has loosened up a lot and doesn't pressure him to work more or faster, but Dazai is also actually trying to get the work done today, hoping for some relief from his own brain. It's only that it's hard to focus no matter how hard he tries. Atsushi helps him with the workload, helping him finish his weeks worth of neglected paperwork.
He doesn't join them at the cafe because he isn't hungry and thinks he'd like the privacy to think about what he has to do with Mori, not so much looking forward to the thoughts and feelings about Chuuya, the self-hatred and blame and grief, but he still might be better able to refocus when he's alone.
Even so, Yosano plops down the take-out in front of him when they all return and orders him to eat.
They take care of him like that in their own small ways, and he thinks he kind of loves them.
No. He does.
He does love them. In whatever ways someone like him can, he does.
And he doesn't know how he'll keep on living without them, but he will have to now.
Maybe after it's over, without any of them around, it will be easier to do it. To end himself.
At the end of the day, they begin to pile out, with a rare kiss to his cheek from Yosano, a hand to his shoulder from Kunikida and Tanizaki, a hand to his hand from Naomi, a hug from Kenji, a smile and a wave from Kyouka and Atsushi.
Ranpo and Dazai are the only ones left in the end. Dazai is just beginning to leave, pulling his coat on.
"Don't do it," Ranpo says when Dazai is at the door, with his head over the backrest of his chair, lollipop in his mouth. "It's not worth it."
Dazai stills.
He turns around after several seconds.
"Do you know if Mori did it?"
"Hmm," Ranpo says, "even if I did, I wouldn't tell you. Where's the fun in that? And if this is what makes you want to stay alive a bit longer? I'm not gonna be the one to take that away. I like having you around too much for that."
Dazai stays silent, swallowing. He shakes his arm, an uncharacteristically jittery gesture, feeling something crawl up his spine; desperation, a numb and blank kind of anxiety in his rapid, uncontrolled thoughts.
"I have to know."
"I know you do. But my two cents? Don't take that executive seat back. It might get you close enough to Mori to figure this stuff out, and I have no doubt you'll find a way to burn the Port Mafia down into the ground from the inside. But will it really make you happy or change anything? Is it worth it, going against Oda's words for this? Would Mr. Fancy Hat want this for you?"
Chuuya wouldn't. He was a selfless idiot like that. But what does that matter anymore?
"I was looking at them all, you know," Ranpo says, with a smirk. "While you were busy grieving over Mr. Fancy Hat. It was interesting."
"What are you saying?"
Ranpo lifts his head and opens his eyes, green fixated on him.
"I'm saying you don't have to worry. There's already someone in the Port Mafia wondering the same thing as you."
Dazai blinks, surprised.
"For now, let them take the full impact of the blow, especially if it turns out Mori just shot himself in the foot with it. You sit back and relax, wait for them to do all the work. When they figure it out, they'll come to you."
***
At the end of the month, Mori calls him and says, "This is the point where you give me your final decision. After this, if the answer is anything but yes, your crime will be exposed, and the ADA, in particular you Dazai-kun, will face severe retaliation from the Port Mafia."
"As if we haven't dealt with you fuckers for years before the truce," Yosano sneers into the phone, which is on speaker.
"This will be different," Mori says, a smirk in his voice, "Chuuya-kun was quite...favored, you see."
Dazai has already considered this; to kill two birds with one stone. If Chuuya was loved, if he was loved and respected more than Mori — if there are people who believed he would have been a more capable boss and were prepared to rise against Mori —
How funny, if Mori killed him for this too.
Chuuya was so loyal he would have never even tried. He would have suppressed such an uprising himself. He was loyal to a fault.
"Here's my answer," Dazai says into the phone.
All the members are suspended in wait. He can feel Ranpo, above all, looking at him.
Dazai smirks. "Eat shit, Mori-san."
Atsushi makes a startled noise. Dazai is not one for swearing, usually. Yosano snorts and Ranpo laughs.
The silence is long on the other end.
"Very well, then," Mori says calmly with a smile, in that smooth, sibilant tone, "You've made your choice, Dazai-kun. See what happens when everyone knows: you killed Chuuya-kun. You will hear this until the day you finally kill yourself."
The phone hangs up, the tone ringing.
"Bastard," Kunikida grits out.
So this is his play.
Dazai knows he is like a cockroach in a nuclear explosion. The worst can happen and somehow he manages to live, even when he wants to do anything but.
Mori doesn't necessarily expect anyone to manage to kill him. He sounds sure Dazai would just do it himself.
And that.
That, he may not be wrong about.
***
The first person to attack, as Dazai already expected, is Kouyou.
She ambushes him in the midst of a small mission, chasing after the ability user before she jumps down in front of him, her uchiwa in front of her face and the Golden Demon appearing behind her.
"Now? Really?" Kunikida, who's with him, mumbles.
"You go after the ability user. I'll deal with her."
Kunikida trusts fully that he can, so he nods and runs past. Kouyou doesn't make a move. He is not the one she wants.
The ADA is split between people who trust Dazai to take care of himself and people who think he needs to be accompanied everywhere he goes. Among the former are Kunikida, Yosano and Ranpo. Among the latter are Atsushi, the Tanizaki siblings, even Fukuzawa.
Dazai much prefers the former's thinking, to be frank. He can take care of himself, but he doesn't care if he can't.
"Ane-san," Dazai greets.
"Don't call me that," she says in a cold voice, and the Golden Demon attacks with a slash.
Dazai jumps back, instinctively. It's a warning. Her ability can't hurt him and they both know it. Kouyou takes out her own katana, solid in her grip.
"Why did you leave him to die?"
Dazai's stomach clenches nauseatingly. Outwardly, his face remains steady and unwavering.
"We've told you the full story."
"All the times you left him there before — were they also such urgent situations, or could you simply not be bothered?"
There is no answer for that. There is no reason. It was just Dazai being a fool, just being careless.
"I always did everything to make sure he would be okay, for what it's worth," Dazai whispers. It's weak and he knows it.
"It's not worth anything," Kouyou says, her eyes hollow and unmoving on his, " considering he's dead."
"No, I guess not." Dazai feels the weight of this bear down on him, like the waves of a tsunami. His throat is tight. "I really am sorry."
Kouyou looks at him as if she can't care less about his apologies.
"He loved you," she says, after a while. "Did you know that? He was head over heels in love with you."
Dazai startles, eyes wide. His heart has seized violently in his throat.
He can't breathe.
"I learned this the day you defected, and he spent months looking for you. The day he realized he might never know what happened to you, he came into my office exhausted and in a panic. I held him as he cried because he thought you were dead, that you finally killed yourself."
Dazai finds that he is shaking. He clenches his fists inside his pockets, tries to control himself, the wild and painful beating of his own heart. He feels sick to his core.
"I hope it didn't come as too much of a shock to my lad, that he died like this," Kouyou whispers, and lowers her uchiwa, "He always did say he meant nothing to you."
Kouyou charges with her katana. Dazai nearly doesn't get out of the way in time.
***
"Why do you love that boy anyway, my lad?"
"Shit, Ane-san," Chuuya laughs, mirthless, "Beats me."
Kouyou finds herself smiling too, briefly amused, before it fades.
"I can't say it doesn't worry me," Kouyou tells him, "He's no good. He never was, but especially now, when he's on the other side and likely doesn't feel the same way as he used to." She has never known what it was: if Dazai loved him too. But he did seem to care about him in subtle ways once. Something like friends.
Chuuya twirls the glass of wine in his head. "I'd say he's better now than he was when he was here. But you're right. He's probably not better for me." He smiles ruefully, his eyes hazy. "Maybe if I still meant anything to him..."
He goes quiet. Kouyou says nothing as well. That boy is not worth it. He will hurt him, break his heart, maybe even worse. It seems Chuuya is aware of that, but still can't help his feelings.
"Ah well, whatever," Chuuya says, and drinks the entire glass, placing it on the table and getting up. "I guess I had too much to drink, Ane-san. I'm taking my leave. Thanks for the wine."
***
Dazai returns to the ADA bleeding and torn up, his head full with thoughts of fiery red hair and a beautiful face, sad blue eyes, all morphing into a body covered in blood, nearly black from saturation; thoughts of standing at the edge of a bridge, wanting to fall.
He loved you.
He always did say he meant nothing to you.
"Dazai-san!" Kenji gasps, as everyone stands to their feet, wide-eyed.
From there on, everyone becomes of one group: that Dazai should be accompanied wherever he goes, protected, not just from the Port Mafia but from himself. They all see it; he didn't try too hard to defend himself against Kouyou.
She only stopped because she could see he was suffering. She let him go herself, sheathing her katana as she said, "I won't be the one to kill you. I know living is much harder for you, and I'd rather see you suffer."
***
On an errand, the hairs on the back of his neck rise. Outwardly, Dazai continues walking, entirely relaxed with his hands in his pockets, before turning swiftly into an alley.
"Fancy meeting you here," Dazai says, hearing the light fall of boots on the ground some distance behind him.
He waits for a cough. Instead it's utterly quiet.
"Mori has even your mind all twisted up, huh?" Dazai says. "But I guess you always have been easy to manipulate. Akutagawa-kun."
He turns, unfazedly. Akutagawa is staring at him with the same hollow, bloodshot eyes, the tendrils of Rashoumon suspended in the air behind him.
Akutagawa does not speak.
They stare at each other in absolute silence, one with eyes full of cold fury, the other half-lidded and numb.
The Rashoumon attacks, a fast snap, cracking the ground where Dazai stood a second ago, jumping back instinctively with his hands in his pockets. They both know it will take nothing from Dazai to subdue him and stop all this. All he has to do is raise his hand and nullify Akutagawa's ability. All he has to do is let it touch him.
He doesn't, however, because that won't satisfy Akutagawa's hunger for catharsis. Akutagawa doesn't want to hurt him, though he seems to think he does. If he did want to hurt Dazai, he would not have used his ability at all. He only wants to pour out all his pain and rage onto the person who put it there.
Once, Akutagawa looked up to him, saw him as his reason to live, but now in his eyes, Dazai has done something so irrevocable and unforgivable that he can't bear it, and yet, he can't let go either.
So Dazai lets Akutagawa lash out, one slash of his demon after another at him, and just maneuvers his body to dodge each attack trying to cut through him, turns back one shoulder and the other, jumps out of the way each time. He is grieving. Dazai can understand this. He can give him this much, after everything he has done.
This is Dazai grieving too. If this could hurt him, he would have let it.
He lets this go on until Akutagawa is on his hands and knees, having overexerted himself, heaving and panting for air with his head hung between his shoulders. He lets out an angry cry, a scream, slamming a fist hard on the ground.
Dazai watches him with impassive eyes.
"Dazai-san, here you are! Why did you disappear like—" Atsushi's voice trails off, his running footsteps nearing, slowly coming to a stop. "What..."
There is debri and cracked walls and floors, an Akutagawa on his knees, gasping for air.
When Atsushi understands, he makes for Akutagawa, speaking in a voice slow and raspy with anger, "Akutagawa... damn it!"
"Atsushi," Dazai says, grabbing his shoulder. Atsushi startles to a still, looking at him. "Let him be."
"He tried to attack you—"
"Let him be."
"I don't need your pity," Akutagawa snarls.
"Far from it, Akutagawa-kun," Dazai says, "I thought you of all people would know that I have never pitied anyone in my life for anything."
"Then what is this?" Akutagawa forces out hoarsely, his eyes angry and anguished.
Where were you all, when he was lying here drowning in his own blood?
"Understanding."
Dazai feels Atsushi's eyes on him as he walks past, before he rushes over to follow him. Above all, it's Akutagawa's gaze that burns his back until he turns the corner at the end of the alley.
***
Nearly every day after, there is an attack from the Port Mafia from a myriad of people, those Dazai recognizes as well as many of those he doesn't.
Tachihara is among the most consistent of the attackers, throwing his knives at him, using his ability to hit on target with precision. Even if Dazai can nullify his ability, the natural force of his knives being thrown at him mid-motion will not be stopped from injuring him.
Dazai understands something right from the first time he looks Tachihara in his grief-stricken and restless eyes, with a gaze that can look right into a soul, his mind turning over each expression it can read, each word out of Tachihara's mouth, every shade of its tone.
"You were in love with him," Dazai says, and just about stops himself from saying too. That makes two of us.
If anything could have made Tachihara angrier, it was this: the inherent unease of being flayed open by Dazai's intellect.
Tachihara hurls four knives at once with a yell, raw and full of rage and from somewhere deeply wounded. Kunikida shoots each one down before changing the gun to something wooden with his notebook. Tachihara's ability of controlling metal makes fighting him tricky, since they can't use weapons, but they manage and come out relatively unscathed.
The longer this goes on, the more Dazai begins to feel like a burden on the ADA.
And so, two months later, he disappears.
Chapter 5
Notes:
Warning for some spoilers of BSD Beast (you can skip the second last section to avoid it!)
Chapter Text
Dazai holes up in a shipping container on the outskirts of Yokohama. The ADA is searching for him, and the Port Mafia is hunting him. Too often, he just misses his friends by a hair, far closer to reaching him than Port Mafia. They are among the best detectives in Yokohama, after all.
Ranpo knows, Dazai is sure of it. But Ranpo never interferes in the choices and business of others unless absolutely necessary.
Every week, Dazai makes a long trek to visit Chuuya's grave. It's a risky endeavor, but he knows well how to manage it.
Three months later, he comes upon Chuuya's grave while someone else is there.
Chuuya's grave is filled with gifts and flowers. Every week, there's something new. It's clear Dazai is never the only one to visit (it's clear Chuuya is dear to many, and yet, the idiot likely had never realized just how much). He memorizes everyone's days and timings makes sure not to come on the days anyone else is here.
But today, the routine is broken. Akutagawa is here as well, on a day he usually isn't.
Just as Dazai, standing a few feet away, begins to soundlessly turn away, not wanting a fight to break out in a graveyard — especially not in front of Chuuya's grave —
"Dazai-san." Akutagawa's voice carries in the wind, even as low as it is.
Dazai halts.
Dazai-san.
After a while, he turns to face him slowly. He forces his shoulders relaxed, hands in his coat pockets.
"Akutagawa-kun."
***
The two sit silently against the opposite sides of Chuuya's grave. The wind blows through them, rustling hair and clothes and leaves, swaying branches above their heads. Dazai expects they would continue to stay like this until one of them leaves.
Akutagawa doesn't seem angry at him anymore, but that does not necessarily mean he feels friendly towards him either. Even so, Dazai can sense that there is not much animosity there either. He has no plans to set Dazai up, and has even confirmed himself that he won't be telling anyone he encounteted Dazai here.
It's...not bad, to be in the company of someone here without having to look at their face, to be with someone who Chuuya was clearly very important to as well.
It's also interesting to see Akutagawa care about someone other than his sister, and to do so purely, untainted by the desperation that freights his feelings for Dazai. He knows Chuuya was kinder than he ever could have been to Akutagawa.
"He must have been a good mentor," he finds himself murmuring aloud.
There is no response, and in that length, Dazai wonders if Akutagawa will simply ignore his presence.
Then, quietly, "And friend."
Dazai hums. That, he knows. Even if he and Chuuya never managed to call each other friends out loud, feelings far too complicated so as to make their relationship unnameable (but good, when Dazai wasn't relentlessly teasing him and Chuuya wasn't trying to tear his hair out — it felt like a good thing, a lot of the time). But he knows Chuuya was an incredible friend.
"I didn't know," Akutagawa says in his reserved voice, "about..." Dazai understands before he even says the rest. "About Corruption, and how painful it was for him... I would have come for him every day if I..." His voice doesn't shake, or strain... it just simply hitches off, as if the thread of his voice has been cut at the end.
Dazai smiles, bitterly, "At least you have the excuse of not knowing, Akutagawa-kun."
He has his head leaned back on the stone, looking up at the pale blue sky.
When people die, is there anything in the after?
It's a question that comes back to him time and time again, especially these days. Dazai never thought so, and it feels frivolous to imagine the people they lose are watching over them. But still, what a comfort it must be, for those who can believe it. He wants to be able to believe it too, more than anything.
"But you knew how he was, didn't you? Never wanting to wake anyone up in the middle of the night just to get him."
It was something that Dazai found extremely annoying. He could never understand why Chuuya didn't exert his position as an executive more.
When he thinks about it now, though, it always links to a memory that he wishes he could erase.
I don't get why you don't just call one of your subordinates.
Don't wanna... bother them...
Ah, but Chuuya can bother me, right?
The worst part about it is that he did notice; that was the last time Chuuya ever asked Dazai to take him home.
There are so many things Dazai wishes he did better.
Chuuya used to struggle to rely on others, or trust that anyone would take care of him.
But he trusted Dazai. He was the only one Chuuya ever trusted like that.
And in the end, Chuuya lost that too.
"I would have preferred he call me at 3 than find out he was dead the next morning," Akutagawa says, after a long time, and now... now his voice is almost strained.
***
"I am sorry, Chuuya-san," Akutagawa says, his voice strained with pain, limping from the bleeding gashes in his legs. "For disturbing you like this. I didn't know who else to call, and..."
To keep it short, if Chuuya-san didn't come the minute he did, the three ability users would have killed him.
"Ahh, stop apologizing already, Akutagawa," Chuuya says, with a longsuffering sigh. He is helping Akutagawa walk with an arm around his waist, Akutagawa's arm leaning on Chuuya's shoulders. It's a bit awkward, because of how short his mentor is, but not too much.
"It can't be ideal to be woken up at 3 like this just to come get me. I assure you, however, I would not have done it if I—"
Chuuya sighs again. "I know, Akutagawa. And sure, it's not ideal exactly. But it's worth it, right? I'd rather be woken up by a call from you at 3 than find out you're dead the next morning."
***
"Dazai-san," Akutagawa says, "I have learned of the true circumstances behind Chuuya-san's death."
Dazai's heart screeches to a halt, and he straightens abruptly, turning to look at Akutagawa over his shoulder, the grave between them.
"I began to have doubts as well about Mori," Akutagawa continues, still with his back to Dazai. The lack of a honorific is notable. "After what you said, and because I didn't want it to be true that you would ever hurt Chuuya-san... but also... Mori seemed suspiciously eager to take full advantage of Chuuya-san's death and to coerce you back into the executive seat."
Dazai is suddenly standing, and in the next second, he has knelt in front of Akutagawa.
It's him, the one Ranpo was talking about.
"What did Mori do?" His voice comes out dangerous, the voice of that same Port Mafia executive. He sees something flash across Akutagawa's eyes, but this voice is not directed at him today.
Akutagawa's eyes are as reserved as ever, impassive, and to anyone who doesn't observe as keenly in an instant as Dazai or knows his mentee so well, they wouldn't have seen the imperceptible emotion in them.
"It's not quite what you think."
Dazai's face falls from its anger.
"It's true that Mori tried to take whatever advantage he could of Chuuya-san's death. It was why he tried to hide the full details of the medical records, Dazai-san, so he can play with your mind and turn everyone against you. He wanted you to feel fully responsible for what happened to Chuuya-san, and be so under pressure that you would come back to the Port Mafia to keep the agency safe."
Akutagawa reaches inside his coat and takes out a file. When Dazai takes them, he sees that they are medical records.
"It's also true that Mori lied to Chuuya-san. Last month, Chuuya-san went to Mori to have himself examined. To Mori after discovering what he did, Chuuya-san's death was inevitable, and so he wanted to be able to utilize his power, in particular Corruption, as much as possible until then."
"He must have feared telling Chuuya-san this would make him stop using Corruption to lengthen his own life. So he told Chuuya-san that there was nothing there. It was his neglect as well, perhaps even more than yours, that ended Chuuya-san's life as it did. But ultimately he did not cause it by his own hand. He only speeded it up."
The anger and hatred burns like acid at the base of Dazai's throat, along with many other things. He can see it now, where this is going. The whole picture that has been missing so many pieces of context is beginning to take shape in his mind.
A quick look over the medical file only confirms it.
"It seems Chuuya-san has been developing some kind of unusual metastatic growth throughout his body, though he showed very little symptoms until in his last months, possibly because he hadn't used it for four years."
"Mori believes it's not at all unrelated to his frequent use of Corruption since he was young. Now the recent uses of Corruption may have aggravated this somehow. You had four such missions with him in the last two months itself, I believe?"
Dazai nods, numbly.
"With the kind of damage Corruption does to his internal organs, combined with his condition, it was far too much for his body."
Nothing feels real, as if he is hearing it all from the other end of a tunnel.
He thought discovering the truth would absolve him of his guilt and remorse, that if Mori had done something to Chuuya, it would relegate all the fault to him instead, as if it would erase the part of Dazai's carelessness in Chuuya's death. But even knowing of Mori's greater form of neglect didn't do anything. In the end, it was Dazai that did not look back, did not know what was happening to Chuuya.
In the end, it was Dazai that didn't save him.
It was Dazai that left him there to die.
The only thing he knows is that he played with Chuuya's life far too much to be worthy of loving him and—
And having been loved back. (Somehow, he had been loved back.)
The only thing he knows is he should have done more.
"You've done well," Dazai manages, and by some miracle, or just years of practice, he doesn't sound as ripped apart as he feels on the inside at all. "Akutagawa-kun."
He doesn't know why he says it; habit with Atsushi, a show of gratitude without saying thank you, or just the sense of carmarederie, linked by their care and grief for Chuuya, the way they both felt that Chuuya didn't know at all; how much he meant to them, and the things they didn't do.
Only, Dazai's regrets are far greater, and far worse, and he has no excuse.
Akutagawa's eyes are wide. Dazai wonders if he will tell him now that his praise means nothing anymore.
(Good for him then.)
"I don't think I know how to hate you," is what Akutagawa whispers, "Not you."
This is a kind of death, surely; the worst kind, what Dazai feels right now on the inside. It is something rotten and diseased and festering. It is so heavy, this feeling, and if this isn't death, then it's most definitely a killing. He has been dying inside slowly ever since he can remember, but this is a different flavor of it; fraught with regret and shame and self-disgust.
Outwardly, he is still as composed as ever, but for the slightest, red grittiness at the edges of his eyes. He smiles and leans in slightly, as if to tell Akutagawa a secret.
"Worry not," Dazai responds in the same whispering voice, "I will do it enough for the both of us."
Akutagawa is looking into his face silently, a faint knit between his brows, the barest hint of rue.
After a while, he stands to his feet.
He clasps his hands behind his back and bows to Dazai respectfully, before straightening again.
"Take care, Dazai-san." He means it sincerely, it is clear.
Putting his hands in his coat pockets, he turns around and begins to walk down the grass, making his leave. Dazai sits there for a very long time, staring at Chuuya's name carved on the stone, the short range of the years of his life.
***
Mori is waiting with a controlled expression for Chuuya to speak, sitting across from him with his hands steepled. Chuuya is taking too long and he knows it. He has never been really great at talking about stuff like this.
"I... I'm not sure what's going on exactly. It's just... worse?"
"What's worse, Chuuya-kun?" Mori asks impatiently.
"Corruption. The aftermath of it..." Chuuya clears his throat. "It feels worse than I remember... the weakness, the pain... I think I bleed more than I used to. But I might be remembering it wrong, since I used to sleep through a lot of it so I don't know."
It didn't matter back then so much. Dazai used to take care of him, so it didn't matter. Now he has to take care of himself. (And that's fine, he thinks, he tells himself. It's as Dazai said in those few words, it's not his job to). Maybe that's why he feels it more, because he has to be a bit more awake throughout to drag himself home or to the extraction point, to bring down his own fevers, make sure he ate something.
"I don't know. Maybe I'm just feeling it because I'm not used to it anymore, and it's really nothing. I guess I thought I should get myself checked out anyway, just in case."
Few days later, the results of the tests come back.
"Everything looks as usual, besides some reduction in red blood cells. But that's nothing new, is it, Chuuya-kun?"
"Oh..."
Chuuya should have been relieved or grateful. It's good, right? That nothing's amiss and everything's mostly normal?
For some reason, he doesn't. He just feels strangely... disappointed. Or confused. He feels like he should have found an answer that was more solid. There should have been more of a reason for why it feels so much worse besides that...he is just being weak? Just not used to it anymore? That he just remembers the way it used to be wrong? Maybe the reason why it hurt less back then really was because he had someone taking care of him.
"It appears it's as you said then. You're simply not used to it anymore, and you need to build your tolerance back up."
Mori seems amused for some reason upon saying these things, Chuuya notes with bemusement. His smile is thin, his eyes hollow.
"Such paranoia doesn't suit you, Chuuya-kun."
Only then he feels embarrassed.
"Sorry, Boss."
"Hmm. Get out."
Chuuya nods, his chest unsettled, his face hot with mortification. Was he really acting that paranoid about it? Seems Boss isn't happy about Chuuya wasting his time with such concerns, now suddenly looking frivolous and pathetic as he reads his tests results over again.
That's the last time he bothers the Boss with this then. It took him a long time to muster himself up for an examination, but it seems that was for a good reason. He really was just thinking too much about this.
"Sorry again. And thanks."
Chuuya stands to his feet, turning and making his leave. Outside, his hands are trembling. He laughs at himself, still embarrassed and still deeply uneasy.
But Mori is one of the best in Yokohama, and there's no other doctor he can go to about this anyway. He can only find ways to manage the aftermath himself.
Unfortunately, it seems he needs more days than he ever used to in order to get better, so unused to the aftermath of Corruption he is after years, but Mori gets pretty annoyed considering all the work that has to pause or doesn't go as smoothly in his absence, so he tries to cut down on the rest days as much as possible.
Chuuya can't really pinpoint the reason for why he ends up in a bathroom stall trying to breathe through the weight in his chest, so painful and heavy he thinks it might suffocate him. He wishes he didn't keep thinking about it, how hard it is without him.
He's being pathetic, but he can't help but miss how gentle those bandaged hands were with him, how he used to lay Chuuya in his lap, take him home on his back, look after him.
It's so hard to do this on his own now. It's so hard.
But he will have to do it anyway. He will just have to.
***
The day Dazai finds the Book, he does two things.
The first is that he creates a world for Odasaku, a world in which he can fulfil his dream, where he can keep his kids safe and be where he belongs.
The painful catch is that the only world where it's possible for Odasaku to fulfil his dreams is the one where Dazai will not get to be his friend.
Dazai smiles ruefully, as The Book whispers to him in the form of a visceral sense; it can't be in that world. Odasaku's dreams, or their friendship. There can only be one.
He writes Odasaku in the ADA, and he pours his regrets with Akutagawa here into this story, where he will be mentored by a kinder man than himself. Dazai will become the boss of the Port Mafia, and while he would love to kill Mori in this, he can sense that some things might occur in the future where he will be needed. He keeps Atsushi with himself, so he will be taken care of in the end, and Chuuya the closest, to be by his side every waking minute as his bodyguard, protecting him.
He closes his eyes and sees the picture vividly; Odasaku sitting under a lamplight at his desk, writing that story he spoke of.
***
Now for his other greatest grief, all coalesced into that single moment in time, when he did not look back.
The world he has created for Odasaku will exist and keep on existing, no matter where he goes from here. Whenever and wherever he will open the book next, even if he does so in a different timeline, the life he has written for Odasaku will remain as it is. He can take comfort in that.
Hopefully, after what he does now, the Port Mafia will be placated to some extent by his disappearance and supposed 'death'. There will never be peace between the two organizations ever again, but it will certainly be better than it is with Dazai in the equation.
Now, he will send his consciousness back into the mind of his past self, make different choices and create a divergence in this timeline.
He will do it right this time.
He will do better.
Under the lamplight, Dazai puts the pen to The Book and begins to write his desire.
All goes black.
Chapter 6
Notes:
This is a bit of a short one, but an important progression! Five more chapters to go I think :D
Thank you from the bottom of my heart for all the comments in the previous chapter!! The response to this fic has been so heartwarming <3
Chapter Text
When Dazai opens his eyes to the black night, the trees are surrounding him in the clearing. His breaths are heavy as they leave him, forming a mist in the cold air.
It worked.
Dazai turns around.
And there he is.
Alive.
Chuuya is there. He is alive.
And his hand is outstretched, reaching for Dazai.
It's strange. Dazai's mind has created this scene for him in his head so vividly, painting over it a thousand times with more and more detail, until he felt he may as well have lived it.
But this is one thing he has never imagined.
He has never imagined Chuuya being awake, reaching for him like this while he was walking away from him that day, unaware that he would hate himself for this for months to come, that he would lose Chuuya for what once felt like a long, exhausting and nearly unbearable forever.
Seeing his lips shape inaudibly around Dazai's own name spurs him into action, and suddenly he is running, jostling his phone out of his coat pocket and already calling Yosano's number. He catches Chuuya's outreaching hand, and up close he can see his face; clammy and drained of color.
Pain.
So much pain.
Dazai has the phone to his ear, propped by his shoulder, as he maneuvers Chuuya so that he is resting sideways on his lap. Chuuya's face sags with immense relief, eyes falling shut. He shivers on his lap. Dazai manages to shrug the coat off his shoulders and drapes it over him, tucking them in at the edges to protect him from the cold.
Between ragged and shuddering breaths, Chuuya tries to speak, as if to try and explain.
"Shh..." Dazai murmurs, stroking his hair, "Don't try to talk. I'm here now. I'm right here."
"Hello?"
"Yosano-sensei," Dazai says into the phone, fast, "I'll send you a location and I need you to get here as fast as you can."
"Is Atsushi okay? I heard about..."
By the time Dazai reaches Atsushi, his mentee won't need immediate care or Yosano's ability. He knows that much. He only has to make sure he reaches there in time.
"He'll be fine, I promise, I'll make sure of it. Right now it's Chuuya I need you to use your ability on, I reiterate, your ability and nothing else — please, I don't have time to explain — "
"Okay, okay, I'll be there." Dazai thanks whoever that Yosano is quick like that. It also seems a 'please' is very useful to convey urgency for someone who almost never uses it. "But tell me this. Is he critical right now? Or will I have to take measures? Because you know, that's going to be an issue, I can't do anything like that to a Port Mafia executive against his consent, in the event he is not able to give — "
The rest of Yosano's words don't register for a few seconds, so lost he is in the sight of Chuuya in his loose grasp; the shallow rise and fall of his chest, the anguish slackening Chuuya's face and knitting his brows. His eyes are unfocused. Only for a few seconds, they focus slightly on Dazai, almost meeting his.
It breaks off abruptly. Chuuya convulses on his lap, blood rushing out of his mouth, gasping and cold to his palm. He makes a pained sound, nearly a whimper. Dazai has never, not in the seven years he has known him, heard him make a sound like that. Dazai rubs his thumb over the back of his hand in circles, trying to control his own tremors, soothe Chuuya.
"Hello? Dazai?" Yosano's voice has gone insistent.
It shakes Dazai out of his trance, blinking rapidly. His breaths are stuck in his throat.
"Yes. He's critical." The words are slightly strained, hoarse.
"Got it. I'm coming."
"Thank you."
If Yosano is surprised by this sincere display of gratitude, she says nothing. She only hangs up, not wanting to waste time.
Time is ticking, and Dazai can feel Atsushi's life in his hands, slowly trickling out by the second.
But he has planned this for months. He is certain he can save them both.
He calls another person.
"Akutagawa," Dazai says, "I'm going to send you a location. It's urgent and I need you to get here as fast as you can. Can you do that?"
He hears rustling on the other end. "What is it, Dazai-san?"
"Chuuya's hurt badly. Yosano-sensei is coming to help him but I just need you to stay with him — don't ask questions, I'll answer them later. Just know it has to be her who heals him." Dazai finishes typing and hits send. "Did you get the location? How much time do you think it'll take for you to get here?"
"Not long with my ability, Dazai-san. I'm coming."
"That's good. I'm hanging up now."
Dazai pockets his phone and looks down at Chuuya. He brushes a knuckle down his cheek.
"Chuuya," Dazai says, "I'm going to need you to hold on and trust me once again, okay? Yosano's coming and she'll make you good as new." I'll do it right this time, I'll take good care of you, I won't ruin it—
Dazai breathes.
"I'm going to have to leave now, but I swear... I swear I'm not leaving you. Atsushi's in trouble and I have to save him. He doesn't have a lot of time, you see, but Akutagawa will be with you until Yosano gets here, and I'll come and see you when I can after. You will be okay, I promise."
Dazai wasn't sure Chuuya was hearing him until he feels a squeeze, hand in bandaged hand. Something bubbles in his chest, the flush of warmth, a horrible ache and tightness. I understand, Chuuya is saying, because all Chuuya has ever asked for is an explanation for the things he does, and Dazai fails even to give him that much.
"Okay," Dazai whispers, his face tilted over his. It's all he can do to not gather him up and hold him tight, but it would hurt him. "Okay."
This is his only chance, teleporting back in time at a point where he didn't have the book. If he ruins this, he'll have to wait months to get it, and he can't go through that again.
For months, Dazai has thought about all of it, calculated every minute and detail and step down, so he makes sure he can save both Chuuya and Atsushi. Atsushi is fighting against the dysfunction ability trying to tear him apart with his own claws, but the regeneration ability would hold him over along with Kunikida and Kenji's interference. Estimatedly, Atsushi would have about a half an hour at most before he becomes critical. He has lost about six minutes here, but he reached Atsushi in ten minutes when he speeded up—
His mind is chaos like that, measuring, predicting, estimating, the impatience and restlessness making him feel almost sick—
Dazai begins to lay Chuuya carefully on the ground. Chuuya knows help is coming, and that somebody will stay with him through this. He has made sure Yosano will use her ability to heal Chuuya.
This is a big part of the reason he chose this moment to return to, not only to reframe this terrible memory and resolve his regret, but also because it's the nearest moment where his condition is so critical Yosano's ability can be used on him, so it will reset his body entirely and remove the cancerous growth.
Just before he manages to place Chuuya down, Akutagawa lands on the ground in front of him. He has not changed out of his night pyjamas, just wore his coat over it.
Dazai wastes no time maneuvering Chuuya's head and shoulders to Akutagawa's arms. He runs a hand through Chuuya's hair once.
"Yosano-sensei will be here soon." Dazai stands, already turning, "Stay with him and watch over him until then."
"Dazai-san, are you sure Chuuya-san will be fine?" Akutagawa asks. His face is overtaken with a muted expression of worry, pinched and white, looking down at Chuuya.
His fear is understandable, but Dazai remembers noting the state of his — his body when he was —
...when he was holding him in the other timeline, cross-checking Mori's claims that he passed at dawn. He has theorized that part of why Chuuya manages to survive so long is because of Arahabaki keeping him alive. Any other person so physically damaged would have passed away much sooner.
In that world where Chuuya laid here alone, without any help coming for him — that must have been an absolute curse.
Dazai finds himself staring at Chuuya, trying to search for the life moving in his chest, to remind himself — he shakes his head, agitation writhing in his joints, vividly aware of the seconds ticking down, and Atsushi somewhere on the edge of danger too, waiting for him.
"Yes, I'm sure!" he shouts as he turns fully, running as fast as he can.
Hold on for me, Atsushi.
***
Atsushi is saved. After two hours, with his regeneration ability working on him, he looks good as new.
On a call, Akutagawa tells him Chuuya has been healed by Yosano and is now resting in the agency's infirmary.
Nobody sees Dazai heaving a large, unsteady breath, muffling the phone against his chest as he slumps against a wall, drained of all his stress in an instant. He puts the phone back to his ear and says, "You did well, Akutagawa-kun. You can head home now."
Akutagawa is silent, something baffled, "I haven't done anything... I..."
If only you knew. "You did more than you know," Dazai finds himself saying, before he realizes it. "Don't worry about Chuuya. I'll look after him now."
Another long pause. "I... understand. I will head home. I'm hanging up now, Dazai-san."
Dazai frowns for a second at the odd way he said that. What exactly did he understand?
"Okay," is all Dazai says into the waiting line. Akutagawa hangs up after a few seconds.
Chapter Text
When Dazai enters the ADA's infirmary, Chuuya is in his white shirt and grey vest, fitted to the dips of his waist. It's speckled with blood but nothing like the image of his saturated clothes and bloodied mouth and neck that haunted Dazai's mind for months. He is putting his gloves on, pulling them over his wrist, adjusting the leather around his fingers.
"Mackerel," Chuuya says with a smirk, without even looking up from what he's doing. He always knows; they would always know each other just by the sound of their breathing, the fall of their feet to the ground. In another world, Dazai lost this forever. "You really outdid yourself this time, huh? I thought you were gonna leave me there to die, but I guess you shockingly grew a conscience at the last second."
This is the routine of their banters, an opening for Dazai to say something like, I was thinking about it! But then I thought about how much more annoying you'd be as a ghost and decided I didn't want to deal with that at ALL—
What happens instead is that something in Dazai lurches, nauseatingly, and in an instant, he is across the room and barrelling into Chuuya's back, his mouth pressing into his shoulder and his arms catching Chuuya's torso, covering as much of his smaller body as he can, and he is so warm.
He is here.
He is alive.
He can feel the tension freezing Chuuya's shoulders and back, his hand that has startled away from his glove, suspended in air.
"I'd never..." Dazai mumbles into the strap of his vest, the bone of his shoulder, "Not on purpose, I'd never..." He doesn't manage to finish it. He knows it sounds strange. When has he ever been at such a loss for words, except when standing before Mori, the realization sinking in of what he'd done to Odasaku?
Chuuya is silent for a long moment, and Dazai has the inexplicable, aching urge to kiss him on the neck, somewhere warm and real. His waist is lithe, solid against the inside of his arms.
Six months ago, he would have thought Chuuya would punch him in the face if he dared. Now, knowing what he knows about Chuuya's feelings for him, he wonders if he might just let him.
"I, ah..." Chuuya finally manages, his head low, turning vaguely over his shoulder, but not fully. He makes no move to untangle Dazai from himself, and his voice sounds bemused. "I know that..."
Does he really?
Dazai loosens his arms instinctually when Chuuya begins to turn in the circle of his arms, so he can look at Dazai's face, his brows knit in a neat line. He is beautiful. He is so beautiful.
"You look shaken," Chuuya murmurs, slowly, confused.
Does he? He didn't know. He doesn't know what look he must have on his face for Chuuya to be looking at him like this.
Chuuya's gaze lowers to Dazai's hands, and the furrow in his brows deepens.
"Your hands are shaking too."
Dazai blinks, looking down at them too. They are. They are shaking. It's strange. It's so strange. He thought it was strange the first time too; standing beside Odasaku's dead body, trembling, his eyes blurring as he stared at his blood-stained bandages, and yet still numb to his own heart. His body is always reacting to things before he himself is.
"Hey," Chuuya says, his voice something it has never been for him before, low with puzzlement and concern. His head is tilted up towards him, looking at him closely. If he was a bit closer, he could have touched his chin to Dazai's chest. Dazai can angle his own face over his, take his mouth into a kiss. "What the hell's going on with you?"
You died.
You died and I had to live without you for months.
You died because I was callous and careless with you.
Sometimes I forget you're not just a powerful deity, that your body is still as breakable as any human being's.
"Nothing," Dazai says, with a small laugh, and how weird, he hadn't even noticed his own breathing change until just now — how it became shallow in his chest, his fake laugh coming out in a quavering exhale, "This is just adrenaline. Wooh! I mean, what a rush, right? And anyway, I was just checking if chibi grew any taller since the last time I saw him, but he hasn't grown an inch, has he? He's still coming up only to my ank—"
"The werebrat's fine," Chuuya interrupts, "Right?"
It's hard to continue his bullshitting under that burning, blue gaze (so full of life, and feeling, and they are open, looking at him again). "Yeah."
"And ah... I'm fine too... right?" Chuuya is seemingly trying to reassure him, but he doesn't so sure if he's reading the situation right. It's only when it comes to himself that he sounds this unsure.
Dazai swallows. He nods, and remembers the way it felt to hold his cold corpse, to look into that face stricken with the realization that this will be the last time he will ever see it.
He drinks it in now; flickering with life, eyes full with himself, and beautiful with health. He is not staring blankly into somewhere Dazai can't reach him. He is not grey and bloodless. He wants to hold his face and stare at him for hours.
It takes Chuuya some time to realize how close they're standing, and Dazai sort of hoped he wouldn't have realized it so soon. Chuuya breaks away quickly, reddening. He turns in a stuttering spin looking for his coat, muttering, "Yeah, anyway, I'm... going home."
He loved you.
He was head over heels in love with you.
Dazai's mouth quirks slightly with quiet affection.
He's not letting him go so easily this time. Never again.
Chuuya grabs his coat and throws his grip over his shoulder, and in one swift motion, he turns and makes his way for the door. Dazai slips his hands into his pockets and follows after him.
***
On the walk to his apartment, Chuuya imagined they would both go their separate ways again, but unexpectedly, Dazai ends up basically sticking to Chuuya's ass all the back to his apartment, without much warning beyond a cheerful wave to the other agency members, who are also beginning to leave. They all had a late night.
The only reason why Chuuya isn't telling him to fuck off is because he can't get the image of Dazai's shaking hands out of his mind, and his face, so strangely haunted, wide-eyed, the way he was looking at Chuuya as if he couldn't believe he was looking at him at all —
Is it all unusual and confusing? Yeah, hell fucking yeah. It's weird. He never took Dazai to be the kind of guy that gets shaken up by someone's near death experiences, and he's still more than half sure there's something else that's on that dumb genius mind of his that Dazai will never talk about.
Chuuya is still thinking about the way Dazai came colliding right into him, the way he held him so tightly and desperately. It was so fucking weird.
It would have made such great ammo, but... somehow he can't bring himself to embarrass the bastard for it the way he probably should, as demanded by the workings of their dynamic.
He just can't get that face out of his mind. He has never seen Dazai look like that, and definitely never, never at him. He wouldn't have even imagined it in a million years.
***
When Chuuya returns from his shower, he finds Dazai sprawled all over his bed like a starfish.
"Oi, get the hell off my bed! If you're staying here against my will, you're taking the couch."
"The couch?" Dazai has that melodramatic, whining pitch to it, "Chuuya wants me to die of back pain and leg cramps! Chuuya's couch is too small and only fitting for chibis, not normal sized people like me!"
Chuuya's fists clench. For fuck's sake. "Get. Off."
"No, I'm sleeping on the bed! Chuuya should take the chibi-sized couch."
"Shitty Dazai, I'll fucking kill you if you don't get off this bed!"
"I'm not getting off."
"Get the fuck off."
"No!"
Chuuya lunges at him. Dazai rolls over and dodges him.
"How barbaric!"
"Are you getting off this bed or do I have to throw you out?"
Dazai pouts and rolls over to the other side, giving him more than half the space. His coat, vest, belt and bolo tie are thrown in a corner of the room, and he is only in his shirt and trousers; a clear sign he has every intention to stay. This is his trick; pretending Chuuya wasn't able to get any of it, and then making him feel like he did him a favor by relenting some. Chuuya, like the lovesick fool forever playing to his absurd whims, pretends to fall right into it. He can see Dazai needs something, even if he doesn't know what exactly that is.
Chuuya sighs, too tired to force him off completely. It's going to be a compromise but at least the dumbass is giving him the space he needs.
"Idiot," Chuuya mutters, plopping down on the other side of the bed. He tries to sleep with his back facing Dazai, but after a while, he grows uncomfortable and shifts around until he is on his other side, facing Dazai's back. This feels right.
He also finds himself counting the rise and fall of Dazai's shoulders, his eyes drooping as he is focused on the familiar rhythm of his former partner's breathing. It soothes him.
After a while, when Chuuya is on the edge of sleep, he feels the weight on the bed shift around, until it's dipping near to him. He falls.
***
Dazai lies wide awake.
When he came into this timeline, he expected that all of his haunting thoughts and memories would disappear in a minute.
Instead, they keep reeling in his mind over and over, and he keeps shaking his head, trying to flick the images clambering over each other in his rapidly running brain, and each time, his focus lays onto the sound of Chuuya's breathing to calm himself down; steady and even and audible in the silent night. It's the only thing that soothes the uncomfortable tightness in his chest, the weight at the base of his throat.
When the phantoms of his past grief begin to fray at the edges of his mind again, he looks to Chuuya's chest, the sink and swell of his sleeping body.
Dazai is on his side, cheek half-pressed into the pillows, fixated onto Chuuya's face.
Chuuya has always been a loud and messy sleeper, either sprawled wide on his back or sleeping half on his stomach with his arms under his pillows, taking up too much of the bed and mumbling or snoring in his sleep. It was annoying once, cramped into a single bed in a motel room in overseas missions before their pay could afford them better rooms.
Dazai finds himself smiling a little now. He reaches out a hand and runs the back of his fingers against his cheek.
His chest is now tight in a different way, and his skin sings with an urge for the warmth and solidity of his alive body. All he wants, suddenly, is to hear the beating of his heart. He would have crawled inside Chuuya's chest if he could, in that moment.
He contents himself with just this; a hand running down the bed to curl around Chuuya's slender wrist, thumb tight to the beat of his heart at the inner corner, reminding himself he is still here.
The lub-dub of his pulse loosens the feeling in Dazai's chest. He pulls Chuuya's hand up, presses his face to it and breathes. Chuuya is such a ridiculously heavy sleeper (it has done Dazai favors, mostly for a lot of pranks).
For once, he finds his thoughts have come to something of a still, except for a few strays playing vaguely in the back of his head. For once, he ends up falling asleep hours before dawn, sound and deep.
Chapter 8
Notes:
I wrote a note earlier saying updates might be less regular, but I got this done much sooner than I expected! And I think I can't relax enough to focus on assignments and stuff until I finish this WIP lol, so the next chapter should be up soon
Chapter Text
Chuuya wakes up with a heavy weight on his chest and something furry and ticklish in his mouth and against his neck.
When he spits it out and looks down with a bemused and groggy frown, all he sees is brown, which he soon recognizes as Dazai's gigantic head full of hair.
He has his cheek laid to Chuuya's chest, right over his heart, and he is, to his shock, actually sleeping. But that's not the only thing bewildering about this.
Chuuya shakes the thought of his head quickly. It sounds bizarre, the thought that Dazai might have fallen asleep listening to his heart. The only way this could have happened is that the jackass was cold because he was on top of the covers instead of under it, and gravitated to Chuuya for warmth. It's not the first time they've woken up with their bodies accidentally pressed together in the winter, for convenience in cheap motel rooms or whilst sharing a bed some really bad nights.
It's oddly nostalgic.
He touches a light hand to the side of Dazai's hair, gently slips his fingers under and cards through it, trying not to break the knots in it too hard. He has the intense, out-of-nowhere and extremely embarrassing urge to kiss the top of his stupid head.
When Dazai begins to stir, the mop of brown shifting against his shirt, and his arm under his back, what the fuck — he jerks his hand away as if they got burnt, his face heating.
"What the fuck are you doing?" Chuuya barks, punching his shoulder roughly. Don't let this bastard have been awake, shit, for the love of fuck —
"Hmm?" Dazai asks. He lifts his head, one eye is still closed drowsily and the other pinched and swollen with slumber, brows furrowed. His hair is a complete fucking mess, stray brown locks sticking up all over. He looks so stupid that Chuuya wants to cry.
"Why are you sleeping on me?!" Chuuya is squirming internally with the turmoil of feelings in his chest, the thought of Dazai knowing what he was doing. He expects Dazai to also jolt upright, as disgusted as when they were teens.
Somehow, that's not what happens.
"Chibi makes a nice pillow — ow! My arms!" Dazai seems to have grown aware of his arm under Chuuya's back, his eyes and mouth clenched tight before he buries his face back into Chuuya's chest. The pins and needles cutting through his numbed limb is probably not fun, but one never knows with Dazai. There are a lot of things he thinks are fun that no one should.
"Idiot," Chuuya mumbles. "Get up. I have to go to work."
"Not today," Dazai says cheerfully, raising his head again to look at him. "I have already called Mori to tell him you won't be coming in today."
"You did what?" His voice has gone wild and high at the last word. Clearly, it wasn't a question… because when has Dazai ever asked, and Chuuya has no idea how Boss would have taken that.
The underlying tone of his voice suggests he was definitely not respectful about it.
"Mhm!"
"You can't do that!"
"I just did," Dazai said with his eyes closed sagely, and then his cheek was back against Chuuya's chest. "Now sleep."
Chuuya stares down at the top of his head.
"Seriously, what the hell is going on with you! You're being so weird, shitty Dazai."
"I want to sleep with Chuuya."
"Seriously, you better tell me what the hell is going on right now. Are you messing with me or something?" Chuuya asks. Is this asshole making a fool out of him? Doing all these things that — that Chuuya was maybe too blatantly okay with, taking in stride a little too well (does he know, does he know, does he know)—
Dazai doesn't give an answer.
"Oi! Say something!" Chuuya barks, and when the lack of an answer persists, he wrestles Dazai away from him, "You're freaking me the fuck out!"
The jostling back reveals Dazai's face.
And—
He's not crying, but there is a furrow of distress in his brows and the barest hint of a twist to his features, his eyes hollow and pained, and it's the closest thing — someone like him, it may as well be the equivalent of having a breakdown.
In sheer and panicked confusion, Chuuya just quickly hauls him back in by his biceps, wide-eyed and at a loss.
What the fuck?
This is — this started yesterday, after the whole fiasco with him and the weretiger being in danger at the same time in the worst coincidence. Chuuya thought he was going to die there, those long, infinite minutes he was watching Dazai leave him there... until he stopped.
He stopped and looked back.
He saved him.
This started with the way Dazai looked at him in the infirmary, his face white and as if he was seeing a ghost.
It would have been easy, it Dazai never turned and looked back. It could have happened; Chuuya could have died there. He found his phone broken. The time it took for him to get to the ADA infirmary, settled in the back of Yosano's car against Akutagawa's shoulder, it only kept getting worse, more and more painful. Nobody would have come looking for him until the next morning.
But Atsushi was on the very same edge of death. He doesn't understand what's so different.
"Is this about me nearly dying?" Chuuya asks.
Dazai stays very still against him.
Something suddenly came to him then; a memory. The entire memory of that night had many blanks.
I'm going to need you to hold on and trust me once again, okay?
I'm going to have to leave now, but I swear... I swear I'm not leaving you.
You will be okay, I promise.
Dazai had been holding his hand, all but cradling his body and sheltering it, leaning over him. He was stroking his hair very gently, and he sounded—
Chuuya takes the day off, and he lets him keep clinging to him. He doesn't know what's going on really. He still thinks there's something more that Dazai saw or knew about that night, because nothing else would make sense. Dazai is never one to get fucked up over what-ifs, and very few things could ever make him look like that.
But Chuuya stays. He takes the day off and just stays. He guesses he does have a lot of sleep to catch up on anyway. He has spent these last few months so tired. Kouyou said it's because he has been overworking himself, and it's catching up to him, but because of all the rest days he was taking after Corruption, he wasn't so sure.
He falls asleep and wakes up in the afternoon, and Dazai is still there. He is just lying with his ear to the place where his heart is, and he is grasping loosely at his waist, fingers curled slightly into his shirt. When Chuuya turns his head down subtly, he can see his eyes open, glazed and somewhere afar, deep inside his own head. He has been like that for hours, and looks like he can be there for hours more.
Dazai is a restless man. Nothing can ever still him for long. Even when he is lying about looking lazy or sleeping, Chuuya can imagine his brain is always going overtime, coming up with strategies, mulling and pondering things over.
Chuuya has no idea what comes over him, but probably compelled by these... weird as fuck developments, and Dazai's complete lack of self-consciousness or fear about it all, it all makes it easy for him to push his fingers through Dazai's hair, trying to soothe him and whatever his brain is probably going overtime on now. Dazai can't hold it against him, after all. Not anymore.
What's fucking you up in that giant brain of yours now, huh?
Dazai blinks and looks up at him, his eyes big and brown, almost like a bug sometimes.
Chuuya's fingers stutter in the air, hesitating. Then, like a cat, Dazai pushes his head against his fingers, bringing up a hand even to press them to his hair, a soundless cue for more of it.
Maybe it's weird, but not in a bad way.
Not in a bad way at all.
***
Well. Maybe it's a bit annoying.
They spend the day playing all the video games they used to play and then the latest, and Dazai forces Chuuya to make him crab for lunch, since they missed breakfast.
By forced, he means that Dazai whined and pestered Chuuya until he was yelling, "fine! Fucking fine! Shit, you're insufferable."
Dazai smiles widely in that stupid fake cutesy way he did, sitting on the couch. Chuuya rolls his eyes and goes into the kitchen.
Not a minute after, Dazai follows after him, hopping up on the counter and making moronic comments like, Chuuya's such a good housewife, or something or the other.
"Call me your housewife again and this knife is going in your gut, you asshole!"
"Oh? Well, how about personal maid then? Chuuya still hasn't worn that outfit I so kindly bought him when we were sixteen—"
Chuuya, being thoroughly irritated at this point, threatens, "Just shut the fuck up or I'll burn your crab."
"But that's Chuuya's hard work."
"But you won't get any crab," Chuuya says in a mockery of Dazai's tone, standing at the stove and adding all the spices in.
The silence that follows is surprising. When Chuuya looks over, Dazai is just looking at him, his head tilted very slightly, his hands loosely clasped between his thighs as his bare feet just barely brush the floor. His eyes are strange, almost liquid. There is the barest hint of a quirk at a corner of his mouth.
"What?" Chuuya asks, brows knitting. In a second, he grows wary, trying to read whatever the bastard's scheming in his head.
"Nothing," Dazai says, and it's very quiet, something imperceptible in his voice and the heaviness of the air around him, "Nothing at all." He pushes off the counter. "I need a shower."
Chuuya stares after him as he leaves. He is himself, annoying as ever, and yet nothing like himself at all. There are times he has seemed so different and odd in these last many hours that Chuuya feels as if he is talking to someone else. His irritating and teasing persona feels like just another one of his masks rather than the genuine delight he used to gain from pissing Chuuya off.
Chuuya has learned long ago he can wrench his teeth out trying to pry the answers from him, but Dazai only talks when Dazai wants to talk.
And that is, sadly, rare, almost never.
***
The day passes almost without Chuuya even noticing, just that it was with Dazai, talking shit, bantering, cooking, playing games, and finally, watching a movie before bed.
It feels so much like the old times that it hurts.
It hurts to know that it won't last, that Dazai will, inevitably, leave again, and they will just be former partners encountering each other occasionally on the streets, or paired up for missions, and not this, where Dazai spends hours at this apartment laughing and smiling (genuinely) and sidling up close to Chuuya on the couch.
There are times Chuuya tries to bring up yesterday again, and Dazai derails the conversation. Dazai talks only when Dazai wants to talk.
And yet Chuuya is supposed to just… act like this is nothing out of the ordinary.
"Wait, I want to be the big spoon," Dazai says with a petulant frown, hair riding up against Chuuya's chest, pushing off of Chuuya. He knows he is making this as embarrassing as possible on purpose, because Chuuya is the only one who gets embarrassed about anything. Dazai? He doesn't even know the word exists.
Chuuya, like the pathetic bleeding heart fucking idiot that he is, does play along, just because he keeps thinking about the infirmary, this morning when he asked him if it was about him nearly dying.
Chuuya rolls his eyes and sighs and lets him jostle around the bed to get them into a position that he's satisfied with. Dazai ends up against Chuuya's back, gripping him around the waist with his nose pressed to the nape of his neck.
Maybe part of why Chuuya isn't saying anything about it is also because — shit — he likes this. He likes being touched and held by Dazai like this, something he'd never even thought was possible except in his imagination.
But, he reiterates, it doesn't stop it from being absolutely fucking annoying sometimes.
"Actually, no," Dazai says suddenly, his head perking up, "I want to be the small spoon."
"Make up your fucking mind already!" Chuuya snaps, as Dazai, for the third fucking time, shifts around on the bed, now again with his ear to Chuuya's chest, tucked into his side. Chuuya stares up at the ceiling with a heavy breath, running a hand through his hair.
After a long minute, with Chuuya on edge about the dumbass changing his mind again —
"This," Dazai says sleepily, and all of Chuuya's anger drains out of him in an instant at that sweet voice, sounding at peace, "Hmm."
"What's with you and heartbeats?" Chuuya asks, running a hand through his brown wavy hair, because that was just what they did now, he guesses. His heart is jittery and warm in his chest in a nice way.
"So Chuuya can give me a head massage while I sleep."
"Who the fuck said I was gonna do that?"
Dazai pushes his head into his hand insistently, humming in contentment.
Why does he always give in to this jerk's whims, damn it?!
***
The next morning, he wakes up to Dazai's stupid face right in his face, both his hands framing his cheeks wholly with one long index finger behind his ear and his thumbs on his cheeks, staring at him with his dumb bug eyes. It's a bit creepy, actually, but what isn't creepy with the mackerel?
"You're being weird again," Chuuya says, his voice hoarse with sleep.
That, as Chuuya has come to expect, doesn't deter Dazai at all. He is looking at him as if he is remapping his features, drinking him in, a small, guileless smile (a smile that is, very often, not at all guileless, but somehow it feels genuine right now). Chuuya understands the reason for the feeling.
Dazai looks happy to be looking at Chuuya. It makes him squirmy on the inside — discomfort as well as something else entirely.
"What's with that look?" Chuuya asks, when he doesn't know what to do with this. His voice comes out as one trying to be snippy but is instead falling weak. He turns away, unable to hold the bright and intense eye contact.
"Chuuya is pretty."
Chuuya startles, eyes wide and snapping back to him.
"What did you say?"
"Chuuya is pretty." Dazai is looking at him shamelessly, unwaveringly, even after saying that.
His eyes drop to Dazai's mouth, back up to his eyes, swallowing.
"Is that a confession?" It's meant to be disguised entirely as a joke, but it falls flat.
Dazai stares at him, blinking.
Then he tears his gaze away, laughing, head hanging between his shoulders.
"Oi, what's so funny!?" Chuuya flushes, and suddenly he's wondering if maybe Dazai really is just fucking with him at this point.
Dazai's shoulders still and he looks up, smiling. His face is even closer, his chin resting on the space between Chuuya's collarbones. "I just think it should be obvious by now."
Chuuya scowls and turns his head away.
He thinks about it, however, and maybe it should be; the shameless flirting, calling him pretty, the way Dazai can't seem to keep his hands off of him (holding his face the way he just did now), always touching him somewhere and wanting to be close to him.
There's the way he keeps looking at him.
Like in the kitchen yesterday. He reads it now, like a language he can suddenly understand with the context given to him. The look on Dazai's face was tender.
Could it really be?
Dazai is now moving up on his wrist to Chuuya's chest, hovering his face over his. His eyes fall to Chuuya's mouth, half-lidded and mellow, a breath apart.
Four years ago, Chuuya realized he was in love with this asshole and, at the very same time, began to believe that he meant nothing to Dazai at all, not because he left, but because he didn't consider him important enough to even say goodbye.
A few months ago, the first time Dazai left him in a field, he dragged himself back home sick with pain and weakness, furious and also embarrassed about having assumed they would be anything like the partners they used to be, that Dazai would go to such lengths for him anymore. After that, he tried to distance himself outwardly a bit more, even if there wasn't much he could do to change his internal feelings for him — convoluted as they were with pain and anger.
Now two days ago, Dazai held him on his lap again for the first time in four years. He called someone for him and stayed with him until someone reached him, all while under the impossible and tremendous pressure and panic of needing to save someone who was important to him.
He seems, these days, as if he needs to be close to Chuuya all the time.
Still, two days isn't a lot, is it?
"How do I know you'll stay?" Chuuya asks, in a low voice. Dazai is not the kind of person who stays.
When Chuuya says stay, he doesn't mean physically. He just means…
When Dazai stops being bothered by whatever's on his mind, will his behavior change? Will he go back to the way he was months ago again? With Dazai, one never knows. His feelings and interests fluctuate like the temper of the sea.
"I'll stay for you," Dazai says. The impact is in the way he says you. There is no joke around this.
"Why should I believe you?"
"Maybe you shouldn't yet. But I'd like to prove it to you, if you can let me."
"Are you ever gonna tell me why the sudden change?"
"Some day."
"I can't think of anything that happened that was so drastic that you'd… I almost died, but that's not the first time. It's not the first time you left me in some kinda danger either, so I don't get it."
"It's the first time you — " Dazai falters, and it's confusing, "the first time you almost died because I left you in danger."
He takes a breath.
"Usually, I have a plan. I calculate things down as much as I possibly can with the uncertainty of the future. It's not always accurate, like with Professor N, I really meant to find you before he got to hurt you, but I admit I also knew I might not. Even then, it's always within the realms that I know you'll be alive when I get to you. When I leave you after you use Corruption, I stay long enough to make sure you will be okay and the area is safe. While looking for your hat and coats, I scour everything. But this time… it really could have gone wrong."
Chuuya looks away. He can't deny it sucks, believing his once partner left him in danger deliberately. He knows he can generally take care of himself and that Dazai knows that better than anyone, but it always left him with the question of how far Dazai would let things go for his plans or entertainment.
It's the first time he's hearing that the bastard actually does take measures to make sure he isn't leaving him in any true danger, and that he does try as much as possible to prevent his plans from hurting him, even if he fails.
"To be clear," Dazai adds, "I am not saying these are favors I have bestowed on you. I just need you to know that... even when I was trying not to, I never stopped." I never stopped caring about you.
Chuuya stares at him, slightly wide-eyed.
They've never been straightforward like this about how they felt. Through anger, sure… but hurt, never. Chuuya would never have spoken of his own troubles. It felt embarrassing, because it just wasn't their dynamic, and he always imagined Dazai would laugh and make fun of him if he tried. So he never did.
But here Dazai is, explaining his feelings so openly, displaying vulnerability, admitting that he could have fucked up, which is a feat.
"It," Chuuya starts, "It doesn't feel great though… when you leave me like that after..." He trails off.
Using Corruption is the one and only time he is fully dependent on Dazai. He thinks that's why it has always felt so awful to wake up alone.
"I guess I know it wasn't your job," Chuuya ends up saying, in a low voice. He understands that. He does.
Why does it hurt so much then?
"Logically," Dazai says, "Going to the extraction point with you puts me at risk. I can never trust..." He closes his eyes. His voice is thick with disgust around the next words, "I can never trust Mori, you see." Chuuya has long stopped expecting that he'll find out what his problem with Mori is. "But none of this is really logical, is it? And I could, alternatively, take you back home. At the root of this, it makes you feel like I don't care about you. Am I wrong?"
Since when did this bastard understand the way he felt better than he himself did?
"I don't give a shit how you feel about me," Chuuya tries to deflect, but it's just stupid and weak at this point, especially after these two days, after already having given his feelings up. But it's the only thing he can say that doesn't make him feel like even more of a exposed and raw nerve than he already is.
Dazai's eyes are knowing, and Chuuya hates it. "Chuuya. I really am sorry, for everything."
It takes Chuuya some time to absorb the fact that Dazai Osamu even knew the word sorry.
Let alone that he sounded so sincere.
"And when you let Corruption go on even after the job's over? Because that always feels like it was just a step away from you saying fuck it and letting me — "
Dazai presses his fingers over his mouth, to stop him from finishing it.
"I didn't. I only said that as a joke to make you angry. It's true that it did go on too long that day, but that was because it did take a long time to defeat Lovecraft, not because I let it go on for my own amusement. Chuuya... I always get to you as fast as I can."
Chuuya blinks.
This begs the question then. If Dazai hasn't really been letting it go on so long, why did it get so bad that night?
"You sound like you thought about this way too much, Mackerel."
"Every day I — " Dazai cuts off immediately, blinking, as if he has come back from somewhere else inside his head.
"Every day?"
"I have been callous, right? I played with your life too much. It's not like I don't think about that. Sometimes I don't realize I'm being callous with people, and sometimes I don't care if I am… in this case I was just selfish and I found it more important to protect myself, to not risk getting closer to you again only to find out I'm not welcome in your life."
There is still so much to unpack it's overwhelming to think about.
"Look at this." Chuuya smirks. "Never thought I'd see the day, the emotionally repressed mackerel apologizing and talking about his feelings."
With that, it's over for now, trying to lighten the mood.
Dazai smiles back slightly, brushing his nose against his. His eyes are closed. "They are all things I didn't get to say."
Chuuya frowns, yet again bemused by his words, but Dazai kisses him and Chuuya just melts into it under him, forgotten. He wraps his arms around Dazai's neck.
It starts soft, and chaste, and then slowly into a hungry kind of kiss. Dazai holds his face wholly in his hands as if he is precious and kisses him as if he is pouring everything in himself into him, Chuuya himself swimming in many emotions that are only finding an outlet in this.
After a while, Dazai lets go of the kiss and holds him, pushes his cold nose into his neck. He just holds him like that. Even after the conversation they had today, it feels as if there is still something on his mind.
Chapter Text
They're on a mission requiring Double Black, and Chuuya only has to hear about the objectives and details of who they're after to understand that Boss has the full expectation that Chuuya would use Corruption for this.
The unexpected twist is that there is a giant bomb.
Still, Dazai does not seem concerned about it. He is confident that they can deal with it.
Dazai comes up with a strategy, and it's not perfect but it's decent. They have to fight against a large army of various strong ability users to deactivate a giant bomb that could take out a quarter of Yokohama, including the Port Mafia territory itself. Deactivating the bomb is the easy part. Getting to the bomb — that's hard.
Chuuya had refused to bring any of his men. They would be powerless in this mission, and would only end up being collateral damage. All of their ability users were busy suppressing and dealing with other factions of the organization in other areas, including shin soukoku and the Black Lizard.
As a principle, ever since their mafia days, Dazai has always tried to stop Chuuya from using Corruption unless it was all they had. He has only ever suggested it as a last resort.
In Chuuya's mind, it's the same principle at work right now when he suggests Corruption and Dazai says, "There is no need for that, Chuuya. We only need a number of strategies to get through, and I have them."
"We got less than an hour," Chuuya says, staring up at the bomb from where they are hiding. "We can't get through them that fast no matter how well planned your strategies are."
"Just trust me," Dazai says. "Do as I say."
"Like your dog, hah?" Chuuya drawls, with half-lidded eyes, hands on his hips with his shoulders cocked back.
Dazai smirks, tugs at his choker with a finger, "That's right." Chuuya smacks his hand away.
It seems to be going well for a while. Dazai's using all the right strategies for every ability user, for every cluster of them. He seems to have planned everything down to a T — nothing new with him, and Chuuya thinks they can do this. They can win this without needing Corruption at all.
It turns out, unmentioned in any of the data they have gathered about the organization, that they bring out a giant, genetically mutated monster. Like Lovecraft, it does not get nullified by Dazai's ability, and is resistant to Chuuya's gravitons.
Dazai has gone pale, looking up at the monster that has remained unaffected by his touch, heaving for air from all the running. It's at least slow, so Dazai managed to get past, though not without Chuuya barrelling into him from behind to save him from its swinging arm, grabbing Dazai by the waist to stand him up to his feet and help him retreat into a hiding spot. The time on the bomb is showing that they have twenty-five minutes.
Dazai never reacts like that at such outcomes. Even when it feels like there is nothing left, he just laughs and says, it's time to give up. Let's just die.
And then he says something along the lines of:
"I guess there's only one answer now, huh?" Chuuya is the one to say it this time, glancing at Dazai.
In these last two months, he has started to grow a bit nauseated at the thought of using Corruption, with the shape it has been leaving Chuuya in each time, and now even more so after what happened the last time.
He finds it's somewhat helpful to prepare everything beforehand, for any mission that seems like they might end up having to use Corruption, especially any Double Black missions.
Before leaving for the mission, Chuuya sets a cooler full of ice at the floor beside his bed and a bowl with water and a washcloth for fevers, along with a trash bin for vomiting, tissues for bleeding from his nose or if he coughs up blood. There are meds and painkillers set on his nightstand and a jug of water, light foods prepared and stored in the fridge (though he usually doesn't manage to move for days to be able to get to it, or has to force himself to eat it cold because he doesn't have the energy to heat it). He did it today too, while Dazai was out for work.
In the end, what does it matter how unready he is to go through that again, in the face of the Port Mafia and a quarter of Yokohoma getting destroyed?
He stares up at the creature, the bomb guarded behind it. There is no other way. He sighs and begins to pull at his gloves.
"No."
The response, so abrupt and adamant, the hand that grabs his wrist tightly — it rattles through Chuuya.
That is not how this usually goes.
Chuuya stares at Dazai, bewildered.
"There's no other way to get through them. Dazai, listen — while I'm taking care of this trash, you gotta sneak in to get to the control of the bomb, but be careful. Got it?"
"No Corruption. Just... just give me a minute. I'm thinking of something."
"Dazai..."
"Just shut up for a minute," Dazai snaps. His grip on Chuuya's wrist is tight, and his eyes are fixated on a spot, his chest moving shallowly, still out of breath from how fast he had run to try and nullify the beast before discovering its nature and trying to escape. He is leaning against the wall behind him, so he is almost at eye-level with Chuuya.
Chuuya rolls his eyes and exhales. He gives him a minute, but time is precious right now.
"Did you think of anything? Because I can't give you more than that. We're down to twenty four minutes now."
Dazai's grip tightens even more around Chuuya, and now it's starting to hurt. Chuuya maintains composure even through that pain.
Then Chuuya notices Dazai's hand is trembling again, like in the infirmary.
"Dazai?" Chuuya says, brows furrowed with the worry curdling in his stomach. It never fails to freak him out, seeing him like this. He grabs his face. "Hey. What—"
"I can't think," Dazai whispers, and that distress, weighing down his wide eyes, "I can't think."
Dazai. Always ten steps ahead Dazai.
"That's okay," Chuuya tells him, leaves one cheek to stroke Dazai's hair, "Hey, that's okay."
"No it's not," Dazai grits out, "I swore I'd never let you use it again."
Chuuya frowns.
Dazai is blinking, gaze darting around, as if trying to come back to himself from somewhere else, or keep himself here and away from wherever that is. Chuuya knows that look. He has seen it in himself and many others, to be lost in some terrible memory.
It always come down to this, to what had almost happened last time, but Chuuya never guessed that Dazai would be so affected that he decided Chuuya should never use it again. Even Chuuya never considered that he shouldn't.
"We have no other choice."
"No, Chuuya please—" Dazai breathes, and if Chuuya thought the last time he saw a face like this on him was awful, he was wrong. The face in front of him right now was even worse.
A plea from Dazai. Well, shit. That went right through Chuuya's heart like a knife.
It twists deeper to have to say, "I'm sorry, Osamu. I'm so sorry. But people, including my people, are going to die if I don't — "
When he glances over at the bomb, they are down to twenty-two minutes now. The creature is wreaking havoc around them, and all the ability users have disappeared, leaving the guarding to the creature. Chuuya knew that was bound to happen. They were decoys after all and this creature was the real thing, but it still would have been good to get some of them.
"You'll save me, right? You always save me," Chuuya says, his hands brushing over his cheeks feather-light.
Dazai's expression is that of one saying, that's not the problem here.
Even so, he breathes shakily, and stands upright with a stagger. His hands hold Chuuya's shoulders.
"Ten minutes," Dazai says, "in ten minutes, I'll get the bomb deactivated, and then I'm coming to nullify you."
It should be enough. The creature doesn't look like it can regenerate the way Lovecraft can.
Chuuya pulls him down by a hand on the nape of his neck and kisses him hard, so hard it bobs Dazai's head back. Chuuya lets him go and smirks at him, and it soothes something in Dazai's face.
"Don't be late," Chuuya says, and with his gloved hand on Dazai's shoulder, pushes himself back with an outstretch of his arm. He is gone from his space by the next few seconds, Dazai's eyes following him.
As Chuuya stalks slowly towards the creature, he slides his gloves off his fingers. Around him, the gravitons rise in the air, suspended.
"O grantors of Dark Disgrace… you need not wake me again."
***
The mission is a success.
Dazai detonates the bomb and Chuuya manages to destroy the creature in seven minutes. Unfortunately, on his way to the bomb, the fight between Chuuya and the beast results in the fall of large debri, and upon trying to jump out of the way, ends up spraining his ankle. But it doesn't stop him from deactivating the bomb and reaching Chuuya within the next two minutes.
He ambushes Chuuya from behind, grasping him around the belly and pulling him in tight, startling him into silence from his maniacal screams and laughter.
"Rest now, Chuuya," he says, holding him closer, as the red swirls on Chuuya's skin begin to disappear, tracing back the path they made before.
Chuuya falls back against Dazai, and Dazai catches him and lowers him down to the ground, nearly losing his balance in the process in trying to keep all the weight on one ankle.
Chuuya's nose and mouth are bleeding, but not his eyes and ears, which hopefully means it's less bad than usual. The length of time does determine how bad the aftermath will be, but to an extent. It's more about how much power Chuuya exerted within that time frame, and that's why it's never quite linear. It's somewhat unpredictable, and Dazai doesn't like unpredictable things.
Dazai leans over him, Chuuya's head on the folded coat. He wants to take him onto his lap, like in their younger days, but the sprained ankle makes that difficult.
"You hurt?" Chuuya rasps, glancing down at the way he is sitting as if to keep weight off his ankle.
"Sprained ankle," Dazai replies in a low voice, just between their faces, "Don't worry about it. How is Chuuya feeling? Scale of 1-10."
Chuuya breathes, as if surprised by how not bad it is, "Ah… a 5 actually." It's the wonders of Yosano's ability, entirely resetting his body.
"Better than your usual 7," Dazai says with a smile, relieved.
"Haven't passed out yet either. That's good, right?" He is speaking in complete sentences instead of fragmented, forced out. It's only that his voice is feeble, hoarse.
"Hmm." Dazai runs a hand through his hair soothingly.
***
Dazai reaches inside his pocket for a handkerchief and begins to clean the blood off Chuuya's face, gentle scrubs below his nose, over his chin, down his neck. Chuuya is looking at him with eyes that are as tired as they are fond. He brings up a hand to Dazai's cheek.
Dazai smiles. He is looking down at him, and they are drinking in their fill of each other, comforted by the presence and touch. This is familiar, this quietness between two partners that know each other just by the sound of their breathing, feelings now weighed and deepened with more. This feels as old as themselves.
Dazai's hands feel good on him, and his presence, but it feels like borrowed time, like he has to savor it quickly and as much as he can before it ends. They soothe the sickly, dark feelings that Arahabaki leaves behind in his chest, somewhere to his core.
It feels good.
The truth is that he hates being alone after Corruption. He hates waking up alone. It's a truth that has always left him feeling weak.
Chuuya swallows, his drooping eyes roving over Dazai's face — his face that is so soft, and Chuuya could get used to it, has been getting used to it.
I'll stay for you.
He thinks Dazai would stay, if he asked. He just needs to ask.
But…
Ah, but Chuuya can bother me, right?
"You should get started," Chuuya whispers, but he can feel the hunger in his heart, his eyes feasting on him, "On the walk home. It's gettin' late."
Dazai's sprained ankle will make it even harder for him to get there, so the sooner he starts, the better.
He has thought about that memory a lot through his initial anger and embarrassment, and when the anger died away. He has thought about it, and Dazai was right.
If he won't ask anyone else to bother with him, then he shouldn't expect it of Dazai either to take him home or to the extraction point. His expectations from the years of their old partnership grew inflated and too deep rooted, and he forgot in those months before they got together, after they reunited. But after the conversation, there are things he has come to realize.
During Lovecraft, Dazai was injured. In every other mission, he must have been exhausted too, just as overworked at the ADA as his subordinates that Chuuya was reluctant to call on. Not to mention, after Dazai explained about him not trusting Mori — Chuuya doesn't know the details, but he knew there has always been something tense and cold between them — it makes sense he wouldn't take that risk.
He knows he loves the bastard enough now to be glad that he'll be resting or — hopefully but unlikely — sleeping in a comfortable and warm bed.
And anyway, he knows now that Dazai will check everything and make sure there's no enemy left here. The ability users have to have long evacuated the place, considering they didn't want to be blown up too, and the place is so devastated at this point that he doubts they'll come back. Regardless, Dazai will make sure he'd be safe here.
"I'll stay," is what Dazai whispers back, smiling slightly. He takes Chuuya's hand from his cheek and presses a kiss to the palm of it.
***
Chuuya laughs a little, tugging at the swell of a purple bruise on the corner of his mouth, "You sure about that? Floor's shitty as hell, and s'so cold…"
Dazai's smile falters.
The ground of a clearing, trailing a long line of blood; leading up to a limp hand, fingers frozen in a loose curl.
He was so cold in his arms.
"I'm sure," Dazai answers quietly.
Chuuya grows serious. "There's no point in you stayin' here too, if you can go. Nothing you can do about me being here anyway with that ankle of yours."
"We can call someone," Dazai suggests, in a tone that's clearly saying you're being an idiot by refusing to do that.
Chuuya shakes his head. "Leave it. I bet they're all busy dealing with the rest of the organization right now. But listen… you do whatever you can to make sure it's all clear, and then go home after." He appears to be growing steadily drowsier.
"Why are you saying that now?"
There's a brief silence.
"You remember what you said? Last time I asked you to take me home?"
Ah, but Chuuya can bother me, right?
One of the many things he wished he had never said, in those months he didn't have Chuuya anymore.
"You were right. If I'm not bothering anyone else 'bout it, then why you?"
Because we're partners, is the answer that threads through Dazai's mind. It is a thought that is thick in his throat like glue. He swallows.
Chuuya sees him and makes a tch sound.
"Damn it, you idiot. I didn't bring that up to make you feel guilty. It was a fair point. Listen, there's no point in you stayin' with me here, okay?"
Dazai thinks of Chuuya, drowning in his own blood. He thinks of him saying I hate being alone and I'm not afraid of dying, but I don't wanna die alone, you know? And he thinks of him dying alone, scared in the dark, thinking of things that left tears drying at the corners of his eyes, frozen in death. He thinks of Kouyou saying, he always did say he meant nothing to you.
He loved you. He was head over heels in love with you.
He can't stop thinking about these things. He thinks about them every day, and it always reminds him.
"There doesn't have to be," Dazai tells him, the thing he wished he knew in the other timeline instead, "I love Chuuya, and there doesn't have to be." He laughs, wry and mirthless, "Who else would you bother, if not those that love you?"
The words sober Chuuya up significantly, leave him frozen by them for a long moment.
Then, there's a breath of a small smile, slow growing and in his blue, tired eyes.
"You'd know a lot about that, huh, shitty Dazai?" He doesn't say it back, but he doesn't have to. Dazai knows already, just from the way he is smiling and looking at him, and from Kouyou's words, of course. "Bet you drive your little agency batshit too, like you do me."
So this is how he is saying it back, so indirectly. I love you too.
"That's right," Dazai says with a proud smile. "But Chuuya most of all."
Dazai shrugs off his coat and lies down beside Chuuya, careful of his ankle. He drapes it over both of them, but Chuuya is not near enough for it to cover them completely. Chuuya shifts a little to come closer, and winces.
"What's wrong? Does something hurt a lot?"
"No, just kinda sore. Like I said, floor's shitty as hell."
"Ah."
So Dazai maneuvers him with his hands, with some confused help from Chuuya letting himself be led by his cues and tugs, until Chuuya is lying on top of him, one arm trapped between their chests, the other resting on his collarbone. Dazai's arm wraps around his back. Now it's easy to drape his tan coat over the two of them, so they are both covered and protected from the cold.
"Better?" Dazai asks, craning his neck to look down into his face, one hand light at Chuuya's tancoated back.
"Yeah... but isn't this gonna be uncomfortable as hell for you?" Chuuya asks. His nose is running blood again. It does that sometimes, randomly for days after using Corruption. He must have felt the trickle, seeing it soak on Dazai's vest, reaching up with his fingers. "Ah, shit."
"Chuuya is so tiny I don't even feel him on me," Dazai says with a dismissive wave of his hand, and uses the bandages on his hand to wipe the blood away, unbothered. (Gross, Chuuya mumbles. Dazai isn't bothered by touching Chuuya's blood, old time partners and all, having all but lived in it. He is a bit bothered by Chuuya bleeding these days though. He has held his corpse, once, and seen more of it than he could stand to see.)
Chuuya laughs, soundless movement through his shoulders and chest. "You're the worst. Don't regret it in the morning."
The truth is Chuuya isn't exactly light, but it's fine. Dazai finds that the weight of Chuuya on him is actually grounding. It's mildly suffocating, but well, Dazai has a lot of practice in tolerating (well, even enjoying) suffocation. What's important is that it calms him down a lot, after the events of today.
"Ne, Chuuya?"
"Hmm." Chuuya sounds on the verge of sleep.
"Bother me. Stay with me and bother me, whenever you need me."
After a while, "You too." It's muffled into Dazai's chest. "Don' die, 'kay?" Chuuya is talking about his suicidal tendencies. He is saying, come to me, bother me, but don't let me lose you. They are both dying inside in different ways; a mind that wants to kill itself, a god that wants to kill its body, and Chuuya is saying the same thing Dazai is to him.
Grief is the best teacher on how to value those you love, Dazai thinks, in the silence, the sound of Chuuya's breathing ( alive, alive, alive ) — a lilt of soft squeaks when he inhales, a small snore when he exhales, his nose buried into Dazai's vest.
However, the catch is always that it's too late by then. You can only use this lesson you've learned to love others, then, but never the one you lost.
Dazai is the only one lucky enough to reverse this.
He has never thought himself capable of it. This burden is heavy, and difficult, and absolutely terrifying.
He looks down at Chuuya's face with an awkward crane of his neck, tucking a red strand of hair behind his ear.
But it's worth carrying. It's worth carrying. It's better than not getting to carry it at all.
Chapter 10
Notes:
Hii! Finally finished. I had more plans for the chapter but tbh I'm tired and want to just get it done, so it's just tying up some loose ends. Maybe I'll come back some day and write more but for now, here it is
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
Chuuya's phone is ringing. Dazai keeps his grip around Chuuya as he digs into Chuuya's pocket for it.
Akutagawa's name flashes on the screen. Dazai answers.
"Chuuya-san, I have called to report—"
"Ah, sorry! Chuuya's out for the count right now, but I can pass it on when he wakes up, if you like?"
"...Dazai-san?"
"The one and only."
"What happened?"
"Corruption, of course."
Dazai tells Akutagawa all about it.
He plans to tell everyone who cares about Chuuya everything, so they will know what to expect whenever they are told he is away on a mission with Dazai, so they will be there to take care of him on the off-chance Dazai can't stay with him.
So that nothing like that night ever happens here.
Fuck Mori and his conviction to keep this a secret, his orders that Chuuya never tell anyone and even those closest to him, to keep him so isolated in this regard. Chuuya can at least tell the people he trusts.
"That was what it was, that night? I assumed it was an injury."
"It wasn't."
"I see."
"Think you could do us a favor?"
"Of course, Dazai-san."
It is an excellent opportunity for Dazai to make his request without going against Chuuya's wishes. He didn't call anyone, after all!
And anyway, Chuuya may have qualms about disturbing his subordinates to ridiculous extents, but Dazai sure doesn't.
Akutagawa reaches them within half an hour. He looks tired, but not weak and breathless as if he has overexerted himself.
Dazai carefully sits up with Chuuya, which is a bit difficult with him leaning almost entirely into Dazai's front and doing it with only one foot.
"Your ankle," Akutagawa says, frowning. It looks purple and swollen.
"Just take him home. I'll follow with the car."
Dazai helps Akutagawa take Chuuya from him, one arm under his back, the other under his knees.
"Heh. Chuuya's not going to be happy about me calling you here."
Akutagawa seems curious. "Is that so?"
"Hmm. You know him. He doesn't like calling anyone in the middle of the night just to come get him."
"I didn't know that," Akutagawa says, tilting his head. "Well, Dazai-san… you may tell him what I tell you now:" Dazai knows even before he says it, and feels the slight smile tugging at a corner of his mouth. He remembers Akutagawa sitting on the opposite side of the grave, telling him the very same thing, Chuuya's words to him circling back. "I would prefer to come and get him in the middle of the night than see him dead the next morning."
***
Dazai notices the house.
He notices the bath already prepared, the change of clothes folded. He notices the bowl of water and washcloth and a jug and a tissue box on the nightstand, the cooler of ice and a trashbin on the floor beside his bed, light foods in the fridge.
It takes Dazai a while to understand the unsettling feeling.
It's the understanding that Chuuya was prepared to be left behind again.
***
When Chuuya wakes up, it's to a gentle, lingering kiss on his mouth. His lips twitch in a sleepy hint of a smile.
He opens his eyes.
Dazai is lying in front of him, his face half-hidden by the pillow. The morning light is streaming in through the window, framing his body.
The smile gradually gets replaced by a bemused frown.
Chuuya is in a bed. His clothes are changed into comfortable pyjamas and a shirt, and he smells fresh and clean. Dazai has a sprained ankle. The memories are returning to him now.
"How...?"
"Akutagawa. For the record, I didn't call him. He called you first! And so of course it came up and I had to tell him what happened. Don't worry, I only asked him to take you home. I got here by myself. Also, Akutagawa thinks you're an idiot."
"Does he?" Chuuya drawls. Akutagawa would never speak to him like that.
"He didn't say it, but he was clearly thinking it. He also told me to tell you this: he'd rather come and get you in the middle of the night than see you dead the next morning."
Chuuya blinks. It's his own words to Akutagawa, coming back to him.
"Did he change me too?"
"No. He just helped with the bath. I changed you. Nothing I haven't seen as your partner!"
"Ugh, shut the fuck up."
The humor on Dazai's face softens into seriousness. "Can I ask you something?"
"Yeah."
"You know you've done the same for your friends more than once. Why don't you think they would want to do the same for you?"
"Honestly, ah..." Chuuya says with an odd laugh, "I don't know?"
"Tachihara is in love with you—" Dazai says.
"Hah?! Fuck off, no he's not—"
"You juuust need to call him, maybe with a sultry little voice too, and he'll drop everything and come running right for you!"
Chuuya is stunned, his cheeks flushed.
"How do you know he is?"
Dazai laughs at his flustered expression, unable to help himself. "Are you really going to ask me that?"
Chuuya rolls his eyes, but mutters, I guess not.
"Akutagawa respects and admires you, second only to myself. He has already said he's willing. You don't think he'll come for you if you ask? That he'd rather know for sure you're okay where you are? I don't think you have doubts about Kouyou. You're an idiot for not at least relying on her."
In the Sheep before Chuuya learned to fight well enough to protect himself, none of his friends wanted to be burdened by him. If he got hurt somewhere alone, if he called someone at night, they asked him if it was life threatening. If the answer was no, they said they'd get him later then because they were tired — which had sounded fair enough to Chuuya, if he was calling them at fuck-o-clock in the night to come and take him back to their base. They all believed he was strong and powerful enough, and he agreed within himself that it was his responsibility to protect them and not the other way around. They had all done enough for him anyway.
But somewhere along the way, he'd started to internalize something from it; his pain was not important enough to bother anyone else with it. Nobody likes to be burdened, and that's true… but when someone he cares about calls him for help, he always does what has to be done without a second thought, compelled by the need to make sure they would be okay and safe.
Why couldn't he imagine anyone else feeling that way for him too?
He understands now, where it comes from.
He also understands why he began to expect it of Dazai to care for him if he was in pain (even if that's just taking him back home). Dazai was the only one he knew who ever had.
This was a part of why Chuuya had felt the gentleness of his fingers so keenly as he cleaned the blood off his face, Dazai holding him in his lap with Chuuya's head under his chin and trying to distract him from his pain with stupid jokes, and realized, suddenly with the force of a hurricane, that he was in love with him.
"You're so weird these days, you know that?"
"Hmm. So you keep saying."
"Why do you sound like you understand the way I feel better than I do?"
Dazai smiles. "I am your partner. I know you better than anyone."
"Yeah, but… you were like a brick when it came to shit like this. You're gonna have to tell me about your sudden metamorphosis."
"Big word for Chuuya's tiny brain."
"Shut up, you bastard. Seriously, what happened?"
Dazai's smile wilts slightly at the edges. He looks down at their hands, entangled together between them on the bed.
"Hey," Chuuya says, softer. He touches Dazai's chin with a knuckle. It must have broken through something.
"You died."
Dazai's voice is so quiet it's nearly a croak.
That is the last thing Chuuya expects.
It makes no sense at all.
"What?"
Dazai tells him everything; from the beginning to the end. He tells him about another timeline, where Chuuya died, about the Port Mafia — all his friends and loved ones and a myriad of people — blaming Dazai for his death and wanting to kill him for it. He tells Chuuya about finding the Book, in which he returned to that pivotal moment that changed everything.
It takes Chuuya a very long time to process it, and Dazai lets him in absolute silence. It's hard to wrap his head around it. It's almost impossible to imagine something like that even happened, that the Dazai in front of him had witnessed him dying in a world that only he knew of, that he lived without him for months, that he reversed time to change it. Chuuya thinks he might never actually be able to absorb it wholly.
Even so, distantly, Chuuya also understands that it makes more sense than anything he has been imagining for Dazai's drastic shift in personality and behavior; how clingy Dazai has been, how much gentler, how he seems to understand his feelings better even before Chuuya tells him, why he was so terrified when Chuuya had to use Corruption.
How he stayed.
"When they told me you died, I laughed." There is a note of self reproach, a rueful tightness to the corners of his mouth. "I couldn't believe it. I thought it was just another one of Mori's schemes, you see."
Chuuya is puzzled. "Boss wouldn't..."
"He would." Dazai's expression has gone cold, unwavering, as he looks at him. "He has."
Chuuya's face falls.
Dazai then tells him about the metastatic growth in his body, borne from the years of using Corruption. The reason why Chuuya feels so much better and like himself than he has in months is because Yosano's ability reset his body entirely.
"Mori lied to you. He thought you couldn't be saved and wanted to utilize you to the fullest before your death."
***
Chuuya is silent for a long time. His eyes are fixated on the ceiling. The pain of this betrayal is slow-growing in his eyes, the doleful frown. Dazai circles his thumb over the back of his hand.
"What do you want to do about him?"
"I don't know."
"Chuuya... just say the word, and I'll slit his throat and let you take his place." Maybe Odasaku would forgive him for this; just for this. "But I think you'd do a better job of that than me, won't you?"
"I'm not gonna kill him." Chuuya breathes, slow, somehow composed in the face of something that hurts him the most. "He's a bastard but he's still a good leader. I can't fuck up the order for my own agendas."
"Then leave. You know you can. Power like yours, it's not like he can stop you, and losing you to the ADA is a great damage to him."
"You might be right about that. But Osamu... Mori's not all that the mafia is to me. You know that right? More than I was to him, I'm loyal to the people I care about. I don't wanna leave them no matter how I feel about him."
***
"If I ask you to do something, will you do it?" Dazai asks as Chuuya is wrapping up his ankle after icing it.
"Depends. Is it reasonable? A lot of what you ask me to do's not reasonable."
"I'll say asking you to put on that maid costume was very reasonable. It may be old but since you didn't grow much it'd still fit, ya know, and you'd make all of sixteen-year old me's wet dreams come true--"
"Shut up and get to the point already."
Dazai sighs, pouting disappointedly.
After a few seconds, "I know you think she's terrifying, but... at least once or twice a year, if you keep using Corruption — can you come to Yosano-sensei and have her use her ability on you..." Chuuya shudders at that, as expected. "just to make sure that doesn't happen to you again?"
It takes him a moment to begrudgingly grumble, "the after-effects are great, I'll admit, even if she's crazy."
Dazai smiles. "I always thought you'd make good friends."
"Hah? Are you telling me I'm crazy too?"
Dazai shrugs guilelessly, his mouth in a moue, "You said it, not me. She is as crazy about wine as you though."
***
Dazai doesn't kill Mori. But he does ambush him in his office and puts a knife to his throat.
"My, my," Mori drawls, smirking, "How hard it must be, to pretend the mafia doesn't run in your blood."
"If you try to hurt Chuuya again in any way," Dazai tells him, his smile hollow, "I'll stop pretending. Mori-san."
The threat is clear. Dazai will slit his throat, like he would have four years ago if his promise to Odasaku didn't stop him.
Dazai shoves him back against his chair and stands, pocketing his knife. All the guards that have been sent outside stand unaware of the ongoings, evidence that Mori knew regardless of Dazai's not-so-empty threats, he wouldn't do anything to him today.
"It's interesting," Mori says, with the tremor of a laugh in his voice when Dazai is at the door, "to see you love. Dazai-kun. I wonder if it makes you weaker, or more dangerous?"
"That's a good question. I hope you won't try to figure it out, for your own sake."
Dazai leaves.
Notes:
If you have a minute, I would so love to know what you thought of the overall fic. Even if it's just a little heart or one line, it'd be so lovely to know if you enjoyed it or felt something! <3
Thanks for reading! Find me on tumblr @alxmeg!
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