Work Text:
It doesn’t matter.
When Chuuya comes to, it’s just him in the white corridor and the body on the ground. He’s sure that bastard Dostoevsky is still talking, but it’s of no concern to him.
He throws the gun somewhere to his right. It flies from his hands, and the clatter of it hitting the ground echoes unbearably in the silence, the kind of broken stillness that makes you want to flinch, curl into yourself. Chuuya has lived his entire life surrounded by screaming though, so.
It doesn’t matter.
(Arahabaki is quiet. That’s new. Even through the vampirism, the god kept screaming like an annoying fly inside Chuuya’s ear. He doesn’t speak now. Perhaps the death of a demon is a rare enough occasion for even gods to falter.)
He doesn’t do anything for awhile. He just stares. Looks.
The damn mackerel looks like shit. The famed Demon Prodigy hunched against the wall looks more like a sopping kitten than the youngest executive in the history of the Port Mafia.
His legs look like a soggy broken pinata, or maybe like a pretzel that’s fallen into a pond. It’s a wonder how he even managed to crawl to where he is. For sure he couldn’t have made it any farther, lanky beanpole that he is.
It’s not like he has anywhere else to go now anyways.
It doesn’t matter.
(This is the part where Dazai makes fun of him. Where he leers at Chuuya with bright eyes and calls him rude and chibi and hatrack and asks him if his hat finally ate his brain or if he’s simply made speechless by how stunning Dazai looks. Where Chuuya screams and Dazai laughs and Chuuya grips his collar with both hands and pushes him against the wall.
This is the part where Dazai whines at him, contrite and high and fake, his mouth pursed in a pout, except it’s not, because there’s a smile on his face and no light in his eyes and a bloody gunshot in the middle of his forehead, there’s a corpse where his partner should be and it might be the realest he’s ever been and Chuuya for the first time wants him to lie.)
The blood is already seeping into the uniform, and history really does repeat itself, red on white, one dead and the other out of control, except this time there’s no waking Snow White.
Chuuya is no prince and god knows Dazai is no princess, as spoiled as he may be.
Chuuya takes off his gloves and throws them without looking in the same direction as the gun. The hat he puts down with more care, but it’s not like he plans on coming back for either of them. He doesn’t plan on coming back at all.
It doesn’t matter.
(He’s not spoiled. He never asks for anything, not anything that matters, just kicks up a fuss so you don’t look too closely at all the places he’s barely holding himself together. He was in pain, Chuuya knows he was. The one thing he wanted was a painless suicide, and Chuuya couldn’t even give him that. Well, Chuuya is not a beautiful woman, but he knows he looks good and he has long hair. It’ll do. The exact timings of the double suicide will be their little secret, nobody else has to know.
The suicidal maniac and the selfless martyr. It reads like a bad joke. Two dead men walk into a prison. It bleeds tragedy all over the gates.)
He puts his naked hand on his partner’s head, cards his fingers through hair that hasn’t been washed in weeks. Even without the buzz of No Longer Human it’s familiar, a learned routine of comfort they built in the wake of post-Corruption recovery and failed suicide attempts, in hospital rooms that were never safe enough and houses that never became homes. He could almost kid himself into believing this was any other day, but he’s not the kind of person to frolic in self-delusion, so he doesn’t.
It doesn’t matter.
(The joke is of course, that dead men can do nothing at all, much less walk. Dazai would know.
The punchline is they come out Death itself.
Chuuya never gave himself time to wonder about what ifs and maybes, intent on surviving and protecting and acting, but he bets Dazai did. With as big of a brain as his, never slowing and never stopping, he’s sure the idiot’s thought of entire realities stemming from the kind of cereal he decided to pretend to eat on that particular morning, probably could write entire books with the ways things could’ve gone right and wrong.
Chuuya never gave himself the chance to hope, not when everyone he cared for was taken from him and every loss left him even more desperate to defend the people he cared about with tooth and nail, not when every time he dared to raise his eyes everything fell apart below his feet.
Dazai wasn’t the type to hope either, but Chuuya likes to think that beside the worlds where they were who they are here and Dazai wasn’t a name on a tombstone, Chuuya likes to think he also imagined something normal. Something peaceful.
And it’s hilarious to think of Double Black as normal or peaceful, but he would’ve learned to like it, he thinks now. He could’ve learned to live with high school and college and their biggest crime being sneaking. He could’ve learned to coexist with the silence in both their minds, with parties and all-nighters and parents that stayed and friends that didn’t drop like flies.
A world where they were humans trying to be people and not whatever they are.
He thinks they could’ve made it, in a world like that, that for all the black blood in their veins there’s still enough heart to do something other than destroy.)
Perhaps he’s fucking up all of Dazai’s plans. He’s always been a damned slacker, and this is probably just another way for him to pass all of his work onto Chuuya, so he can laze about being useless as usual while everyone else is running to and fro. Stupid fucking fish. Chuuya hates him.
Tough luck this time. If he’s really that much of a genius he should’ve foreseen Chuuya’s actions and taken them into account. He’s got backup plans for his backup plans, worse than a cockroach. What, a little water and a faulty elevator are enough to make him dumb? Idiot.
It’s not Chuuya’s problem whether or not he goes along with the mackerel’s plans.
He’s not his damn dog.
It doesn’t matter.
(Dazai’s no genius. He’s smart but mostly he’s a lucky bastard with a quick mind and a quicker tongue. Whatever absolute facade he has built is just another mask. He doesn’t see the future, just makes predictions that he adjusts in the heat of the moment.
It’s lonely at the top, and at the bottom too. Chuuya knows him better than anyone else, better than himself, but he doesn’t understand him. Perhaps nobody can.
He’s always been so lonely. So scared.
This is not Chuuya’s first time drowning, and yet he feels he will never breathe again.
His hands have been bathed in blood for as long as he’s been alive, but he looks at them clean against chestnut hair and feels for the first time that he might be crushed by the red.)
Shitty Dazai making him do this with no way to stop himself. When this is over he better not bitch about casualties and shit. This goody-two-shoes act that he’s been putting up may fool the Agency idiots, but not him. He spent three years basically glued at the hip with the idiot, shallow bond his ass.
He doesn’t take his hand back as he opens his mouth; he will consume everything there is and then some, a black hole of ruin and destruction. Gravity cannot be denied. Nothing and no one can stop him.
It doesn’t matter.
(He’s been trying so hard, to be good, to live for a dead man. Sakunosuke better be congratulating him right this instant, or Chuuya will rip him a new one when he gets there.
It’s not like Chuuya wasn’t prepared for his own death. Kinda comes with the job description. He just would’ve liked to die as a human, instead of whatever the thing inside him makes him.
Dazai didn’t die the way he wanted though, so it’s only natural that Chuuya follows.
You can’t win them all, at least he got to kill the waste of bandages.
If there’s an afterlife the idiot mackerel better appreciate this.)
“Oh grantors of dark disgrace,”
(All things considered, they lasted pretty fucking long for a soul split in two bodies. Certainly more than anyone could’ve imagined. Suck it.)
“you need not wake me again.”
It doesn’t matter.