and i don't care if you're sick, i don't care if you're contagious

by xkatsuyuu

Summary:

He liked to think his heart worked just fine. It felt things, didn’t it? It raced when he was nervous, ached when he was sad. That counted for something, right? But maybe that wasn’t the kind of work it was supposed to be doing.

But what did he know, anyway?

He was just a boy.

A boy named Nakahara Chuuya.

And, at the end of the day, there was nothing special about that.

While in the hospital, Chuuya meets a boy. There is a saying in Japan: びじんはくめい — beautiful person, short life. The most beautiful always die young.

Chapter 1: i guess i grew up in the end; hey mom, look at me now

Notes:

happy first (or second) day of pride month everyone! the beginning of this fic is set in may: after chuuya’s 15th birthday, and right before dazai’s. this fic is set in japan, so they use honorifics, and, for my fellow americans, football refers to soccer here, the one where you actually kick the ball. surnames go before first names, and they use the DD/MM/YY format. i hope you enjoy!

“Are you having any shortness of breath?”

“Only when I’m working. It’s not bad.”

That was a lie. But Chuuya didn’t want to admit the truth — not if it meant getting stuck here longer than necessary. He hated scans, hated hospitals, hated the hum of machines, the prick of IV lines. He’d had it all before. And he definitely did not want to deal with the consequences of jumping head-first into a situation that he didn’t fully understand, something he wasn’t even sure he wanted to face in the first place.

“It may not seem serious, but we won’t know until we check.”

“I really don’t think it’s anything. I’m fine,” he insisted. Chuuya knew that the nurses were only trying to help, but he was fine. Maybe other people would be troubled in his situation, but Chuuya was strong; he knew he was just fine. He had to be.

“Of course, I trust you, Chuuya-kun, but just to be safe,” the nurse’s lie fell from her lips too easily, like it was practiced in weaving mistruths. Chuuya knew she was lying, of course. They always lie.

It was one of those gentle, careful lines they told every patient, meant to comfort rather than be believed. He’d heard them before, too many times to count. Lies dressed up in kindness were still lies.

Chuuya watched stiffly as the woman leaned over him, pressing her stethoscope against the different areas of his chest, listening carefully for the drain and fill of each chamber of his empty heart.

And, as she repositioned her stethoscope once, twice, three times, furrowing her brow, Chuuya thought surely, surely that can’t be good. He knew that look. That kind of silence always meant something.

The nurse, herself, was pretty, with tied black hair and gray eyes; a face of clear skin, but even that couldn’t hide the darkness of the circles under her eyes. Her look was demure, but focused — her appearance was not unique, but she was still beautiful enough all the same.

“What is it?” he asked, already anxious just from the woman’s expression, which surely did not aid whatever was wrong with his heart.

“Ah, it’s likely nothing,” she replied, slipping the stethoscope from her ears. She was only cushioning the blow. Chuuya wasn’t interested in reassurances — he didn’t want the polite version of the truth. He wanted the real one. He wanted to know what was actually wrong, not hear that it was ‘probably nothing.’

“A heart murmur can be common in athletes or children your age. But, combined with jugular venous pressure…” she sighed, her gaze flickering to her notes before meeting his eyes again. “I’d just like to run a few more scans. Just to be sure.”

There were few things in the world that Chuuya despised more than tests, more than scans, more than needles, more than being hooked up to machines. If he could say no, he would. But instead, he just sighed.

“Sure, whatever,” he murmured, rubbing at the veins bulging at his neck — it wasn’t painful, but the simple knowledge that it was there was bothering him. He dug his blunt nails at it, though it ultimately did nothing to relieve his discontent.

Something so deep-seated couldn’t be brushed away so easily, after all. No amount of scratching could get rid of something that was part of you now.

---

“Why do I have to be in the kids’ unit?” Chuuya groaned as the nurse walked him through the hallway. His tone was already soaked in irritation.

“All patients under the age of eighteen reside in the pediatric unit.”

“I’m not a goddamn kid, I don’t play with toys.”

“Of course you’re not. There’s no need to worry, Chuuya-kun. You’ll be in a room that’s appropriate for your age.”

But he did worry. Not about the room itself, that was whatever, but about the way people looked at him, like he was some fragile thing. Like he wasn’t old enough to understand what was happening to him.

Chuuya hated that. He hated being infantilized. He hated being belittled and kept in the dark, talked down to; kept out of conversations about his own body. He knew that the staff thought he was a kid, but he was 15, dammit — not a goddamn baby! Sure, he was a little short, but he was still growing! He was mature for his age! And more than anything, he wanted to be treated like it.

Chuuya hated feeling small.

“How long will I have to stay here?” Chuuya asked through gritted teeth, patience already taut; a spider’s string pulled too tight.

“We’d just like to keep you here for observation while we do some further tests,” the nurse explained, her voice warm, but the undertone clinical. Chuuya hated it, every bit of it — the tests, the antiseptic smell. He hated it all. Even with his eyes closed, he was so painfully aware of everything around him.

“What do you think it is?” he pressed, harder this time — this nurse just wouldn’t tell him what the fuck was the issue, and it was bothering him.

“Ah, it’s nothing to be too concerned about.”

“I’m more concerned that you’re not telling me.”

Now Chuuya was really pissed off, and the nurse sensed it. She probably didn’t want to stress him, since she thought he was just a “kid”, but it was doing the opposite; it was just making him angrier.

“Your… heart, ah, allow me to explain,” she began, opening the door to a hospital room he’d be staying in. “Your physical examination showed some strange behavior in your heart. It’s normal in pediatric patients to have a slight stutter or murmur, and these arrhythmias can be harmless most of the time — arrhythmia, that’s an irregular heartbeat, if you didn’t know.”

Chuuya did know what it was, but he just pressed his lips together in annoyance instead of berating her.

“But yours is unusual, so we’d like to keep you for some further testing, just to be sure. Yours, coupled with the edema in your extremities and your fainting spells, can be a cause of concern.”

Chuuya still didn’t fully understand, but it was a start. He took in a breath, looking at his fingers. His limbs had been swelling lately, and it hadn’t gone unnoticed by him. It was no big deal at first, but now, in retrospect, every issue coupled together seemed to twist into a bright yellow warning sign.

But Chuuya was never the type to think in retrospect, to take life slowly — he was impulsive, he hated to admit; a carpe-diemist, if you will.

Chuuya huffed. “How long will I have to be here?”

“I’m not sure. We’ll have to run some tests first.”

Chuuya sighed, already expecting the vague answer. He stepped into the space, glancing around, taking in the vapid room. It was plain, no toys, no distractions for a kid. It was just a basic, empty room.

There was a hospital bed, a small television mounted on the wall, a chair, and a drawn shade. The room felt bleak, isolating — like a grim hospital ward, frozen in time from disuse many years ago. And, in a way, it was. And that fact made Chuuya’s skin crawl, like a thousand bugs invisible on the surface, the redhead helpless to rid himself of their ubiquity.

“If you need anything, you can press that button to call a nurse. I’ll inform your parents to bring you some of your personal items.”

Chuuya nodded, tuning out most of her voice. He didn’t care about any of it. All he wanted was to get out of here as soon as possible. All of this was unnecessary anyway. He was fine, and he would be fine — he was no weakling, that was for sure.

Chuuya soon fell into a fitful sleep after that, the same routine nightmares haunting him behind the seal of his eyelids. It was nothing new, something he’d grown used to — the little variations in each one were never notable enough to lend much thought. Like what he had for lunch some days ago — important in the moment, but forgotten in the long haul.

---

Chuuya woke up to his phone blaring, a vibration so great his phone had nearly knocked itself off the table. It took him a moment to gather his bearings, to remember where he was, but when he did, he unlocked his phone to see the dozens of missed texts waiting for him.

Seems like he slept through the night.

From: Shirase

Dude, where are you? u never came back to school after u passed out. What happened??

From: Mom

Good morning, honey. Are you awake yet? Your father and I will be visiting in a few hours. I hope you’re doing all right.

From: Yuan

Shirase and I are worried about you. Please update us when you can. Be safe!!!

Chuuya sighed, setting his phone face down on the bedside table. He would reply eventually — later, soon, at some point, definitely. But they all had questions, and he didn’t have any answers. He wasn’t sure what was wrong with him. Maybe it was something serious. Maybe he’d die tomorrow. Maybe it was nothing at all. Every line of questioning he seemed to pursue would always draw a blank.

He tried not to let it get to him, not to worry himself over nothing, but his mind was like a cat on hot bricks, and he couldn’t get it to shut up. He just wanted silence, but it seemed to exist nowhere that he went.

Chuuya looked up at the TV playing on the wall of his hospital room. The volume was low, a quiet hum in the background. A reporter was talking about a woman whose remains had been found in the Nara Prefecture. She’d gone missing on a hiking trail.

Chuuya felt bad, he always did, about things like this. He imagined if it were his mother who’d gone missing, how heartbroken he’d be.

But it passed, like it always did, and the newscaster switched to another story. He blinked up at the screen, already forgetting the woman’s name. (It was strange how an entire life could be reduced to a nine-second clip on the morning news, then vanish as easily. Gone, dismissed, like it never mattered in the first place.)

There was a knock on the door to his room — not an askance, but an alert that someone would enter whether he liked it or not. The knob to the door twisted, pushing open to reveal a nurse that he didn’t recognize.

“Good morning, Chuuya-kun. How are you feeling today?” the nurse asked, her voice sweet — or, at least, sweeter than the nurse from yesterday.

The woman at the door had hair that was bistre, ashy, but it shone in the sunlight bleeding through the blinds. She wore a nametag that read Ishige Miroku. Chuuya glanced at it once and figured he would forget it by tomorrow. Still, she smiled at him.

“Fine. My neck’s a little sore, think I slept on it wrong,” he replied, rolling his shoulders.

“Don’t worry, I know the feeling,” she smiled, her voice sweet, like honeyed sugar. He wasn’t typically one to fall for charm — he usually saw through that play, usually sniffed out that disingenuous kindness from a mile away — but something in her tone calmed him somewhat, just a little. Like a shade on his eyes that blocked out the unease weighing on his mind. Perhaps likened to a splinter in the foot, or a twisted ankle, in the way that it was only exacerbated with each step he took. Metaphorically, of course. Just metaphorically.

His leg was aching. His feet, too, but not soreness, but more like it was being pulled apart, stretched beyond what it could withstand. His socks bit into his ankles, and his feet pulsed with a numb warmth; an annoyance he’d gotten used to by now, but an annoyance nevertheless.

“It’s early morning, and we’ve gotten your test results back, Chuuya-kun. We’d like to bring in your parents to discuss what we’ve found.”

“Is it bad?” was Chuuya’s first question, instinctual, the words coming out of his mouth before he could even stop it, an arrow loose from tightly drawn nerves. He hated asking. Hated the vulnerability in the question, but he couldn’t help it — he was a bundle of nerves impossible to unwind.

“Well…” the nurse hesitated, circumspect with her statements. Chuuya understood, but it annoyed him all the same. “It relies on a lot of factors. If untreated, it can be bad, but, conversely, it’s important to be aware of the treatments you have at your disposal.”

Her voice was a smile, even despite Chuuya not looking. That didn’t answer the question, though. Not really.

“I just don’t want to feel like I’m in the dark anymore,” he grumbled, the taciturn tone of voice an attempt to mask how vulnerable he truly felt.

“I understand, Chuuya-kun, and I’ll do my best to make sure you don’t feel that way, alright? Your parents are waiting outside. I’m going to let them in so we can discuss the treatment plan together.”

“Alright,” he replied, barely louder than a breath.

The nurse smiled again, a gentle one, of course, before turning on her heel to depart from his room.

Chuuya glanced down at his phone, seeing the time. It was late morning. He hadn’t replied to his mother’s texts, but he figured it would be fine; she’d see him soon anyway.

His gaze shifted to the TV, getting lost in the news broadcast in the process. It was past the weather broadcasts, so they were reporting on smaller, filler stories. Something about an American company testing new delivery robots, and something frivolous the Prime Minister had said. Chuuya didn’t care. It all sounded static.

He swung his legs over the edge of the bed, immediately wincing as he put his weight down on them. He’d had his legs swell like this before, and it was always painful.

It was a strange pain, something that nobody ever seemed to understand when he described it. It felt like his veins were throbbing. He couldn’t explain it well. Chuuya was really no good at articulating things. Wasn’t his strong suit.

He found it frustrating. It all sat unspoken on the tip of his tongue, and every time he tried to say it out loud, it came out wrong. Too blunt, too vague, or not at all.

He climbed back on the bed with an annoyed glower, agitated with the feeling of being helpless. He hated it. Hated not knowing, hated waiting. He was at a loss, cornered. Up a creek without a paddle, as the saying went. It was stupid, in all honesty, but it was hard to think clearly with the constant throb in his legs and the anticipation of whatever the doctors were going to say.

He’d gotten distracted with studying the remote. It was oddly bulky, dust-worn with faded buttons. The writing on the back was in English, an American model, maybe. How strange.

The recurrent sound of knocking dragged him out of his curious mind. The same nurse from earlier came back, now with two familiar figures behind her.

“Chuuya!” his mother cried, rushing over to trap him in her embrace before he could even sit up straight. Her arms were tight around his shoulders, clinging like he might fall apart if she let go.

He mumbled a soft “hello” into her shoulder.

He didn’t hate his mother’s hugs, far from it — but with the hospital smell in the air, the embrace didn’t comfort him like it usually did. He couldn’t stave off the discomfort he felt just by being there. It was a constant reminder of just how serious this all might be.

His father wore his typical stoic expression, lips pressed so tightly together that it nearly twisted into a scowl, like a wilting flower’s petals curling in on itself. Chuuya was used to it by now, so much so, in fact, that he could see the concern hidden beneath it. But his father was a man of few words and even fewer emotions, so that glimpse of concern vanished as quickly as it appeared. “Honey, how are you feeling?” his mother asked, sitting beside him on the edge of the hospital bed as the same nurse from earlier entered the room, now followed by a male doctor without a nametag. “I’m alright, Mama,” he assured her, keeping his voice steady despite the way he felt inside. He felt like a bug on an examination table — small, exposed, and vulnerable. Like every twitch, every breath, every beat of his aching heart was under scrutiny.

His mother’s presence comforted him slightly, but he still felt a sense of unease, like a poisonous gas in the air. She squeezed his hand, and he tried not to flinch at the sight of her fingers leaving small indents in his swollen skin. It always went away after a while, so it was okay. “Just a little anxious.”

“It’s okay, dear,” she whispered, and it helped, a little. Maybe. He wasn’t sure. But he wanted it to, so he tried to convince himself it did. He didn’t want to seem ungrateful.

He knew his parents were trying their best. Trying to be strong for him. And showing any sign of worry felt like giving them more to carry, a burden he hated to add.

“Nakahara-san, good morning, it’s a pleasure. My name is Ishige Miroku, and this is our lead pediatric cardiologist, Tsuchida-sensei. He has carefully reviewed your son’s case. I know it’s been a confusing time for you, and I’m sure you’ve been worried, but I hope we can provide you with some clear answers today,” the nurse said with a gentle smile.

Chuuya turned his head to watch his mother return the smile. It put him at ease, a little, despite the paradoxical situation. The nurse’s hands were neatly folded as she stood in the room, while the doctor’s attention was fixed on the graphs and notes in his hands. Chuuya wondered why they had chosen to break the news in his residential room instead of an office. Maybe it was meant to feel less clinical, more personal, more human.

Was Chuuya really still human?

“Yes, thank you all for coming in today. I reviewed the results of your son’s echocardiogram, MRI, and blood work. Based on what we’ve seen, the signs point to a condition called restrictive cardiomyopathy.”

“Cardiomyopathy? So his heart isn’t working?” his mother asked, concern clear in her voice.

“To a degree, yes. More specifically, it means that the walls of the heart become stiff — especially the lower chambers, the ventricles — which prevents the heart from filling with blood completely between each beat.”

The nurse chimed in, “It’s not immediately life-threatening, ah, you can think of it as if your son’s heart is made of leather. It’s too stiff to properly relax when it needs to, which causes a buildup of pressure that can be pushed down to the liver and the lungs.”

That all made sense. It made complete sense, actually. No wonder he often felt like he couldn’t get enough air to feel satisfied, but just enough to survive. The reason why he could never seem to properly catch his breath. It all made sense, but it didn’t make him feel much better. He was still confused, and, despite his reluctance to admit it, he was scared. He didn’t like this one bit. Why did his body have to betray him like this?

He found it ironic that even his own heart didn’t seem to want him. Did he even deserve a heart?

Maybe something as sophisticated as a heart didn’t suit someone like him.

“Is it fatal?” his father asked, straight to the point, yet unable to mask the unease in his usually steady voice.

“Well, yes, it can be. It’s quite rare in someone his age, and this condition can worsen over time. I can only imagine the reason being a congenital heart defect, but still — this type of cardiomyopathy is rare in pediatric patients,” the cardiologist spoke, his voice steady, clinical.

The man’s tone was more factual than sympathetic, but it didn’t disconcert the redhead — the professionalism — he admired the man’s dedication to his work, really.

“But,” the nurse cut in with a sweeter, more hopeful tone, “it’s important to know that we caught it early, which means we can treat it more effectively. With otherwise good health, your prognosis is quite promising.”

Her smile really was sincere.

“How do you treat it, I-I mean— Can it even be cured?” his mother’s voice was shaky, her fingers gently tracing his.

“This disease — No, it can’t be cured, well, more accurately, your heart’s muscles can’t be ‘fixed’, so to speak,” the cardiologist began. “Regarding treatment, we can manage it with medication. But this condition will inevitably progress.”

“In cases like his, we typically begin the process of evaluating for a heart transplant,” the nurse spoke with a voice that was gentle.

“A transplant, really? That serious?” asked his father, a flicker of disbelief and worry in his voice, barely visible to an outside observer. “Yes, for cases like this, a transplant is often the most effective treatment.”

Strangely, the first question Chuuya found himself able to voice was, “Will I have to stay here?”

The nurse shook her head. “No, not forever. We want to keep you here under observation for now to monitor how your body responds to various? medications. Do you have any drug allergies?”

“He’s allergic to Dilaudid,” his mother said. In truth, Chuuya had no idea what that even was. The name sounded like some complicated medical jargon, it was all Greek to him, terms he couldn’t even begin to understand.

The doctor began to scribble something on his clipboard while the nurse still regarded his family with a patient, sympathetic look.

“If you have any questions or concerns, please feel free to ask.”

“Transplant,” his father began, “How long does he have if he doesn’t get one?”

“Anywhere between six months to two years. Somewhere around the middle,” said the cardiologist.

“That’s… no time at all…” his mother mumbled, voice barely disguising the horror hidden underneath. “How… How long is the waitlist?”

“Currently, it’s around three years for pediatric patients. But patients are prioritized by urgency, and those higher up on the list can often be skipped when an organ becomes available, especially if the donor has an incompatible blood type or physical size,” the nurse explained once again, ever the patient with the three of them.

“So his chances are good,” his father declared, more of a statement than a question. He had a knack for seeing the bigger picture, something his that mother often struggled with.

“Precisely.”

“We’ll leave you two alone to discuss things. If you need anything, feel free to use the call button,” the nurse smiled, before carefully leaving the room with the cardiologist in tow.

It was silent for what felt like eternity. Sempiternity, perhaps. Chuuya had heard the word in a book before, and, although he wasn’t entirely sure what it meant, it felt fitting here.

“How are you feeling?” was his mother’s first question once the door closed, her face decorated with a heartfelt concern.

In truth, Chuuya wasn’t sure how to answer. He had no idea how he truly felt. It was as if he were floating in the middle of the ocean. He was fine for now, but he knew that he’d drown soon, and he had no idea which way was shore.

“I’m okay, Mama,” he reassured her, smiling, both a consolation for her and for himself. He was trying to present an emotion that wasn’t there, that didn’t belong to him. It was like putting on a jacket that didn’t fit right.

It was hard to know how he should feel in a situation like this. Everything inside him was a blur. It was hard to parse the strongest feeling out of the jumbled mess of scattered, overwhelming ones. There was just too much of it, all muddled together, and none of it made any sense.

A part of him wanted to commiserate with her, to lean into the comfort of his mother’s worry, to let her hold him and say everything would be alright — and to believe it.

But another part of him just wanted to push it all away, to ignore the issue until it eventually put him under the ground.

“It’ll be alright, son,” his father spoke up, surprisingly, despite his penchant for tight-lipped stoicism. His father was not the emotional type, but he was not uncaring, either. Chuuya knew his parents cared for him.

Of course they cared. He was their only child, their pride and joy. They never expected a child, after failing so many tries, so when they finally succeeded, they were elated. They’d celebrated his birth for three whole days. Those were some of the only days his father ever missed work.

“Fuku, you don’t need to worry. He’ll be fine. Our son is strong,” his father added, placing a reassuring hand on her shoulder.

His mother bit down on her lip, hard, nodding slowly. Chuuya could see the doubt in her eyes, how hard she was trying to convince herself that it was true.

Whether she succeeded or not, Chuuya hadn’t a clue.

Notes:

i hope the irony of chuuya having a heart defect is not lost on anyone. it’s absolutely an intentional play on the line “something as sophisticated as a heart wouldn’t suit me.” anyways, ten thousand kisses to my lovely beta reader for doing this chapter and the entirety of the fic, she is the best~ this chapter is just worldbuilding but next chapter soukoku will actually meet so i hope you are all excited! i believe we should have biweekly updates and i will try my best to maintain that, but otherwise you can follow me on twitter here and thank you for reading~

Chapter 2: pick a flower, take a flower

Notes:

this chapter is named after the song "bumblebees are out" by jack stauber. this is the first chapter where soukoku actually meet and you get it early, since next chapter will be in 1-2 weeks and its quite short. i don't have much to say here but i hope you enjoy!! i will post my playlist for this fic at some point maybe teehee

Chuuya woke to the feeling of the sun’s rays blinding his closed eyelids. He shifted, trying to escape the golden warmth, burying his face into the pillow, but the feeling of it burning into the back of his neck was even more annoying. So he opened his eyes, rubbing his temples to stave off an oncoming headache.

His phone was flooded with even more unread messages than the ones that he’d already ignored yesterday. He didn’t want to open them. He dreaded the fact that he’d actually have to reply today. Because now, unlike yesterday, he had answers. Now he was expected to say something, to share, to explain. It was his obligation, after all. He didn’t want his friends to be worried about him. He was okay — he had to be. This wasn’t their burden to carry. It was his, and his alone.

Chuuya pushed his tousled bangs out of his eyes before sitting up. He was sweaty and wanted to shower — he’d have to ask the nurses if he could do that soon. Standing still hurt, sure, but it wasn’t that bad. He’d had worse.

His parents had left him in the hospital last night after discussing the treatment options with the cardiologist — Chuuya had already forgotten his name, something like Tsushima, or… well, Chuuya didn’t know.

His parents had brought him some of his clothes to wear during his stay — the hospital was quite understanding about it, as long as they were all sanitized beforehand. He was wearing a pair of loose sweatpants, along with a button-up pajama top that the hospital had provided.

There was an IV line taped to his arm, dripping something like Furosemide — or, at least, that’s what the label on the bag said. The nurse had explained it was to help with fluid retention when she hooked it up last night, to reduce the edema in his extremities.

He also had pads on his chest, which connected to a telemetry device that monitored his heartbeat constantly. Chuuya didn’t fully understand how it worked. He’d tried to, he really had, but most of it went over his head. All he understood was that his heart didn’t work, and that he needed a new one.

He liked to think his heart worked just fine. It felt things, didn’t it? It raced when he was nervous, ached when he was sad. That counted for something, right? But maybe that wasn’t the kind of work it was supposed to be doing.

But what did he know, anyway?

He was just a boy.

A boy named Nakahara Chuuya.

And, at the end of the day, there was nothing special about that.

He reached for his phone on the bedside table, jolting just slightly when there was a knock at his door, like he’d been pricked with a tiny electrical rod.

“Come in.”

The nurse named Ishige slowly opened the door, entering with her usual gentle smile. She shut the door behind her with a soft click, the fuss of the hospital behind her sneaking in through the door.

“Good morning, Chuuya-kun. How are you feeling?”

“I’m alright, Ishige-san,” he spoke with a reassuring voice — he couldn’t help it, really — it was just second nature to him to comfort others. To put them before himself; their comfort and happiness before his own.

It was easier to soothe someone else than to untangle the mess inside himself, easier than confronting how he truly felt. Looking inward was harder, less familiar.

“How is the Furosemide working?” she asked, eyes scanning the IV line.

“It’s… good, I think,” he answered, uncertain. He wasn’t sure what he should say in reply. He didn’t really understand all of these drugs. All he knew was that they were supposed to help him, but… how? “The swelling in my feet doesn’t hurt as much.”

She smiled. “Good, that’s good! I’m going to check your vitals, and then we’re going to check your weight. Is that all right?”

“That’s okay,” he replied, not sure why they had to check his weight, but oh well. He couldn’t find it in himself to care enough — not out of defiance, but out of exhaustion. He wished he cared more. He knew he should, but he simply couldn’t. It was the cycle of his life.

The nurse nodded and put on her stethoscope, moving it around his chest and below his ribs.

“Have you been having any trouble breathing while lying down?”

“A little bit. Just discomfort,” he answered, voice quiet. He didn’t know why he was mumbling. Maybe it was out of habit, or maybe he just didn’t want to make a big deal out of anything.

“Alright, let me listen to your lungs now — take a deep breath for me, in and out, alright?”

He took in a deep breath — once, twice — sputtering a little at the pressure he felt inside his chest cavity. His lungs felt like overfilled balloons.

“Ow,” he groaned out before he could suppress it, coughing and pressing his hand over his chest. The nurse set down her stethoscope, rubbing his back.

“Are you alright, Chuuya-kun? Are you having some pressure in your lungs?” she asked, her eyes glazed over in concern.

“Yeah, it… kinda feels like that,” he replied, brushing sweat-dampened hair off the back of his neck. He felt hot and uncomfortable, like his insides were boiling. It was bothering him. There was an itch deep in his chest, like something wanted to claw itself out of it. He needed a drink of water. She nodded in understanding.

“Alright, we’re going to take your weight to look for any fluid retention, and I’ll talk to the doctor about some medications that we can look into.”

“Like what?” his question came instinctively, like something he’d done a million times. A reflex born of so many days of wanting to understand, to feel like he had some kind of control.

“Well, that pressure in your lungs is most likely due to something called pulmonary edema — that’s when fluid accumulates in the lungs, similar to how it collects in your feet and legs. It can make it difficult to breathe. Furosemide is meant to treat that issue by pushing the body to expel more fluid, but we may want to raise your dose if it doesn’t show any improvement soon.”

Her voice was sweet, really, it was, and it comforted him to an extent. He appreciated that she was taking the time to explain it to him and not simply leaving him in the dark like all the other staff had been doing.

It wasn’t much, but it was enough to make the sterile hospital room feel a little less cold, a little less clinical, and lonely.

“Oh… alright, I think I understand. Thank you.”

“Of course, Chuuya-kun,” she smiled, “if you have any questions, you can ask me, alright? I want to make sure you feel comfortable here.”

“Thank you,” he repeated, uncertain of what to say. He didn’t know how to convey his appreciation well. Words were never his strong suit.

Still, the two of them exchanged a smile.

“I’m going to bring you some breakfast and your medications before we head over to get your weight checked. Are you hungry?” she asked patiently. Her voice reminded Chuuya of a nurturing mother or a daycare attendant. She was certainly fit for her job as a pediatric nurse.

“Yeah,” he answered, voice still rough from sleep. He watched as she smiled, leaving for a moment before returning with a tray of breakfast. It wasn’t what he’d normally choose to eat, but it wasn’t too bad. He often forgot to eat breakfast, anyway.

The medications he had been taking recently and for most of his life had completely wiped out his appetite. Many days, he didn’t feel hungry at all. Eating felt like a chore, not something natural, which made him feel even more disconnected from what it meant to be a human. Often, it was only because his friends reminded him that he even needed to eat.

On the tray was soup with a good portion of brown rice and boiled eggs. The soup was garnished with daikon and wakame.

Chuuya thanked her, swallowing the pills he was given before he began to eat. She left to give him some privacy after that, allowing him to eat in relative silence.

He switched on the television.

He kept it at a low volume, so he wouldn’t need to use headphones, like some hospitals required. He ate his rice and eggs silently, secretly wishing he was at home, eating some quick meal of cereal before school.

Strangely enough, he missed the monotony of those ordinary mornings. The comfort of it, more so. But then again, the frog in the well knows nothing of the sea, and Chuuya was starting to feel how small his world really was.

The news was being broadcast by now, the early morning already coming to pass. They were talking about the weather and the beginning of the Canola flower festival in Hokkaido. He’d never been — it was much too far from Yokohama to ever visit, despite his younger self’s pleas to his parents — but he hoped he could visit the festival one day.

He really did love flowers. They were beautiful, but ephemeral. Something that must be appreciated in the moment, for it would wither away just as fast.

But the beautiful always die young. That’s what they say, anyway.

Maybe Chuuya was doomed to participate in that cycle, too. Like a cog in the machine, grinding along without control, never making any autonomous achievements, but only serving to push the entire system forward.

Was that really what he wanted from life?

Chuuya looked down at his half-eaten breakfast, his appetite still absent. He wasn’t particularly hungry; he was feeling more introspective today.

He glanced down at his phone. It was half-charged — he’d forgotten to plug it in last night, too tired.

He had a lot of unread messages.

From: Shirase

Dude are you dead??? Literally nobody knows where you are, not even the teachers will tell us

Hello???

???????

Oh my god you actually did die

Chuuya sighed, rubbing his temples. He pushed the tray of food off his lap, clicking on messages to reply.

To: Shirase

I’m fine, I’m fine. You guys don’t need to worry about me. They said I have this heart condition that made me pass out. They’re keeping me in the hospital to test some medication or something, I’ll keep you updated

Chuuya quickly typed out a message and sent it. He didn’t think much before he did. It’s not that he wanted his friends to know every detail of his personal life, nor did he want them to worry about him, but he knew they wouldn’t stop pestering him until they got an answer.

He looked at his phone and saw five unread messages from Yuan, a few from his cousins, and some of his other friends. He figured that Shirase would tell most people at school what Chuuya said, so he didn’t bother responding to the rest.

He wasn’t feeling too social today. It was tiring just keeping up. He set down his phone, glancing up at the TV. He wasn’t interested in what was playing, so he shut it off.

He wished the rest of his life were that easy.

---

Chuuya didn’t like stepping on the scale. There was really no reason he should be insecure about it — sure, he was a little short for his age, but his weight was within a healthy range.

But it was difficult to rationalize away his feelings sometimes.

“About 56.5 kg, so a bit of fluid retention,” the cardiologist from yesterday spoke, nodding. “Chuuya-kun, I’ve been monitoring your fluid levels, so if it becomes any more difficult to breathe, then let us know immediately.”

“Alright,” Chuuya nodded, stepping off the scale as soon as he was allowed to. He slipped his uwabaki back on, watching as the cardiologist spoke with one of his residents to explain the treatment protocol that he would be following.

Earlier, they’d examined his legs for swelling and inspected his neck for something they called “jugular vein distension,” which was apparently a key symptom in cardiac circulatory problems.

Chuuya sat up on the exam table, silent as the younger resident moved closer to strap a blood pressure cuff around his arm. The boy had hair just as orange as Chuuya’s, and looked rather young for a medical student. His nametag read Tanizaki Junichiro. Chuuya gritted his teeth as the cuff pressed down on his flesh, hating the feeling of his heartbeat thudding in his arm. It seemed to be squeezing down for an eternity.

“Systole and diastole are both a bit high, I’d say mildly tachycardic,” the cardiologist noted once the machine beeped, letting Chuuya’s arm relax for a moment. “I’d say push Metoprolol and Spironolactone with the IV Furosemide.”

Chuuya didn’t know what any of that meant. All he knew was that his heart felt too fast, and he hoped they were treating him for it, hoped that the treatment would help. This man, Tsuchima, wasn’t a pediatric doctor. He was the only cardiologist they had, but since he wasn’t trained in pediatrics, he tended to speak in terms that Chuuya didn’t really understand.

“Does that mean my heart is too fast?”

The cardiologist looked up at him. His hair was black and his scrubs a dark blue, but Chuuya hadn’t been paying much attention to that until now.

“Yes, your blood pressure is too high, and your heart rate is above the average. That means we’re giving you something to relax it and hopefully help with fluid buildup.”

“Okay,” Chuuya nodded, looking down at his feet. They weren’t as swollen today as yesterday, so he knew that the treatment was working. But despite trusting the doctors, he couldn’t help feeling anxious. He felt bad, doubting them, being ungrateful.

Maybe that’s how he got himself into this situation in the first place — his skepticism had brought him here. He was too stubborn to let others take control, always trying to hold on tightly to everything in his life, and always failing.

If only he had been willing to let go and trust, to accept when it was offered, he might not be stuck here now. Maybe he deserved something like this for being so distrustful.

Yes, maybe it was his own fault all along.

Chuuya had gone back to his room after that. He’d taken a shower, done some tedious, unnoteworthy schoolwork that his parents dropped off for him, and changed into more comfy clothes by the time the nurse returned to his room to check on him.

“I see you finished all of your schoolwork, Chuuya-kun,” smiled Ishige as she arrived in his room, her expression as kind and tender as usual. Chuuya returned a small smile, setting his phone aside. “Right before lunch is around the time that the pediatric unit meets for group therapy.”

“Group… therapy?” Chuuya asked, confused. The thought of opening up about his feelings, especially to a group, felt overwhelming. He had never liked speaking about his emotions, not even to a single person, let alone several strangers!

“Yes, group therapy is where we assign you a small group of peers to share your thoughts and feelings about your illnesses. It’s a new program implemented in hopes that our teens in the ward will be able to make friends.”

The way that she explained it made it seem a bit less daunting than how it seemed in his head, even if slightly. He… guessed it wouldn’t be too bad. He probably wasn’t the only person struggling here. It still made his stomach twist with uncertainty.

“Do I have to go? That shit’s never helpful anyway…” he grumbled, trying to veil hesitation. He hated seeming weak, unsure. It wasn’t what someone in his position should do. He needed to be strong. He was a natural leader. He made decisions just fine.

“I think you should,” answered Ishige, her tone slightly firm. Chuuya didn’t know if that was a yes or a no.

“It starts in about ten minutes, and I really think it could benefit you during your stay here, Chuuya-kun.”

“Alright… I… guess I’ll do it.”

---

“Good morning, everyone. My name is Natsume Soseki, and I’m a licensed clinical social worker,” said the man sitting in the heart of the circle. The way he spoke was slow, leisurely — almost a drawl. Like he was really in no hurry, as if he had all the time in the world. It was a stark contrast to the speed at which things moved in the hospital.

The man, Natsume, was certainly a character. He dressed quite strangely and wore such garb that would deter anyone from thinking he worked in a hospital. The strange hat he wore was almost comical, and yet, despite this, he still seemed to exude an aura that made him seem almost wise, respectable.

Chuuya was fidgeting with his hands. There were windows in this room, all around them. The azaleas were blooming brightly outside.

“Today, we are here to talk about ourselves. I have great faith that you lot will get along just fine. How about we start by introducing ourselves? We’ll go from left to right. How about you first?” the man spoke, glancing over to a boy with split colored hair.

Chuuya wasn’t sure why he was so anxious. It was a strange feeling. He expected more people to be here, but there were merely a few present. Nobody was even looking at Chuuya, yet he felt exposed, like he was standing on a stage in front of thousands of people. He certainly did not like this. No, not at all.

“Ah… me?” the boy asked, simply sighing. “I’m Sigma.”

“Why don’t you tell us something about you?”

“I like cookies,” the boy replied.

“Alright. And you?” prompted the man, looking beside Sigma. There was a boy, there, with his legs pulled to his chest, wearing a mask and gloves as if he were behind a glass display case. He was wrapped in bandages from head to toe, like a mummy, leaving barely an inch of skin clear. His head lowered enough that his eyes were barely visible. It was such a unique appearance, Chuuya thought. What would someone need so many bandages for?

He wore a turtleneck sweater similar to the one Sigma wore. But Chuuya swore that he could still see bandages peeking out from the neck of the brunette’s sweater. Of course.

“Don’t wanna,” the boy replied.

“Come now, don’t be that way.”

“I’m Dazai. I like… crabs,” finally came the answer, stubbornly. As if it were a piece of classified information, the boy simply couldn’t stand to give up. Natsume nodded, turning to another patient.

But Chuuya wasn’t paying attention, no, he was staring at Dazai. And Dazai was staring back.

Dazai only had one eye visible, as the other was wrapped tightly with alabaster gauze. His expression was impossible to decipher, as his mouth was covered, too, with a mask. But Chuuya got the impression he certainly wasn’t smiling.

“Ah, now how about you?” spoke Natsume, looking in Chuuya’s direction. He jolted — he hadn’t been rehearsing what to say.

“Uh, I’m Chuuya. I like… uh… guitars,” he answered, making a complete fool of himself. He thought he could hear Dazai snicker. Great.

Chuuya wished he could disappear, melt into the floor, and be anywhere but here. This was everything he hated — awkward attention, forced vulnerability. It was the exact opposite of comfortable.

“Oh? Do you, now? Are you any good at it?” Natsume asked, throwing the redhead off even more. He could tell the older man was enjoying it just by the way he was smiling smugly. Damn bastard…

“I like to think so?” replied Chuuya, mentally facepalming as his words came out as more of a question than an actual answer. Natsume laughed, moving on to the girl next to him. But Chuuya was not paying attention. Such a dumbass…

He glanced toward Dazai again, who didn’t bother to hide the faintest smirk behind his mask. A pang of irritation flickered inside Chuuya. He had only known the guy for a few minutes, and he already found him annoying.

The introductions went on for a few moments longer, until Natsume tapped his clipboard on his lap and began to prompt them with more personal questions.

“Alright, kids, now we’re going to move on to some more difficult questions. Why don’t you share the hardest thing that you went through this week? Sigma-kun can start.”

“I asked the nurses for a room on the highest floor, since I like high-up places. They said no,” he sighed, tilting his head with his curtain of long hair. “So Osamu complained to them for me,” he giggled.

Chuuya blinked. Osamu? That sounded like a first name, which was strange. He felt like an outlier in this little group that was already formed.

“Still didn’t work,” mumbled the brunette beside him. Chuuya assumed that it must be “Osamu.” Dazai Osamu… Chuuya nearly scoffed aloud. A cute name for such a smug jerk.

He hated the way his cheeks heated when he thought about it. What was wrong with him? This kid was annoying the hell out of him. He was pretentious and absolutely insufferable, so why was Chuuya blushing? The apathetic way he talked, the amount of bandages he wore, it was all so damn… annoying! So why wasn’t Chuuya acting annoyed?

Dazai and Sigma must’ve been really close for Sigma to use his first name…

Chuuya had always been the type to bristle when he was left out — but he wasn’t used to feeling… jealous. It was all ridiculous, strange.

Natsume nodded, listening carefully, as if he truly did care about the petty tribulations of teenage children. And perhaps he did. Perhaps that is why he chose this job — because he cared enough to treat the small things as big ones. “And how about you, Dazai-kun?”

“Ah, the nurses forced me to eat disgusting gruel again! It was truly a soul-crushing, cataclysmic day…” Osamu complained, showing the most emotion that he had in the entire time they’d been here. Chuuya was annoyed.

“What the hell are you even talking about with all those fancy words and shit?” Chuuya growled before he could stop himself, rolling his eyes. Osamu just laughed. God damn, that laugh. So annoying… and somehow attractive— hold on, what?

“Oh, I don’t expect someone like you to understand… How rude, Chuuya-kun. It’s called epexegesis, you know. Though I didn’t expect a half-witted dunce like you to know that~”

“Epex-what-now?” Chuuya hissed, straightening in his seat like a cat puffing up at a threat. Sigma was watching with a visage that was somehow both concerned and amused, but Chuuya couldn’t see the expressions of anyone else. Not that he cared, either. Right now, he was too focused on this asshole named Dazai.

“Epexegesis, the addition of words to clarify meaning. I know you’re as short as a kindergartener, but certainly you’re smarter than one, aren’t you?” Dazai’s words dripped with such smugness that it made Chuuya want to ruin his only good eye. Chuuya couldn’t see the brunette’s lips, but he knew that damn bastard was smiling underneath that mask.

Chuuya’s hands twitched toward the armrest. He didn’t know whether he wanted to throw something or just throttle the boy with his own damn bandages.

“Listen here, you bastard—”

“Children, children,” Natsume began, a bit amused himself. He was far from a strict sensei, but more of an amused parent if anything. He seemed to enjoy Dazai and Chuuya squabbling like two grade school children. “There’s no need for that, hm? We can all get along just fine, don’t you think?”

His gaze shifted to Chuuya before continuing. “Now, why don’t you take a seat, Chuuya-kun, and take a turn answering the question?” Natsume smiled, utterly serene even despite the argument he had just witnessed.

He was steady, like a surgeon in the middle of an operation, and as calm as a still pond undisturbed by wind. Chuuya, on the other hand, was the complete antithesis of that.

“Yeah, whatever,” Chuuya scoffed, dropping back into his seat with all the grace of a slamming door. The entirety of the week had been totally wiped from his mind. He had a tendency to let himself be clouded by anger. But it wasn’t his fault that this kid was so goddamn annoying!

“Uh… What was the question again?” Chuuya mumbled, crossing his arms.

“The hardest thing you’ve experienced this week.”

“I guess…” Chuuya started prematurely, before he had even had a chance to consider what he’d say, “My diagnosis was hard for my parents.”

He regretted it the second the words left his lips. It was too open, too vulnerable. He really hated feeling vulnerable. He didn’t even know why he’d said it. And for some reason, unbeknownst to him, he could see Dazai’s eyebrows furrowing just slightly.

“You, not your parents,” Dazai said, strangely serious. “It’s about you, not other people.”

Chuuya opened his mouth like he was going to say something — maybe retort, deflect, insult — but nothing came; he wasn’t sure what to say. Dazai was right, as annoying as it was to admit.

Chuuya was too used to seeing how his actions affected other people, always putting others before himself, always trying to make things easier for everyone else, like he didn’t have it hard enough already.

He didn’t know how to prioritize himself without guilt clawing at his heels. It felt selfish. It was always easier to ignore his own suffering than to risk being the reason someone else felt discomfort.

“...I guess it was hard for me, too.”

“I see,” Natsume nodded, writing it down in his book. Chuuya let out a sigh of relief when they quickly shifted focus to the person next to him, whose name he couldn’t remember. It didn’t matter to him, anyway.

No, not really.

Chuuya wasn’t paying attention for the rest of the session. The voices around him faded into background noise, distant and meaningless. He didn’t care much about what the others had to say, and, sure, that probably made him a bad person, but it wasn’t his fault. He didn’t want to come here in the first place, anyway. Well, maybe it was his fault. Still, he just couldn’t bring himself to care right now.

His eyes drifted to the window. It had just rained, and the sun was beginning to shine. He was getting tired, and his feet were starting to swell again. He hated this.

“Now, before we end this session, I want to pair you up for one last exercise,” Natsume began, but Chuuya tuned him out. Of course they’d end with a group project. Just his luck. All he wanted was to go back to his room and take a nap.

He was thinking about lunch… oh, he was regaining his appetite already, when he was bored like this. He wondered what they would let him have for lunch here, and whether it would be edible. The flowers outside were quite pretty. It was the beginning of spring, so they were finally starting to bloom. It was around the time most tourists visited Japan, since the sakura trees were finally decorated with vibrant petals.

Chuuya had always wanted to learn botany and floriculture. He’d never had time, but he always found flowers beautiful. Especially red camellias. Still, he kept that interest to himself — he knew his friends would tease him for liking something like that.

Yuan had given him flowers once. He’d accepted them naively, utterly confused at the gesture. Apparently, the flowers she’d given him were meant to symbolize love or something. He’d gotten teased endlessly for not knowing. Eventually, he awkwardly began dating her following that incident. They were together for a while, until he finally gathered the courage to cut it off.

He never felt much for her. She was just his friend, and he had only gone along with it because it felt like something he should do. An obligation, if you want to call it that. That was the pattern. Chuuya always tended to think that way, even to his own detriment. He always did what he thought was expected of him, though he never fully understood why. It was like second nature to him, muscle memory. A normal part of being in his own skin.

“Chuuya-kun? Did you hear me?” Natsume suddenly said, and Chuuya looked up, remembering where he was. He’d gotten distracted quite badly.

“You’re with Dazai-kun,” Natsume said.

Chuuya blinked, utterly confused. He could assume that, to an outside spectator, he might’ve resembled a deer in headlights.

Then it clicked.

“What?”

Chuuya looked around, trying to make sure that he heard the older man correctly.

He glanced over at Dazai, seeing that his mask was pulled down.

Dazai was staring back with his annoying fucking grin.

Of course it had to be him. The universe had jokes, and Chuuya was the punchline.

Just his fucking luck.

 

Notes:

i probably spent more time researching for this fic than i actually have spent writing it so far. yay !!

oh i forgot to mention, next chapter dazai and chuuya will hang out together so i hope everyone is excited

 

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Chapter 3: and if sick is defined by what's different, well, then pull the plug out and let me die

Notes:

chapter 3 is quite short, so i am sorry about that, but this is our first chapter in dazai's pov so i hope everyone enjoys~ dazai is such a loser i love him

here's the playlist for this fic, there will be one for chuuya as well :3 i may add more songs later. this chapter is named after 2econd 2ight 2eer by will wood

“Why do I have to be stuck with you?!” Chuuya hissed, rolling his eyes as they trudged down the hallway together. Dazai’s shitty smile had no trouble reaching his eyes today — he absolutely adored this. It wasn’t often that he got to trail people and bother them this much!

“Well, it’s not like I wanted to be partnered with a shorty like you!” Dazai complained, striding as confidently down the hallway as he could, despite the IV pole he was dragging beside him and those brittle bones that ached with each step. Still, the occasional wince betrayed the truth. His body was too fragile, his frame too thin, struggling to keep up with his sheer stubbornness.

The nurses kept trailing behind him, clearly torn between respecting his independence and stepping in before he fell flat on his face. Every few paces, one of them would stop to ask, “Do you need any help, Dazai-kun?” And every time, Dazai huffed and shook his head. No, he did not need help! He did not want to seem like a baby in front of this shrimp named Chuuya. He could walk just fine on his own!

“Hey! I’m only fifteen, I’m still growing, asshole!” Chuuya snarled, and Dazai could just laugh so much his diaphragm started to ache. It had been a while since he could truly enjoy himself with someone. Nobody managed to rile him up the way this redhead did. It intrigued him more than he cared to admit.

He loved the way Chuuya’s cheeks flushed with irritation, the way his eyes flared with every insult Dazai threw. It was the most fun he’d had in weeks.

Chuuya was unpredictable, loud, and stubborn to a fault — and that was precisely what made him interesting. Most people bored Dazai in minutes. They were all too easy to read. Chuuya? He left him wanting to see what he’d do next.

“Oh yeah? I’m only fourteen and I’m still taller than you!”

“It’s not my damn fault you’re lanky, you bastard!”

“Please keep shouting to a minimum in the hospital corridors,” a nurse interrupted them as they walked past, her voice just stern enough to make Chuuya flinch. He mumbled a quick apology under his breath, cheeks pinking from embarrassment.

Dazai, of course, found it hilarious. He let out a snort of laughter and continued to drag his squeaky IV pole to the cafeteria, where they would have to ‘eat lunch.’ Dazai was not planning on eating whatever they considered ‘lunch.’

“Oh, Chuuya-kun. I see you’ve made a friend,” spoke one of the nurses as she spotted the two of them, her brown hair long and flowy. She must’ve been on break. Most on-duty nurses have their hair pulled back.

“This asshole ain’t my friend,” Chuuya huffed.

“Oh, how you wound me, Chuuya-kun…” Dazai whined, shielding his forehead with a bandaged arm; his performance reminiscent of a theatrical drama from the Middle Ages of Rome. Perhaps he was born in the wrong time period.

He looked one breath away from collapsing into a swoon. Honestly, if there had been a fainting couch nearby, he probably would’ve flung himself onto it without hesitation.

“Well, nevertheless, I see you two are paired up! Your bracelets match!” the nurse smiled, glancing at the identical bands they wore on their respective wrists.

Natsume had decided to ‘pair them up’ to hopefully ‘make them get along,’ and he decided to give each pair of kids a bracelet of matching color. Dazai and Chuuya got blue.

It was significantly looser on Dazai’s wrist than on Chuuya’s — so loose, in fact, that it slid halfway up his forearm whenever he lifted his hand. Chuuya hadn’t realised just how thin Dazai really was until now.

“Even tai, when alone, isn’t delicious,” Natsume had said when he handed them out, smiling with all too much pride in himself. Dazai didn’t get it, not really. He figured it was supposed to mean something about togetherness, or how even good things aren’t as good alone? Maybe. Who knew with that old fart. Still, he was a hell of a lot better than Mori. At least he didn’t pretend to care, only to twist the knife later. Natsume was weird, but his weirdness was honest.

“We’re supposed to go to lunch or whatever,” Chuuya mumbled with a vague annoyance, like being stuck with Dazai was simply something he had to do. There was no more choice in the matter. Dazai smiled internally at the thought. Chuuya was just too fun to annoy, and his frustration was practically a gift.

Dazai had a tendency of poking bears. He wouldn’t call it stupidity — no, stupidity was doing something without knowing better. He did know better. He knew exactly which buttons he was pressing and just how hard to press them, yet he still did it, fully aware of the consequences.

There was something undeniably entertaining about it. The reactions, the chaos, the noise — it made him feel real. But predictable consequences were still consequences, after all. So maybe, in the end, that made him even more stupid.

The hallways of the hospitals were always cold, filled with the low hum of fluorescent lights and the sharp, clean scent of antiseptic that clung to everything like static. It never really went away, no matter how long you stayed.

Outside, it had just finished raining, and droplets of water still clung to the surface of window panes, scattering light across the sterile tile floors like shards of glass.

“Let me lead you two to a more secluded area of the cafeteria,” the nurse offered, gesturing for the two younger boys to follow.

“Secluded…?” Chuuya asked, his brow furrowed. Dazai caught the confusion in his voice immediately, making the edge of his lip upturn. Chuuya certainly hadn’t been here very long, judging from how clueless he seemed to be.

“It’s a precaution they take for immunocompromised patients,” Dazai replied, cheerfully following the nurse. He just laughed, ignoring the soreness of his bones. Now wasn’t the time to dwell on that. “Not that I expected an idiot like you to know that~”

“Hey! I’m not an idiot! I’ll have you know I…”

“Oh, hush,” Dazai cooed, as if silencing a baby animal. Chuuya’s eyes twitched, clearly irritated, which only made Dazai all the more proud of himself.

The redhead looked like he was on the verge of exploding. Whether it was frustration or embarrassment, Dazai wasn’t sure — but honestly, he didn’t care. Both were equally fun to provoke.

He was starting to find a strange comfort in these back-and-forths, despite only knowing Chuuya for a mere hour. Not that he’d ever admit that out loud.

Ishige led them to a… somewhat private, HEPA-filtered room tucked near the back of the cafeteria. It was the same spot he was occasionally allowed to have lunch with Sigma, whenever the staff decided he’d been well-behaved enough or just pathetic enough to earn the privilege. The air was clean and filtered, the windows sealed tight to keep the outside world at bay.

His blood counts were usually too low to justify leaving his room at all. Even despite that, the hospital was lenient with him because they knew that staying in his room all day made him no better either.

It was a losing game either way. Keep him inside, and he withered. Let him out, and they risked infections, fevers, complications. But Dazai didn’t care. To him, it was still a winning game both ways. So long as he died in the end.

He didn’t care about the outcome. He didn’t care if he pushed too far or if being kept in caused him to fall apart silently. After all, he wasn’t afraid to die. If anything, death was the one constant in the mess of uncertainty that made up his life.

Dazai hoped that the nurse wouldn’t find his charts and would just hand him the normal, bland hospital food they served here. Ishige wasn’t his assigned nurse, but he did know who she was. She didn’t work in oncology much. It was Mori’s specialty — surgery and oncology. Then again, Mori was the one who got to decide who worked where in the hospital anyway.

Mori was the boss.

There was simply nothing more to it.

“Ah, let me go find your charts, Dazai-kun… I think Mori-sensei is responsible for your case.”

Dazai groaned, sitting in the chair at the familiar table. “Yeah, whatever,” he mumbled, slightly disappointed. But, at the end of the day, he really shouldn’t have expected anything more.

“So what’s with all those bandages, asshole?” Chuuya asked Dazai the moment the nurse left, because, of course, he did. It was the question everyone asked, sooner or later. And even despite being asked so often, Dazai still had no good answer for it.

“Bruises,” Dazai answered, huffing. It was only half the truth, but he didn’t want to tell the whole truth right now. It tended to ruin the mood every time he had to explain to people that he was a terminal cancer patient who probably had a few months left at best. It made things awkward, heavy. He preferred to keep the weight to himself, at least for now.

“Bruises? What the hell’d ya get so many bruises from? You don’t look like the type to play sports,” Chuuya replied gruffly, and Dazai could physically see the cogs in his brain turning behind the window of his eyes. The brunette was slightly amused, but his own brain was working to come up with a plausible response.

Thankfully, Dazai still had his hair, and that helped mask how sick he really was. Most people wouldn’t suspect the full extent of his condition just by looking at him. He considered saying anemia, since it was close to the reason why, but then they would go down the line of questioning where Chuuya asked just what kind of anemia got someone admitted for a long time stay at a hospital.

So instead, he decided to deflect from the question, hoping that maybe the redhead wouldn’t notice.

“Hey, that’s rude of you, Chuuya-kun! What if I were the best football player and you wouldn’t even know?” Dazai teased, running his tongue over the back of his teeth as he smiled under the mask.

“Yeah, right. You look like you’d keel over the second you tried to kick a football,” Chuuya scoffed, but really, Dazai had no rebuttal for that. So he just studied Chuuya’s face for a moment. For a slug, Chuuya was pretty.

He had this warm, orange-reddish hair that seemed to glitter as if it were its own star when it was hit by a beam from the sun. And those strange, unique, split-colored eyes — one blue, one brown — stood out against the freckles dotted all over his nose and cheeks. Dazai wondered what it possibly was that Chuuya could’ve been here for.

“And what about you? What’s with your scars?” Dazai asked, curiosity getting the better of him, pointing at a faded nick above Chuuya’s eyebrow.

“Oh, that? Nothing too special. Just get in a lotta fights,” the redhead shrugged.

“I can tell,” Dazai said, half-impulsively, half to irritate the other. It seemed to work, but the shorter boy just scoffed.

The nurse quickly returned with their lunches, balancing two trays in her hands with practiced ease. Dazai, as usual, got chicken soboro, rice, mashed kabocha, soup, and a cup of peach jelly sealed in plastic. He had a feeling the only thing he’d end up eating was the jelly.

On the other hand, whatever Chuuya got somehow looked even worse. There was nothing actually wrong with the meal — it was grilled fish, steamed rice, broccoli, and salad — but Dazai felt sick at the mere thought of eating it. Dazai thanked whatever Gods existed that Chuuya was the one eating it and not him.

“Here you are, boys. If you need anything, please let me know, alright?” The nurse spoke kindly, but the warmth of her charm was lost on Dazai after a while. He’d heard it a million times. The gentle tone. The sympathetic smile. It was all rehearsed. He didn’t want to hear it anymore. He didn’t want kindness born from pity.

The only thing he really wanted to hear was the sweet embrace of death. But the universe was not nearly kind enough for that. It never had been.

If anything, it felt like it was mocking him. Each morning he opened his eyes was another reminder that he was still here, still breathing, still waiting for an end that never seemed to come.

“What’s with that weird ass food combination you got there?” Chuuya asked, eyeing Dazai’s tray like it personally offended him. Dazai just shrugged, picking at his plate with the plastic fork. They gave him forks now, ever since his hands became too shaky to use chopsticks. It was annoying; all of it was. Like getting bubblegum stuck in your hair, or a sticky residue under your fingernails. Just an inconvenience, a pesky thing itching at him under his skin.

“I dunno. Some kinda nutrient-dense diet they have me on,” he mumbled. The food looked artificial, like someone had tried to fake vitality in food form. He considered eating something, anything, just so the other boy wouldn’t be suspicious, but the thought made him nauseous in itself.

He hated this. It was awful. Why did Natsume do this to him?

“Damn, no wonder they got you on a diet like that, you look like a fucking twig,” Chuuya answered with little thought, clearly the less tactful type. It wasn’t even the worst thing anyone had said to him. Not by a long shot. But for some reason, hearing it said to his face like that stung.

Maybe it was because it wasn’t said in pity. It was just a plain observation. Cold, factual. Like stating the sky was blue. That kind of honesty felt more humiliating than concern ever did. It embarrassed him more than all the nurses’ weekly weigh-in comments combined. They would always make comments like, “Oh, you’re so light, I bet you’d be buoyant enough to float!” or, “You’re so tiny that a vulture could pick you up and carry you away!”

Dazai didn’t like it. He hated it when people looked at him. Really looked. At his thin wrists, at the way his collarbones jutted out like coat hangers, at the bruises blooming like ink stains across his skin. He didn’t want help. He was sick, and he was broken. He didn’t want to be handled. He didn’t want to be fixed.

There was nothing left to fix.

Porcelain could only be smashed so many times until the pieces would scatter too far to account for anymore. Even an art like kintsugi couldn’t fix the metaphorical ceramic doll that was his mind.

“It’s just genetics,” Dazai said, mumbling. He was doing that thing again — that thing where he lost his confidence and retreated back into his shell.

The truth was, he had no clue whether it was genetics or not. He had no idea what his father looked like, nor what his mother looked like, and he found himself not wanting to know. The less he knew, the better.

Some mysteries are better left unsolved. Questions like those didn’t need answers, not when the answers only made it harder to stay numb.

“You look half-dead,” Chuuya pressed.

Osamu didn’t want to tell him that really was the truth.

“How rude,” Dazai huffed, trying his best to feign an offended expression. It didn’t quite land. He didn’t really care. Maybe it made him happy, even. That someone finally acknowledged his struggles without him outright telling them.

A little bit, at least.

He hated telling people about his illness because, once he did, that’s all they knew him as. The hopeless little cancer patient who would probably never get to see the outside world past his sixteenth birthday.

He didn’t want pity. He didn’t want treatment, or plans, or hope wrapped in sterile packaging. He just wanted to be done. He wanted to finally die.

Unfortunately, it wasn’t his decision to make. And death, as it turned out, didn’t take requests.

He peeled back the plastic lid off the jelly they’d given him, reaching for the remote across the table. This recreational room had a TV, a HEPA filter, art supplies — hell, it somehow even had a window. It was one of the better-stocked rooms; a diamond in a rough, hopeless place like this.

Dazai only got to come here because he had a high clearance, because he was Mori’s patient, and nobody questioned Mori.

He tried to stop thinking too deeply about the food sitting untouched on his tray. It was just food, food he’d probably eaten a million times. There was nothing overtly wrong with it. He didn’t want it. He didn’t want any of it. It wasn’t just about hunger, or the lack of it. It wasn’t even about the taste.

Dazai didn’t know why he was the way he was around food, or when his brain had even started reacting to it like that. The way it looked, the way it smelled, the thought of it mixing together in his churning stomach — eugh, it was disgusting. At first, it had just made him feel sick. Now he felt afraid. It wasn’t just nausea anymore. It was dread. And yet, even in that, there was guilt.

Everyone wanted him to eat. Everyone looked at him like eating would fix things. But he didn’t want to be held together. Not like this. Not when everything inside him was already falling apart.

He didn’t want to eat at all anymore.

The remote suddenly felt foreign in his hand. His thumb hovered uncertainly over the buttons. He had no idea what Chuuya liked to watch. Normally, Dazai would put on the same marine wildlife channel that he’d watched a thousand times over, but Chuuya would probably think he was weird. Chuuya probably watched… sports, or something like that. Dazai didn’t know. He didn’t know many people his age.

Sigma was his only good friend, and Sigma was perfectly content with watching the same aquarium CD on loop for hours straight. But Chuuya probably wasn’t like Sigma.

“Uh.. What do you wanna watch?” Dazai spoke up, feeling uncomfortable.

“Anything but the news,” replied the other boy, already halfway done with his own lunch. Had Dazai really been stuck in his head that long…? He blinked at the tray in front of him, still untouched. Time slipped by strangely here.

Dazai hesitated with the remote in his hand. He knew that when people said ‘anything,’ they usually didn’t want to watch just anything. He sighed. Why was socializing so difficult? The brunette found himself missing their banter, Chuuya’s loud, mulish gasconade — right now, it was much too quiet. If a fly were to land on the window outside, Dazai was sure he’d be able to hear it in the silence.

“I normally watch wildlife documentaries, the American ones.”

It felt so weird to say, like he was speaking in a foreign tongue. Oh dear, now he’s made himself look stupid. Good job, Osamu. Really nailed that one.

“Really? All my friends make fun of me for watching English documentaries,” Chuuya replied.

The brunette blinked.

Was he hearing this correctly?

Chuuya, instead of making fun of him like the (probably) nerd that he was, actually related to him?

The thought caught Dazai off guard. He felt really strange, shifting, discomforted by the warmth blooming unexpectedly in his chest.

“Most people make fun of me too,” Dazai answered, unsure of what tone to use, so it just came out… awkward. He was lying, though — he was sure people probably would make fun of him… If he actually had any friends, that is.

Dazai liked to convince himself that the reason he had few friends was by choice, and not just the fact that he was excruciatingly lonely. Sometimes, he wondered if he was simply too broken for anyone to want to stick around. It was easier to pretend he didn’t care than to admit how badly he wanted someone — anyone — to see past the sickness and the scars and just be there.

“Huh, I didn’t expect to actually find something in common with a bastard like you,” Chuuya spoke up, laughing — his laugh was a confident one, like he had no problem standing by himself on his own two feet. The way he shook his head, the way he chuckled with an almost palpable amusement… it made Dazai’s stomach feel strange.

He tried to push the feeling aside, switching on one of the familiar wildlife documentaries that had become so commonplace for him that he’d long begun to see them in his more unblighted dreams.

“Hmph, don’t think that makes us friends,” Dazai griped in reply, sure to use his most annoying voice possible — like itching someone with a metaphorical feather, or the feeling of crumbs stuck embedded in the sheets. Really, what he did, this annoying act — it was just to push people away.

He didn’t want people too close to him, people who would think of him too highly, or look at him with too much scrutiny, like boiled knives stuck inside his cheeks. They would start to see the cracks in his makeup, or the lies hidden in the space behind his eyes.

That was certainly not what Dazai wanted. No, not at all.

It was easier to keep everyone at a distance, to wear the mask a little longer, even if it felt like it was slowly suffocating him.

It was probably better if nobody knew the true nature of the bleak, morbid place he called his mind. Even if a small part of him longed for help, comfort, recognition, at the end of the day, it was better like this. It was better that people only knew what he showed them, or else they’d run away. They always did.

After all, Chuuya was too nice. Dazai could see it in the way he smiled at the nurse, the way he seemed to glance at Dazai’s ashy, revolting body with something bordering on worry, even the sallow skin beneath his eyes that made him look as though he were agnate to a decaying corpse.

There was something like pity behind Chuuya’s eyes, sure, but there was something else. Something kind, too kind for someone like Dazai, for he did not deserve kindness, and certainly none from Chuuya.

“Wouldn’t dream of it, ya asshole,” Chuuya laughed.

Dazai wasn’t entirely sure why, but he found himself smiling too.

Notes:

an interesting thing to note is that you can kind of see dazai and chuuya’s differing personality traits in this fic just by comparing their narration. chuuya doesn’t tend to think too far into things, and he’s more social than osamu, at least in these earlier chapters — meanwhile, dazai doesn’t really pay attention to what the group is saying and instead shuts himself into his own head. i really enjoy writing this fic for the sole reason of comparing their characters psychologically, at least in this au, and if anybody notices anything else about it i’d love to hear it :3 ty for reading

 

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Chapter 4: cause we've tried hungry, and we've tried full, and nothing seems enough

Notes:

the title of this chapter is from townie by mitski. please be warned that there is self-harm and mentions of suicide and eating disorders in this chapter. if that is too much for you, please skip this one and stay safe; your mental health matters most! otherwise, i hope you enjoy. happy birthday to our favorite dazai and perhaps i'll post chapter five early as well

Dazai rubbed his forehead as the sun shone in his face, trying to brush away the nightmare still burned in the space behind his eyes.

He hated the sun. It was annoying and little more than a hot, glittering nuisance. It’s not like he ever got to go outside to see it anyway. After all, freedom is just a concept, isn’t it?

He didn’t want to sit up, but he did. There were once times when he would stay in bed because he did not want to detach himself from the warm sheets. Nowadays, he stayed in bed because he did not want to accept the fact that he was still alive. Despite having been awake for barely a moment, he already wanted to go back to sleep again.

(Maybe today would finally be the day he kicked the bucket.)

He reached around for his phone, squinting as his eyes adjusted to its light. There were a few alarms that he’d slept through, of course. He didn’t know why he bothered setting them anymore.

Maybe it let him pretend he was still trying. Like he hadn’t completely given up. A small, false hope that still made him open his eyes each morning.

Dazai scrolled through his phone, looking for missed calls that, of course, weren’t there. He didn’t know who he expected to call him. It’s not like anyone cared enough.

He had a few unread messages from Sigma. He’d sent him some videos of seals. That made Dazai happy, at least a little. But a little was a lot when he felt nothing most days. His bones were aching.

Me: those are cute. i hope they let me go see one before i die

The other boy’s response was just as quick.

Sigma: you won’t die, you’ll be okay, Osamu

Me: whatever makes you feel better

Get drunk on life, dream of death, Dazai thought to himself. It really was a dream for him. A wish upon a desire that his fingers were just barely brushing, but too weakly to grab.

If only he wasn’t so weak.

Dazai set down his phone at the knock on the door. He had been prepared for it, so he barely flinched at all. He didn’t bother to reply; there was no need. In came a woman, or, more accurately, a girl, a nurse. Her name was Yosano Akiko. A young nurse with skills beyond her age, she was Mori’s protégée. Despite the way she carried herself, Dazai saw the trauma in her eyes.

After all, it was a trauma that he shared, too.

Mori was the head doctor of the pediatric unit. He was the boss, the man nobody dared to say no to. Mori had taken a liking to Dazai a long time ago.

The brunette hated it more than anything.

He knew that Yosano understood the feeling all too well herself.

“Good morning,” she said calmly, brushing back a strand of dark hair. Her hand reached for the central line sticking out of him — this was a daily occurrence, as cyclical as the rise and set of the sun and the moon. There was no need for her to explain to him what she was doing anymore. “How are you feeling?”

“Nothing,” Dazai replied as she began to draw his blood, feeling no need to lie. He’d seen how she was treated by Mori. Everyone here had. She was only a bit older than he was, barely an adult herself.

Yosano smiled — not a warm or relaxed smile like the other nurses', but just her smile. Her smile was a smug one. A confident one. That was just how she was. Mori broke her down again and again, but, unlike Dazai, that man could never keep her kneeling.

“Stay still or I might burst one of your veins,” she teased.

“Oh, woe is me…” he played along, sighing dramatically.

“Let’s check your vitals,” she replied, putting her stethoscope on, moving it around his back.

“Am I dying yet?” he asked, unable to make his tone sound any more enthusiastic. Being here felt like waiting to die. There was no hope, just a timer ticking slowly. A timer that seemed like it couldn’t finish ticking fast enough.

“Nope, you’re still alive and kicking,” she replied cheerfully, putting her stethoscope away and writing something on his chart. “I’ll go get you breakfast.”

“Aww,” Dazai complained as she turned to walk away. It was nice to see some people. Someone his age. He glanced over at the chart she’d left on the table near his bed.

Dazai Osamu, D.O.B. 19/6/20XX, (14 years)

Blood Type: AB

Past Medical History: Previous AML patient. Cancer was thought to be in remission, but has recently returned. The patient has a genetic mutation FLT3-ITD, which leads to a high relapse rate once remission is achieved. Diagnosed with anorexia nervosa, depression, and suspected ARFID. Cancer is aggressive.

Medications: Currently undergoing 7+3 induction therapy: 7 days of Cytarabine + 3 days of Daunorubicin. Mirtazapine is used to treat both depression and stimulate appetite. Midostaurin is administered in accordance with the FLT3-ITD mutation. Promethazine is given as needed for nausea. Morphine is administered for pain management.

Notes: The patient is a high suicide risk. Weekly weigh-ins and physical examinations are to be done by Doctor Mori. High-calorie, nutrient-dense meals are recommended.

Dazai sighed. He was on so many medications that he was sure the reason the pharmacies were still open was because he was paying their employees’ salaries. So many bottles with labels he could barely pronounce. He set down the clipboard once Yosano came back into the room.

“Here you go, Dazai-kun,” she said as she placed a tray of food on the swiveling table beside his bed. She retrieved the clipboard she’d left as Dazai glanced at the breakfast.

A bowl of okayu sat as the main course, supplemented with warm, peeled apple slices. He preferred them cold, but it was fine. At least they were peeled. He couldn’t eat the peel. He would throw it up. It was like eating paper. But even paper was better than that.

There was a pack of senbei, soft rice crackers. He didn’t like soft food, but he hated textured food more. An egg rested on the side, though he would not eat eggs; he simply refused. They were disgusting. His dietitian insisted, but not once did he ever touch it when he was given one. Eating a rock seemed more attractive to him.

The food did not look appealing at all. Not because he wasn’t hungry, but because it was just plain disgusting. This food was not safe. It would only make him sicker. He didn’t know the reason, but he just knew it to be true. Sickness meant more suffering.

Dazai did not want to suffer.

He mumbled something like “thank you” even still.

---

“How are you feeling today, Dazai-kun?” the woman in front of him asked.

The room was pindrop quiet before she’d spoken — the psychiatrists here had long realized that he needed it to be as silent as a morgue to feel comfortable enough to open up. He was like a Phalaenopsis, a plant that needed very specific conditions to grow.

“Fine, Maru-san,” he mumbled, still hesitant to speak despite her affable tone.

The woman, Maruyama Chiharu, who had allowed him to affectionately dub her “Maru-san,” was the only one on the entire psychiatry team he’d managed to connect with throughout his entire stay in the ward. She wasn’t a long-term employee at this hospital, from what he’d gathered, but only a part-time consultant. Japan had a shortage of professionals in the mental health sector, especially child psychologists.

Dazai would know. He’d been through dozens, each promising something different but leaving him more isolated than before. The only one he’d connected with since, well… him.

This was the second time Dazai’s disease had relapsed. Something to do with an unfavorable genetic mutation that predisposed him to a high rate of relapse.

He wasn’t sure why they didn’t just let him die already. Maybe they believed there was still hope. Maybe they were too afraid to give up. But for Dazai, every treatment felt like a cruel delay, and he wished it would end.

“Do you feel like you want to disappear?” she asked, gently. It was like he could see past his eyes into the mess of his mind.

“I always do.”

It wasn’t an answer she hadn’t heard before, so her frown was no more than minuscule. She sighed and glanced down at her notes, the expression on her face too masked to parse. He was a remarkably difficult patient. He often wondered if she got paid enough to deal with him, and if that was the reason she stayed, why she still tried on someone who obviously had no potential left.

“Have you been eating regularly or skipping meals again?”

He squirmed in his seat, deciding a speck of dust on the wall was more worth his attention right now.

“I don’t like how the food tastes. I always end up throwing it up anyway.”

She hummed.

“I see here that they have you on Zofran for nausea. Is it not helping?”

“Nothing helps,” he admitted, hating how ungrateful he sounded, but it was true. Nothing helped. None of the drugs ever made him better. He was broken too deep; there were too many pieces missing to fix it by now.

He was barely even hungry anymore these days. Eating was just another chore, something forced on him by others who still hoped for a recovery he no longer believed in.

Most days, he barely even felt alive. The line between living and merely existing grew blurrier with each passing day.

“I see,” she hummed, putting aside her notes. “You’re not feeling talkative today, are you?”

He shook his head.

“How about we do some art therapy? Would you like to paint or draw today?” “Draw.”

She nodded, rising from her desk to gather the materials. There were times when he used to follow behind, helping her gather the things that they needed. But he’d gotten too weak to walk for long now. He didn’t like the way his joints cracked and his legs wobbled with each step he took. It felt like he was walking with pencil lead as legs and paper straws as crutches.

She brought back a box of his favorite crayons and the special 0.7mm mechanical pencil that he always drew with. He refused to draw with any other; he would only use that one. He didn’t like how the other ones felt in his hands.

He mumbled a thank you that was quickly lost from his mind. He was itching at his wrists, despite his best attempts not to.

“Let’s start with a hard one. I want you to draw what it feels like inside your body right now — can you do that, Dazai-kun?” she asked.

He could only consider it for a moment.

“I don’t think I feel anything,” he admitted.

“I know you are strong, and you tend to ignore your pain. But I want you to consider it, okay?” she smiled gently, her tone like a piece of mildly sweet candy. She always carried herself with confidence, pursued her work sedulously, but when Maruyama spoke to him, her tone was always coated in compassion.

He didn’t like getting attached to people, but he’d known her too long to avoid it. He couldn’t help how he yearned for a mother, or something of the like — someone to love him, to treat him with a deep care that only comes from an extension of your own blood.

It wasn’t his fault she fit into that empty slot in his heart where a mother should be. Just slightly, of course. He wasn’t sure that hole could ever be filled. His real mother probably didn’t exist anymore.

He looked down at the paper, sketching something without really knowing what it was. He couldn’t explain how he felt inside. His hands were shaking as he dragged the pencil behind, but that was nothing new; like a perpetually leaky faucet, he’d come to live with it in the background of his mind.

He stabbed a hole in the paper — it was thin, after all, weak, just like him — and sliced it with the sharpness of the pencil’s lead. He didn’t like how it looked by the end, but he supposed that meant that it was accurate to the source material. After all, he never liked how his body looked.

“Is that all?” she asked, taking the paper. He nodded.

“I don’t know what it means,” he admitted.

“That’s okay. I’ll put this away, and later, we can figure it out together, alright?”

He nodded. He didn’t like feeling vulnerable or talking about himself. But he liked to draw. At least when the pain in his joints wasn’t too debilitating.

“Can we draw something else now?”

“Of course, Dazai-kun. What do you want to draw?”

“I want you to draw a seal,” he said, off the top of his head. Maruyama was a nice artist. She was kind, and he liked to see her draw.

“How about we draw one together?” she proposed. He thought for a moment, but he agreed, reaching for the gray crayon hidden between red and carnation pink. He wanted to reorganize the whole crayon box, but it would just be jumbled by the next time he came back.

“I wish that I were a seal,” he maundered to himself at first, until she began to listen. “If I were a seal, I wouldn’t have to deal with this stuff.”

“By ‘stuff,’ you mean your illness?” she clarified.

“Everything, I think. It’s hard to explain how I feel. I don’t want to fix it, I just want to feel happy. What's the point of trying if it just proves that I'll never be good enough?” he confessed, the look on her face making him immediately regret the words as soon as they escaped his lips.

He knew he was beyond fixing by now. He was going to die this time, no matter what the doctors did. He glanced down at the IV PICC in his arm; the tiny bit of blood trapped under the sticky bandage.

His blood, just like him, was defective. He honestly believed he wasn’t meant to live at all. The fact that he’d even made it this far was only by a stroke of luck, and that lucky streak wouldn’t last forever. He knew he had a ticking time bomb of a life. Each day wasn’t living, it was just a waiting game of when the bomb would go off, for the inevitable explosion.

“And what makes you happy, Dazai-kun?”

He thought about it for a moment. He loved cartoons, but she knew that already. She knew almost everything about him. She knew that his favorite Chiikawa character was Momonga, that he related to Usagi the most, but deep down, he felt like Chiikawa sometimes. She knew that he loved sea slugs because they reminded him of little fireworks, and fireworks reminded him of stars, and of easier times in his childhood, even if those times weren’t really easy.

She knew that he loved seals and had dreamed his whole life of meeting one in person. She knew that he loved philosophy and criminology, and that he had read nearly every book in the hospital’s library. That he loved penology, because one of his favorite reads was Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment.

She even knew of how he liked cats so much that he would watch cat commercials on the hospital television anytime he was bored. That he kept a journal full of pages of facts about his favorite things, each entry sporting worse and worse handwriting as his limbs became more difficult to control.

Yes, she knew all of that already.

“I met this boy,” he began, a bit hesitant. “His name is Nakahara Chuuya. He’s a patient here, too.”

“That’s amazing,” she beamed, her eyes truly bright for the first time in a while. Dazai knew how much she wanted him to make friends, even though it was difficult for him. “Do you like him?”

“No, not really,” he admitted, thoughtfully. “He’s short and annoying and loud and stupid, but… I don’t know, I just feel this connection with him. He’s kind and caring, and he’s a really sweet person… I don’t know, it’s confusing.”

She smiled. “It sounds like you have a little crush,” she laughed.

“Ew, no! I’d rather die!” he shook his head, but thinking about it… Well, Chuuya certainly wasn’t unsightly, despite what Dazai said to his face. He liked Chuuya, as friends, at the very least, but he didn’t want the redhead to know that. Too embarrassing…

“Still, I’m glad you made a friend,” she smiled, genuinely this time, no teasing in her voice. He felt a bit strange hearing that word. Friend. Were he and Chuuya friends? He didn’t know.

“Yeah… I think so, too.”

---

Dazai sighed as he was helped back into his hospital room by one of his nurses — not Yosano, she was already off work for the day. He had already brushed his teeth, ignoring the worrying amount of blood that leaked from his gums. It was normal to him by now; a faint hum in the background of the pathetic play he called his life.

He sat on the bed, reaching for the remote with his good hand. The buttons were faded from the press of his fingers over time. He’d really been here for a long time.

He switched on the television, automatically opening to the news channel. They were rebroadcasting the morning news, something about the American president and the Russian president on a phone call. Dazai didn’t care at all.

He flipped to the next channel, where they were broadcasting Shabekuri 007. It was a variety talk show where they did skits and interviewed celebrities. Dazai only watched it when he wanted something stale and uninteresting to fall asleep to.

There was nothing he wanted to watch. He switched on some American channel showing a documentary about the evolution of fish in the wild. It quickly faded into easy background noise.

His wrists were still itching. He thought back to the time he’d spent with Maruyama. The number of times they’d spoken on his tendency to mar his own flesh with dour scars. The advice she’d given him to try and stay clean — “wear bracelets,” “snap a rubber band on your skin,” or “draw on yourself with red marker.”

It never helped, but he appreciated the sentiment.

His fingers were shaking — more noticeably now than usual — and he really couldn’t fight against his mind this time. It was like trying to stay standing while being hit with a barrage of heavy waves.

He tended to fall down every time.

He’d been allowed a pair of scissors in his room until they found him hurting himself with them. After that, he was only allowed safety scissors and plastic butter knives. But they’d forgotten to take away the blade from his pencil sharpener.

He dug his pencil sharpener out of his art supplies, using the tip of the safety scissors to unwind the tiny screw. He set it down on the table beside him, glancing out into the darkness of the night through the thick hospital windows. He could only see a few stars.

He remembered how the sky had been full of them when he was young. Nowadays, the number seemed to deplete every time.

Maybe it was a sign that he didn’t have much time left to be alive.

He was okay with that.

He started to uncoil the bandages from around his sickly wrists. Even despite his pale, graying skin — splotched with patches of purple and red like a child’s grade-school art project — the scars he’d previously inflicted still protruded, their presence an obtrusive, over-the-top display.

He didn’t think much when he slid the blade over one of his older scars. It opened back up like it had never even been shut — like a hot knife cutting through soft butter. He barely felt it, no matter how deep he went. He didn’t think he deserved the pain; he didn’t deserve to feel anything, really.

With the amount of morphine that he was on, he’d be shocked if he could feel anything.

The wound wasn’t deep — not by his standards, anyway — only some white before red, like a yucky mix of muddled colors. His blood didn’t clot, though, so even a small slit left his bandages soaked sanguine. Something about thrombocytopenia, another thing about neutropenia, a lack of white blood cells, a high propensity for infection — Dazai didn’t care. He couldn’t bring himself to.

He encircled his gaunt wrist with the sticky bandages, dropping the blade somewhere in the hidden notch of his bedside drawer. He didn’t care that the nurses would see the wounds the next morning when they came to change his IV.

He fell asleep uneventfully after that.

Notes:

its important to note this was actually the second chapter i wrote (i wrote chapter 1, then 4, then 2 and 3) so it may seem less developed or less in character than the other chapters, but 5 will be back to normal so if anyone noticed that dw too much we'll be back in business soon. anyways, sorry if i projected onto dazai too much i hope we all enjoyed the angst though

Chapter 5: it's the norm for animals, it's the norm for chemicals

Notes:

this chapter is named after laplace's angel by will wood. i don't remember what i was going to say here.. it is just a lot of dazai angst. i hope we are excited >_< in the next chapter soukoku will hang out again

Dazai rubbed his eyes to hopefully knock the sleepiness away from his brain. He was tired most days now, no matter how much sleep he got. His fatigue never lifted, like a perpetually thick blanket over his brain.

He’d taken a shower this morning, somehow managing to drag himself there with Yosano’s help. That alone had taken more energy than he wanted to admit. And still, he refused to let anyone help him bathe, despite their insistence — it felt too embarrassing, humiliating even.

He hated being embarrassed, hated the way it made him feel: small, fragile, pathetic. Like something breakable. To be handled like glass was worse than dealing with the consequences of his own stubbornness. He didn’t want to feel more helpless or exposed than he already did.

Not when his body already betrayed him every day.

Dazai didn’t trust people.

That’s just the way he was.

Despite their protests, he didn’t care. If he did slip and crack his skull open on the slick hospital tile, staining it red with his cloyingly gross blood, he wouldn’t care all that much, really.

After all, he wanted to die anyway. Each attempt had been a failure, a trip to the mental health ward, a new therapist, and promises that he would get better. Promises that felt more like obligations than hope.

But Dazai knew better. He would not get better.

Because it wasn’t just his body that was broken, after all. It was something deep-seated, like a parasite in the back of his mind, eating away at his humanity — if he had any to begin with, that was. He couldn’t remember a time when it hadn’t been there. He couldn’t recall when, but at a point, it had become part of him now.

Yosano sat behind him, gently running a comb through the tangles in his hair. He preferred to do things himself, but that often meant that they didn’t get done at all.

There was a time when Dazai procrastinated on small things because he was simply lazy. It was harmless, really — just a few more hours of reading before he would get up to shower, or a few more minutes of sleep before he would finally roll out of bed.

Now, Dazai procrastinated doing things because his body simply couldn’t keep up. His legs hurt too badly to pull himself to his feet, knees trembling under the weight of someone too thin, too tired to hold himself upright. Even simple things like brushing his hair were awful. Just lifting his arms was an arduous task for him. Something most people wouldn’t even think about.

You never notice what you have until it’s gone. Dazai’s life was awful before, but now it was even worse. Before, at least, he could run from things. Now, he couldn’t even walk away.

If only his last seven attempts hadn’t failed.

Seven times fallen, eight times standing.

But the only thing Dazai was good at doing was failing, anyway.

Yosano sat behind him, quietly running a comb through his damp hair. It was falling out from the chemotherapy, but he knew that already, and yet, he chose to ignore it — he didn’t want to see himself in the mirror anymore, didn’t want to accept how he looked now.

He was dressed in standard hospital pajamas — they were offered to every patient, but most children wore clothing from home. Dazai didn’t, because he had no home to begin with.

It used to bother him, years ago. That absence. Now, he could barely remember his childhood. If that’s what it could even be called, anyway.

He wasn’t sure if he’d say he trusted Yosano, but he felt a connection to her — like two tattered souls finding each other in a crowd, they were drawn together, somehow. He felt comforted seeing the hurt reflected in her eyes. Not because he wanted her to suffer. But because it made him feel less alone.

She never pitied him, unlike everyone else. He couldn’t read her expression, how she truly felt — some days, it looked like she wanted him dead.

In a room with just the two of them, she wouldn’t be alone in that sentiment.

“Mori-san’s here today,” she spoke up, no cheer in her voice — it was like a warning of a disaster soon to come, a bomb wrapped up in an empty, unsuspecting label. Her tone portrayed nothing, but Dazai knew that Mori never imputed good things. “Said he wants to see you.”

“I don’t want to,” Dazai mumbled, looking down at his hands. He’d already taken his pills this morning, and they’d already gone through the song and dance of breakfast, where he barely ate a thing from the bland plate in front of him. Yosano coaxed him to try and finish, dangling the promise of bringing him a gift the next time she got a chance, but he knew he’d probably throw it up later, anyway.

He felt bad about disappointing her, but at the end of the day, he had no choice. Feeling bad didn’t change anything and he was still… himself. Good for nothing; just dead weight who could barely do anything for himself.

“You’ll be fine,” Yosano said, smoothing out his dark hair. She always had a stiff upper lip — a way of convincing people that it would be okay even if she didn’t truly believe it would. It wasn’t a lie, not exactly. More like a kindness wrapped in make-believe.

Dazai might have felt more hopeful if he believed there was even a small chance that she was right. But he’d had it all before — her words were empty, a consolation more than anything.

He didn’t know if it helped or not, in the long run. But he supposed it was nice to feel like someone cared.

“Can you give me another shot of morphine?” he asked, trying to ignore the sharp sting of the IV dripping fluid into his arm. It was more painful for him than most people — his veins were small, easy to find, but narrow — he was painfully underweight, and the chemotherapy made it nearly impossible to even keep food down.

Most of his mornings began with him hurling up stomach acid into a basin beside his bed. Sometimes, it came back out with blood, a disgusting concoction he didn’t even want to spare a glance at.

His stomach lining was completely ruined from the cyclical vomiting, the chemo, his poor eating habits, everything. His blood couldn’t coagulate when a wound was opened, since his body didn’t have enough platelets. He was sure he’d bled so much by now that all the original blood in his body was long gone, like shower water flushed down the drain.

He had the greediest blood type, AB, meaning he could receive transfusions from basically anyone, which, in theory, was great for him. But in reality, a hell to go through. He’d had so many blood transfusions he couldn’t count anymore. He wondered about those people, sometimes — they were probably fine, happy in their lives, blissfully ignorant, while he was left here suffering. It wasn’t their fault, not really.

He felt bad, sometimes, for sullying their healthy blood — putting it inside that body of his that seemed to ruin everything it touched, yet was still the only body he had to call his own. The only thing he had to call his own.

The chemo was meant to help him, but all it did was make things worse. It gave his throat ulcers that bled down his esophagus into his stomach, coming back up in his vomit. It made him nauseous, unable to keep down even a bite of food — like even that was a foreign invader, something his body needed to get rid of.

It felt as though the treatments weren’t aimed at healing but at tormenting him, a slow, unrelenting torture designed to wear him down before they finally let him go.

“What do you need morphine for?” Yosano asked, straightening her back. “You know it’ll probably make you even more nauseous.”

He knew that. Of course, of course Dazai knew that. He’d had enough morphine to kill a newborn baby before. He knew exactly what it would do to him, and what it wouldn’t. But he didn’t want Yosano to know the real reason he was asking. It wasn’t for the pain, not really. It was to escape; he didn’t want to be aware when Mori got here. He wanted to be asleep, unconscious. Somewhere far, far away from here. A happier place, somewhere that didn’t exist for him.

“Just push it with Zofran,” he mumbled, unable to think up a better reason. He was in pain, pain that stemmed from much more than just his aching bone marrow. His head was hurting, aching.

“Alright, I can give you a couple of milligrams, but don’t tell Mori-san,” she conceded, and, for anyone else, it would cost them their job. But Yosano was sneaky, and she was good at what she did. Dazai had a special kind of understanding with her that he didn’t have with anyone else.

He muttered a thanks, receiving little more than a hum of acknowledgement in return, but that was enough. He didn’t need more. He knew that she understood.

He felt the morphine the second it seeped into his veins, mixed with his blood in a pretty concoction he couldn’t see. It felt different than other drugs when it went through the IV — burned less, in some way, like it belonged there. Like he belonged with it.

Maybe he did. Maybe he was meant to have enough to overdose on. It would be an easy, painless way to go.

Much better than the chemotherapy, that is. Much kinder, more humane.

Could you even be humane to someone who was barely even human?

“Call if you need me. Mori-san should be here soon,” she said, scratching off an objective on his chart before waving her goodbyes and leaving his sad hospital room. Dazai felt dizzy, his head spinning like his neck was a carousel.

He didn’t want to look at his phone. It would only confirm what he already knew: no one was thinking of him. No missed calls. No unread messages. Just another reminder of how utterly lonely he was. Instead, he reached for his notebook — the only thing in the room not connected to a tube or a machine. He never wrote things about himself; there was nothing in his life he wanted to remember. He wanted to forget his suffering, his existence.

So he wrote about things he enjoyed instead — the inconsequential things that made him feel almost human. It was all he had, confined to this isolated hospital room, the mattress having an imprint of his frail body from how long he’d stayed. How long he’d been dying.

He was neutropenic, and his blood counts were dangerously low — technically, he wasn’t meant to have visitors, much less leave, but they let him, anyway. Everyone in the hospital knew the truth: he wouldn’t be around long enough for it to matter. He was going to die, but they had an obligation to keep him alive until he did.

For Dazai, it felt like they were making him suffer for fun, just to see how long he could last — like he was a guinea pig in their too-tiny cage, nothing more than an experiment for their greedy minds.

Dazai flipped to the first page of his notebook, torturing himself in a different way, remembering how steady his handwriting used to be, how flawless his art once was, back when he could still properly hold a pen. He scanned the page with his eyes, trying to forget the story behind each written word.

Seals are semi-aquatic animals. They are the only marine mammals that feed in water and breed on land. Their diet consists of krill and other fish. Baby seals are called pups, and pups are usually fluffy. 33 species of seals exist, and their size varies by species. The crabeater seal eats krill, not crab, like its name would suggest.

The section about seals was a few dozen pages long. He flipped to the next bookmark.

There are 6,800 species of crab. The largest crab is a Japanese Spider Crab, while the smallest is called a Pea Crab. Thanks to their ten legs, crabs can walk in every direction, but they mostly walk sideways. In addition to this, they can also swim sideways. A group of crabs is called a cast. Most live—

“Hello, Dazai-kun.”

Dazai jolted, slamming the notebook shut. He looked up fast enough to snap his neck if he were lucky, with how brittle his bones were. He should’ve been expecting it, but he hadn’t even heard Mori knock before he entered. The boy wasn’t even sure if he did.

He mumbled a “hello,” wanting nothing more than to disappear. Mori made him feel so uncomfortable, like a cat hanging by its tail, being dangled precariously over a vat of acid, helpless and terrified.

“How is the treatment working?” the man asked, stepping closer to Dazai’s bedside. He lifted the brunette’s chin, inspecting his eyes, although he didn’t need to. He took Dazai’s vitals, despite the fact that Yosano had already done so that morning, and had already left it easy to see on the chart next to his door. It was just another excuse for Mori to make Dazai uncomfortable with the press of freezing cold fingers over the bumps of his protruding spine.

“I don’t know,” he replied, blanking. Dazai wasn’t a doctor; how could he know if it was working or not? Should it even work? Could it even work? Was Dazai even worth saving, after all this? Could he even be salvaged, like an old desk at a dump or a garage sale, or could he only be thrown out now, unable to even be reused or recycled?

He didn’t want to admit that it only felt like things were getting worse. That would make him get more chemo, more aggressive treatment, and he didn’t want any of that.

Dazai did not want pain. He wanted death, he wanted release — an end, not a cure that didn’t exist. Though he wasn’t sure why the grim reaper seemed so averse to taking him just yet.

He existed in a cruel in-between — too sick to live comfortably, yet somehow not sick enough to die. The waiting for his inevitable death was its own punishment, a never-ending purgatory where time dragged on and on.

“I heard that you’ve been throwing up your meals,” Mori said, making Dazai almost flinch. He didn’t know why he was terrified. He didn’t want to go through Mori force-feeding him again, just for it to all be for nothing when it inevitably came back up again.

It wasn’t his fault that he couldn’t keep it down. His body was fighting him — what was he supposed to do?

“It’s hard to keep anything down,” he admitted, unsure.

Without warning, Mori grabbed his jaw, pressing his mouth shut by extension, which knocked a noise of discomfort from his throat, trapping it in his mouth and making him let out a sharp breath from his nose. That breath was apparently enough to scratch his nasal lining and let it begin pouring blood, to which Mori watched with an indecipherable expression.

The hospital air was dry, which made his nosebleeds even worse. Anything could start them now, they were so common. His body couldn’t keep a wound shut once it was open.

Mori wiped his bloody lips with a tissue, sighing before stuffing Dazai’s nostrils with gauze. The fabric was coarse against his dry nasal passageway — everything hypersensitive, his nerves hyperaware. Mori was studying him with this gaze that Dazai could only articulate as itchy, like persistent bugs on your skin that wouldn’t leave, like a sticky residue that remained no matter how much soap you used.

Dazai couldn’t describe it to someone who hadn’t experienced it, but to him, it was the worst feeling in the world.

“Are you alright to stand, Dazai-kun?” Mori asked, letting go of him. Dazai knew what was coming — the weigh-in he dreaded every single time. He had to do it once a week, no matter what; no excuses. Mori didn’t take excuses. He seemed nice on the outside, and he could be worse, sure, but that was just to coax you farther in — a false sense of security, a spider’s web that was designed to trap those desperate enough to reach for it.

Dazai was exactly that, desperate. He always knew Mori wasn’t innocent on the inside, but he was desperate to feel something, anything. Something like care, something to get better, to be better; to really live instead of just survive.

“I guess,” he replied, trying his best not to mumble — but his voice never projected well, it just sounded broken instead. He planted his wobbly feet on the cold floor, gritting his teeth as he balanced his weight on them. It felt like trying to walk on toothpicks while carrying a boulder.

Even the few steps to the scale were hell for him. He could barely do anything anymore.

“37 kg,” Mori read aloud, as if Dazai couldn’t see the number on the scale himself. It went down every time. He knew he should feel worse about it, but he didn’t, not really. Maybe it was what he deserved.

At this point, Dazai didn’t know what he deserved anymore.

Maybe nothing at all.

---

“And I don’t blame you”

There was music playing in the background.

“If you want to bury me in your memory”

Dazai sat in the worn, sunken sheets of his hospital bed. Though they were changed often, they never seemed to feel any newer. His stain on them went beyond a physicality — it was a testament to how long he’d stayed in this empty, hopeless place.

“I’m not the girl I ought to be, but”

Or, perhaps the hopelessness he felt wasn’t due to the hospital, or the isolation, or his condition. Maybe it came from deep inside; maybe it was he who infected the places around him, who drained the hope and the life from anywhere he went.

“Maybe when you tell your friends”

But it didn’t matter anymore. None of it did. He would die soon, and, hopefully, he would take that negativity away with him to whatever hell he was destined to go to. He just had to bear it until then.

“You can tell them what you saw in me”

Dazai sat with his favorite stuffed animal in his lap. It was a red crab, one of his only possessions, the only thing he really cared for. It was named after the man who gifted it to him. But Dazai didn’t want to think too hard about it, or he’d remember how much it all hurt him inside. He tried to focus on what he was drawing instead. Yet, after staring at the blank page for what felt like hours, he realised he’d forgotten what it was meant to be.

“And not the way I am”

The pencil slid from his fingers, rolling off the edge of the table onto the floor. He looked at it with a blank gaze. He was sad. He wanted to draw with that pencil. But moving hurt too much, and getting out of bed felt impossible, so he forgot about it and reached for his phone instead.

“And I don’t mean to make your heart blue, but—”

He ignored the missed calls and texts that didn’t exist, instead switching off the music. Dazai got bored easily. Nothing could occupy him for long. When he was bored, he preferred to drown in his misery — more than he typically did, that is.

Dazai loved music. It was one of the few things that he enjoyed, something that brought him momentary respite from the hell he called life. Something that—

“Dazai-kun, hello.”

He flinched.

When Dazai raised his head, there was a man there — black hair, glasses, a familiar face. Sakaguchi Ango — he was a government worker, the social worker assigned to Dazai’s case. The man who chose to keep him alive, who forced him to go through all this torture.

Dazai tried not to resent him for that. After all, the man was only doing what he thought was best — doing his job, following orders. But that didn’t make it any easier for Dazai to accept. Dazai was suffering. That pain, that anger… it didn’t stop for anyone.

The problem was, ‘best’ didn’t feel like mercy. It felt like punishment. He just wished it would end already. It felt like no one was truly on his side, no matter what they claimed. Not Ango, not the doctors, not even himself. They all treated him like a project, a case file to be managed rather than a person trapped inside a failing body, trying desperately to hold onto something that still felt like life.

Not that he even felt like a person anymore. The sickness, the endless treatments — they’d worn him down bit by bit, until there was almost nothing left. His sense of self had faded, like paint peeling off a wall.

Was he still someone, or just something broken, patched up out of obligation rather than compassion? Something to be kept breathing, not really living.

“I didn’t know you were coming,” the brunette said. Ango rarely came to visit; he was always busy, tired, it was too late — something or another, some excuse to keep him from having to look at Dazai’s face again, to remind him of what he lost.

Dazai couldn’t blame him.

He didn’t want to look at himself either.

“Well, I hadn’t planned to. How are you doing?” Ango asked, nothing much to his voice — he was always pointed, he didn’t tend to beat around the bush. The older man adjusted his glasses, staring at Dazai as if expecting a more swift response. Dazai looked away.

“Fine,” he lied, but it got old fast, lying about this. The word felt emptier every time he said it. It had lost all meaning. Dazai was never fine. He was dying. He was dying, and all he wanted to do was at least not have to suffer before he left. “How much longer do I have to do this?”

“What do you mean?”

The confusion was palpable in his tone, but Dazai couldn’t feel guilty enough to stop himself from continuing.

“The treatment,” he clarified, watching as Ango pushed up his glasses and glanced at the clock, as if searching for the right words, as if time itself could delay the truth, as if he could somehow postpone the inevitable answer, the same one he’d given a dozen times.

The same false hope he’d given a dozen times.

“Until you’re better,” Ango said.

Better? What did that even mean anymore? Dazai wasn’t sure he even remembered what it felt like to not be sick.

“I don’t want to be.”

“Dazai, I can’t just let you end your own life.”

The brunette felt strange, hearing someone speak his name so seriously — without the honorific, without the childish or warm tone, the one nurses cooed into patients’ ears to calm them — it felt… personal. It made him squirm. Made him feel wrong, like an impostor. Dazai was barely a person. So, who was he to be treated in such a human way?

“Why not?”

“Because. You know that’s not what he would’ve wanted.”

Dazai tensed. He looked away, staring at the plushie in his lap. He ran his fingers over the fluff, trying to calm himself, to ground himself in reality — it did little, really, to quiet his raging mind, to make him feel human, instead of just a defect or a misprint in a deck of otherwise perfect cards.

Dazai hated it, he hated when Ango used that against him. Who was he to say what Odasaku would’ve wanted? Who was anyone to say what Odasaku would’ve wanted?

“What about what I want?” Dazai mumbled through tears that hadn’t yet fallen, tears he tried so hard to push away. “This isn’t what I wanted. I want to be gone, I don’t want to suffer anymore. I want to go where he went.”

His voice cracked on the last word, and he cursed himself for it. He hated how raw he sounded, how small. He hated how much of himself he’d let show. Because in the end, even his death didn’t belong to him.

Dazai knew he would never go to heaven, that was a place for people like Odasaku — for good people, people who cared for others, people who gave without expecting anything in return.

Not people like him. Dazai was not a good person. He was selfish. Broken. Whatever came after his life, he knew it wouldn’t be peace.

Still, it was a nice thought, even if he knew it was foolish.

“Dazai—” Ango began, before a buzzing noise cut him off. He glanced down at his phone — ah, of course, work. He seemed to frown, contemplating for a moment, before looking at Dazai with something like pity, something conciliatory, perhaps apologetic. “I have to take this. We’ll talk later, Dazai-kun.”

Dazai said nothing. He didn’t even nod. There was no point. Ango turned to the door, focused, as he raised the phone to his ear.

“Yes, this is Sakaguchi Ango, Special Division of…”

Dazai turned away as the door to his hospital room slammed shut. The sound echoed louder than it should have — sharp and final, like a period slammed down at the end of a sentence. Even grammar seemed cruel today.

Ango was always too busy with work to deal with a pest like him.

Maybe it was for the better that he didn’t stick around much longer.

At least he didn’t have to see the way Osamu’s tears fell once he was gone.

Notes:

i love angst and my beta reader kat

the song that was playing in this fic is goodbye, my danish sweetheart by mitski, but we all knew that

follow me on twt

Chapter 6: i wanna hold your hand so tight, i'm gonna break my wrist

Notes:

i havent written in a while, so i honestly forgot whatt happene in this chapter, i just know its gay as usual. anyways, sorry i also havent uploaded in a while, ive been quite busy + writers block but i think i will get into writing this fic again i hope!! anyways hope you enjoy

Chuuya woke up to the feeling of light in his eyes, as he did every morning.

He never needed alarms — not really. Chuuya was the type of person who simply awoke when he needed to, no intervention necessary. His body was used to waking up early each morning, getting ready for school with only a slightly sluggish droop.

Chuuya had a routine, something he never deviated from. He woke up, took a shower, got dressed, had a small breakfast, and went to school. His life was cyclical, but comfortingly so — just enough to be exciting, but not enough to leave him anxious at night. He liked it that way. Predictability made life manageable.

Even his nightmares were routine, meaning every night was often the same. They scared him, sure, but they didn’t surprise him.

But that was before.

Before the hospital gowns and the lab tests. Before the sterile smell of disinfectant replaced the scent of shampoo and toast. Before the diagnosis that shattered everything he knew and left him picking through the wreckage, trying to rebuild something that resembled a life.

Ever since then, his routine had been thrown to the wolves — cast away like old junk to a scrapyard. The steady cycle he once clung to had been tossed aside, replaced by appointments, blood tests, scans with names he barely understood, and medications he could barely pronounce, let alone remember.

Every day was something new — a new side effect, a new result, a new reason to worry. Nothing felt predictable anymore. Everything was unfamiliar, unstable, quietly terrifying.

Chuuya didn’t like change.

He hated the feeling of not being in control.

But time stops for no one — something brutal and cruel in its own right, that is to say.

He glanced at his phone. It was 6:49 AM, just a bit before the time that nurses came by for morning rounds, knocking politely with their tired smiles, pretending that everything was fine. It happened at the same time every day.

And even if the rest of Chuuya’s life felt like it was slipping out of his hands, that small, predictable moment brought him a strange kind of comfort.

It wasn’t much, but it was something. A routine. And right now, routine was the only thing that made him feel like he still had a grip on the world.

To his surprise, he had a text. Well, he had a few dozen, but this one wasn’t from Yuan or Shirase or any of his other classmates back at school — but one stood out. It wasn’t from any of them. It was from someone else.

mackerel: do yo uwant to hang out later

Chuuya blinked at the screen for a second, confused, before remembering. Right, he had given Dazai his phone number the last time they were together. The spelling mistake made him snort. All his other friends were so picky with how they typed, so embarrassed by a small typo like that. But it was as if Dazai simply didn’t care at all. No effort to correct it. No punctuation.

Chuuya hadn’t expected Osamu to request his company again — that boy was an enigma, a mystery so slippery, so elusive that Chuuya couldn’t even begin to grasp it. Trying to understand him felt like chasing smoke through your fingers. There were layers to him, Chuuya could tell. Many, many layers to a person like that. But they were delicate, hard to peel away — he couldn’t brute force it, like he was used to. He had to be careful, precise. He hovered over the keyboard for a few seconds before finally typing back a response.

Me: why the hell are you suddenly interested in hanging out with me, mackerel

Chuuya hit send before thinking too hard about it, trying to resist the urge to delete and retype it a thousand times. Everything he typed either made him sound too eager or too standoffish, so he just wrote what came to mind first.

He barely had time to set his phone down before it buzzed again.

mackerel: well, natsume-san said that we should spend more time together. it’s not like i have anything better to do.

Chuuya sighed, feeling a bit guilty for responding that way. Dazai sounded almost… sad. Lonely, in a way. Chuuya tried to remind himself of what a manipulative bastard the brunette was deep down.

He typed out a new message.

Me: fine, I can come to your room I guess

mackerel: okay. it’s room 411

Chuuya looked at the message, blinking. Room 411. He found that he had no idea where that was. Supposedly, they were on the same floor, but he hadn’t noticed a room 411 anywhere around. Maybe it was in a different hospital wing, one he hadn’t bothered exploring. The hospital layout was a maze anyway, still, it struck him as odd that he’d never even noticed it.

Then again, there were a lot of things about Dazai that didn’t make sense. Chuuya still wasn’t sure what the guy was even here for, after all. All the brunette had said was that he ‘bruised easily’, whatever the hell that meant. It could’ve been a joke, or it could’ve meant something serious. With Dazai, Chuuya had learned, you could never really tell.

Me: where is that

mackerel: it’s in wing b. you’re probably in wing a. just ask a nurse to show you the way

Chuuya rolled his eyes. That wasn’t very helpful, but then again, vague answers seemed to be Dazai’s speciality. He just sighed. Most of the hospitals he’d stayed in didn’t even have a fourth floor — or at least avoided using it for long-term patient wards. The number was considered unlucky, since it sounded like the word for “death.” Even room numbers with a four were often skipped. Most considered it a bad omen — and in a place like this, no one wanted more reason to feel doomed.

Me: when do u want me to come around

Chuuya hoped he didn’t sound too desperate for Osamu’s company — he still hated the guy! At least… he thought so.

mackerel: i dunno, whenever you want to.

Me: don’t u have to do treatment

mackerel: before lunch time, yeah. but you can come during it as long as you’re not freaked out

Chuuya didn’t know what to say to that. It felt strange — how should he reply? Should he be flattered? The two of them barely knew each other, so why was Dazai so comfortable inviting him to be present during a clearly vulnerable moment, like it was no big deal?

Chuuya didn’t know how to feel. Vulnerability was never something he associated with ease — not his own, and definitely not other people’s. And yet, Dazai extended it like it was nothing, like it cost him nothing. Maybe it meant nothing, and Chuuya was simply thinking too deeply into it. He pushed the thought aside before it could take root.

It was almost time for the nurses to begin their daily rounds — for Chuuya, it was a short process: vitals, weight check, blood pressure, and temperature. Then came his morning medication, and after that, breakfast. The food wasn’t too bad here, and the staff were all kind, but even so, it wasn’t where Chuuya wanted to be. He missed home. He didn’t mean to sound ungrateful, but he simply couldn’t sugarcoat the truth.

Me: alr just text me whenever you’re ready

mackerel: okay

Chuuya set down his phone on the bedside table, dooming himself to once more push off those dozens of unread messages from his classmates and his family. He just didn’t have the energy to answer them, not today.

He appreciated their concern. Really, he did. But sometimes, their words only made him feel more distant, like they belonged to a life still in motion, one that kept going without him. School updates, half-finished inside jokes, the occasional photo from lunch break. It all reminded him of what he was missing, and how far it felt from where he was now.

And how could he respond anyway? He didn’t have the energy to offer reassurance or pretend everything was fine. Not when he wasn’t sure of anything himself. Most days, he didn’t even know what was happening inside his own body. Telling people “I’m okay” felt like a lie, and pretending took more strength than he had.

He still spoke to his mother every day on the phone. She didn’t work, but because she was wary of contracting an illness, she tended not to visit too much. Instead, she came around twice a week to say hello and bring him small presents to keep his morale high.

His father accompanied her sometimes, on his days off. But it wasn’t often, and even then, the visits never lasted long — work always called him back. He was a busy man, always had been. Chuuya understood that. His parents were important people. Deep beneath his mother’s sweet exterior, she had her own dark past, too.

If all went well, Chuuya planned to go home this weekend, and hopefully he could attend the rest of the school year without a hitch. Chuuya wasn’t the most academic, but he had good grades, and he hoped for a good future. So he cared about his attendance and about his friends back at school. He didn’t want them to worry too much over someone like him.

The end of the school year was already soon as spring encroached more and more on the land, bringing with it the bloom of cherry blossom trees and the rain of spring showers. It was a reminder that everything kept moving, even when it felt like he was standing still.

Chuuya pushed himself out of bed, thankful that he did not feel that all-too-familiar pressure once his feet touched the ground. The medication they’d given him had definitely helped with the swelling, which he was grateful for.

The doctors here were certainly good at their job. That was what he tried to remind himself every time the sight of needles sent his mind back into that dark place, into that space filled with nothing but anguish and horror. When the doctor’s faces morphed into the distorted, crooked ones that he vaguely remembered from when he was young, those same ones that always haunted his dreams—

Chuuya pushed away the thought.

It didn’t matter what happened back then. He was fine now, he would be fine. He had to be. He was strong.

He slipped his uwabaki back on his feet, walking towards the curtains in his room. One of the few perks of being one of the more autonomous patients was that he didn’t need to wait for the nurses to help him with smaller things. He could do as he wished until it was time for morning rounds, so he tried to take advantage of that freedom as much as he could.

He glanced out his window into the streets below. People were already on their way to work, passing the blooming wisterias as they walked. April through May was the peak season for tourists in Yokohama.

Chuuya hummed and turned to walk towards the bathroom. He thought about everything and nothing as the hot water ran down the back of his neck, warming it like the touch of another human’s skin.

He moved through his morning routine almost without thinking. Brushing his teeth, combing his hair, so automatic that they felt like clockwork to him — something ingrained in him subconsciously, a cycle he didn’t even notice. Yet, it grounded him in a strange way.

While everything else felt uncertain and out of control, this small ritual gave him a bit of comfort. It wasn’t the same as the routine he had at home, but it was still something — some measure of control in the chaos.

By the time he was dressed and back in his room, Ishige was already knocking on his door with breakfast.

“Good morning, Chuuya-kun,” she smiled, bringing in a tray of food for breakfast. It had a glass of milk, as usual, which was his drink of choice, steamed pumpkin, fruit slices, and the same okayu they served him almost every morning. Everything he got had to be low sodium or low fat, which was only slightly bothersome, but he did miss some of his favorite snacks.

Portion control was strict; he could only eat small amounts to avoid straining his fragile heart and sensitive digestive system. It was annoying. It was more than annoying, it was quietly dehumanizing. He was never completely full, but he tried to ignore it. The doctors were just helping him. They wouldn’t do anything bad this time. They just wanted to help.

“Morning,” he answered in his typical gruff voice, hanging his legs over the edge of the bed. They had to do this every morning — vitals, pills, weight, and a leg examination. They monitored him for varix, which apparently meant that they wanted to make sure his veins didn’t have any broken or damaged valves.

Chuuya didn’t fully understand the science, but he’d heard enough explanations to understand the basics. To him, it felt like his body was more a complicated machine in need of constant maintenance than an organic lifeform.

The doctors talked about him like he was an anatomy diagram — lines and labels, not someone who had to live in that body and feel every part of it.

Still, he found it fascinating, in a way. How the body could be read like a textbook, monitored, and adjusted like a puzzle. But that fascination tugged away at his already weak humanity, just that little bit more each time.

“It seems like the swelling in your legs and neck is going down. Are you feeling any pain there?”

“Nope,” he shook his head, “whatever shit you gave me works just fine.”

The nurse laughed airily, as if amused by his foul tongue. He sat rigid as they did their daily routine of checking his vitals, feeling the cold metal of the stethoscope against his back and chest. He barely flinched anymore. Just another part of the checklist.

“You don’t sound too bad,” she said cheerfully, wrapping the tool around her neck again. ‘Not too bad’ didn’t necessarily mean ‘good,’ but Chuuya tried to disregard that. So long as he wasn’t dying, it was all right with him.

“That’s a good thing, right?” he replied, watching as she retrieved the proper amount of pills for him to take.

“Yes, it means that the medication is working to properly manage your condition. That is a good thing,” she reassured, handing him a small cup of pills and a glass of water.

They had to monitor the amount of water he drank, too, which somehow was much more annoying than the specific diet he had to be on. He hadn’t realized how much he missed the simple act of drinking freely until even that was regulated. Just another thing rationed out like a privilege instead of something basic and human.

That realization had come with a lot of things, actually. Little comforts he never thought twice about until they were taken away. You don’t think about those things, until suddenly, you do. Until you’re left trying to remember what it felt like to have them at all.

He nodded, taking the pills with a single gulp of water, careful not to overdo it. “Can I eat now?”

“Yes, you can have your breakfast, Chuuya-kun. I’ll come back in a bit to take you for your morning weigh-in,” she replied as he lifted his tongue, showing that he’d swallowed the pills.

“Okay,” he agreed, watching as she collected the small cup and tossed it into the garbage, noting down his vitals on the chart by his door. He watched her leave, disappearing into the sea of crying patients and screaming children down the hospital hallways.

Chuuya ate quickly, despite being encouraged to finish his breakfast slowly. He was always fast to finish his meals — that was, when he remembered to have them. Back when things were normal, eating was more of an obligation than a moment to enjoy. He had places to be besides the breakfast table, so he didn’t like to dwell for too long. There were friends, extracurriculars, and important things to do at school, so he didn’t have long to spend at the table chatting.

Now that he was in the hospital, he wasn’t really in a rush to get going, but… the habit still clung stubbornly to him, like a piece of bubblegum in your hair. Too easy to get tangled, but too difficult to get out. It was just a part of him now.

Chuuya pushed away the mostly finished tray of breakfast, ignoring his phone and reaching for the drawer of his bedside table. Inside was the usual stack of schoolwork which his mom would drop off each time she came — “I know you’re sick, but your grades are still important,” she’d chide, dropping a thick stack of papers on the table in his room.

It wasn’t like Chuuya didn’t expect that. All his life, his parents had always pushed him to excel in anything he did, and academics were no exception. If he was going to do something, he had to be the best at it. They wanted the best for him, he knew that much, but it was a lot sometimes. It was difficult to always be perfect while somehow still retaining his true, imperfect self.

His parents had arranged for him to have a tutor to help him keep up with his work while he stayed in the hospital, but it hadn’t been fully cleared yet, so he simply did his work on his own.

His issues typically got swept under the rug, especially the ones that gave his parents a bad image. Out of sight, out of mind. That was how it always went. His parents were important people. Public-facing. Respected. Their lives were polished, orderly, always carefully maintained. He couldn’t afford to sully their reputation with his own piddling little flaws. Sometimes, he wondered if they truly saw him, or just the version of him they wanted the world to see. It was like playing a role in a script he hadn’t written, one where any sign of weakness had to be cut from the final performance.

It didn’t help that he was an only child. There was no one to share the spotlight with. Everything landed squarely on his shoulders. He wasn’t just their child. He was their proof. Proof that they were successful, that their family was perfect. There was no room for error. No room for being a kid. He’d learned early on how to keep certain things to himself. Because whenever he did speak up, it was just dismissed. He was being dramatic. Overreacting. Ungrateful. So he stopped mentioning it altogether. It was easier to pretend everything was fine than to watch their faces twist in disappointment. After a while, even he started to forget what was real and what was rehearsed.

He sighed, grabbing a pen to start working on the papers. He glanced at that tiny, superficial scar on his right wrist from when he was stabbed with a pencil when he was young. He’d gotten into a fight with an older boy who’d said something impolite about his parents. His parents weren’t just nobodies, so it was important for little Chuuya to defend their image at school. He hadn’t quite understood why he was punished for it when he came home that evening.

Chuuya’s mind wandered off as he worked on his math homework. It was all blurry to his mind — like trying to see through a windshield during a storm of pouring rain. Lately, he found himself thinking like that more and more — regretting things, forgetting details, letting them slip through the opposite ear they’d come in from. It wasn’t like him to get hung up on the past. He’d always tried to live in the present, to appreciate the life that he had right now.

He always believed that those who were dealt a better hand in life had an obligation to use that privilege to help the less auspicious. Chuuya considered himself pretty fortunate. He had an okay life, so he tried not to think about the issues he had. He didn’t want to seem too ungrateful.

That kind of negativity was something shitty Dazai would do. That bastard only saw the worst parts of the world, so Chuuya tried to focus on the parts that he considered the best.

Even if they seemed to wane more and more by the day.

---

Chuuya finished his work for the day without a hitch. After that, he went to get his labs done with the cardiologist — they would check his blood pressure, his electrolyte levels, his BNP, auscultation, and whatever other things they inspected that Chuuya had forgotten the name of. His weight hadn’t fluctuated much over the last few days, which seemed to mean that his body wasn’t retaining too much excess fluid. That was a good thing, Chuuya was told.

Still, some nights were hard. He often woke up in the middle of the night, to the feeling of pressure swelling in the base of his fingers, or a sensation that felt as if he were drowning in his own lungs when he lay down. They told him that was to be expected — it was just part of the condition, they said — but that didn’t make it bother him any less.

There was still something wrong with him. Some part of him was broken, a part of him that couldn’t be fixed with pills or tests, and it needed to be replaced.

It was strange to think about. He tried to ignore it, but the more he did, the more it nagged at him, like an itch festering under the surface of his skin, the more he neglected to scratch it.

Chuuya felt trapped. No matter what, he couldn’t win. He’d accepted that by now. So he simply tried to assure himself that he was okay, that everything would turn out all right. He could endure it. He could endure it forever, because he was him.

Even if he didn’t really want to.

Later that day, he was meant to have a visit with the child psychologist who worked on his floor of the hospital. But right now, he was supposed to go see Dazai.

Chuuya didn’t know why he felt nervous. He looked down at his hospital pajamas and felt underdressed, but he knew that more standard attire would feel overly formal. So he simply fixed his hair and tried not to think too much about it.

He’d never been in a situation like this before. Sure, people asked Chuuya to hang out all the time, but it was never because they genuinely wanted to spend time with him. It was always for a reason: they needed his help, or they wanted to be seen with him to seem more popular, more likable.

Chuuya was fairly popular in school. He had lots of girls who asked him to events and festivals, and plenty of people who wanted to be his friend. But the truth was, it wasn’t really because they liked him; it was because they liked his reputation.

It was seen as favorable to be friends with Nakahara Chuuya. Nakahara Chuuya, the school’s best athlete, the boy who held doors open for women and even for teachers, the boy that every girl in the grade had a crush on. He was popular.

But it wasn’t as nice a feeling as most people thought it would be.

At the end of the day, Chuuya still felt guilty. He still felt alone. He couldn’t exactly explain why, but it was like a gnawing feeling in his chest, like a pinched nerve he couldn’t quite untangle.

He glanced down at his phone, noticing the time. It was almost noon.

Me: Do you want me to come around yet

Dazai’s response was within only a few minutes, which Chuuya hadn’t initially expected. But he supposed that it wasn’t too strange.

mackerel: yes it’s fine the nurse says you can come

Chuuya wasn’t quite sure what to expect. He wasn’t squeamish, and if he was allowed to be there during… whatever was happening to Dazai, then certainly it wouldn’t be too bad. He sighed for the umpteenth time that day, running a hand through his ginger hair. When he was a toddler, his relatives had compared it to the color of marmalade, and the nickname had stuck in his mind ever since.

He slipped on his indoor shoes, grabbing his phone to make his way to Dazai’s room. Earlier that day, Ishige had given him permission to visit for a few hours, pointing him towards the wing of the hospital where Dazai was staying. He had said Wing B, so Chuuya followed the signage that led him to his desired place. There were signs hanging from the ceiling that pointed down each hallway. One read Wing B, Pediatric Oncology, 411-425, and Chuuya figured that must be where Dazai was, so he made his way down that hallway.

He thought a bit as he walked. It was obvious why Dazai would’ve been in the oncology unit — he must have some type of cancer. That would explain all the bruises on his body that he didn’t want to disclose to Chuuya the last time they ate lunch together. Dazai was an annoying, infuriating, evil bastard, but Chuuya couldn’t stop himself from feeling bad.

He tried to steel that expression away as he walked down the hallway, eyes searching for the room with the number 411. It was awfully strange for oncology to be placed on the fourth floor, what with the stigma around it. But Chuuya pushed that thought away — it already felt strange enough walking into a different wing of the hospital, somewhere he’d never been before.

Chuuya took careful steps down the eerily empty, silent halls. Oncology was always quiet, peaceful — so much more so compared to general pediatrics, or even cardiology, which was almost always filled with some child throwing one tantrum or another.

Here though, everything felt… still. The air even smelled different, sharp and sterile, with a hint of something unplaceable, like waiting. It made his footsteps sound louder than they should have.

No, oncology was peaceful. Not in a warm or comforting way, but in a final kind of way. Maybe because the people housed there had already accepted that they probably wouldn’t ever leave.

Chuuya felt a pinch in his heart at the thought, but he brushed it away just as quickly. Now wasn’t the time for feelings. He scanned the numbers beside each door, finally stopping at room 411.

He paused, took a deep breath he didn’t realize he needed, and knocked. There was no reason to be nervous.

“Mhm, come in,” came Dazai’s listless voice from on the other side of the thick door, as if he were talking about something no more interesting than today’s weather.

The redhead pushed open the door. It was heavier than it looked, like it was designed to keep the room sealed off from the rest of the world. Or maybe he had just lost some of the strength he used to have.

No, he told himself. That wasn’t it.

“Be careful, Chuuya-kun, I almost thought that heavy door would crush your tiny body! You’re so small, you know. Maybe you should drink more milk~”

Chuuya groaned, rolling his eyes as the door clicked shut behind him.

“Shut up, asshole. You’re not exactly the picture of strength yourself,” he grumbled, approaching the brunette where he sat in bed. He had an IV line in his arm and a mask covering his face.

Chuuya wore a mask, too, at the advice of Ishige. The hospital was very particular about ensuring that no infections spread during visitation, so they had rather strict protocols, especially in high-risk wards like this one.

“Hehe, you got me there,” Dazai giggled, his breath catching on a cough as he did. Chuuya’s gaze lingered on him longer than he meant to. Dazai looked awful. His complexion was pale, almost grayish under the hospital lighting, and his hair, though still messy as always, seemed thinner than before.

He looked almost like death warmed up, and it made Chuuya anxious, although he wasn’t sure why.

“What are you doing?” Chuuya asked, glancing at the central line stuck in the crease of Dazai’s thin, bony arm. He tilted his head, unsure of what exactly he had expected when Dazai said ‘treatment’ — but it hadn’t been this.

“Chemo, silly Chuuya,” Dazai sang, as if he didn’t look half-dead already, pale and too still, but somehow still wore that maddening smirk. His eyes were pretty, even despite their heavy circles and lack of shine. “Didn’t you see the oncology sign when you came here?”

“Of course I did, idiot,” Chuuya grumbled, rolling his eyes. He crossed his arms, unsure why he was trying to appear tough. It was just his default mode, the way he always acted. The routine he was so used to following in the repetitive cycle he called life. “I just thought you weren’t supposed to have any visitors when you did chemo.”

“I’m not,” Dazai smiled, as cheerful as a child at the playground, “my blood counts are too low. They just feel bad for me, so they let me have visitors. Sit,” Dazai said, patting the empty space on his bed with his free hand.

Chuuya hadn’t expected that, so he was a bit thrown off — the brunette wanted him to sit that close? He shifted on his feet, hesitating for a beat longer than he meant to.

“Whatever,” he huffed, climbing onto the empty space in Dazai’s hospital bed. He seemed to sink into the mattress, like it was worn and molded by the prolonged presence of someone who’d spent far too much time in it..

Chuuya sat stiffly, unsure where to put his hands. He glanced at Dazai, watching his eyes as they scanned the TV hanging on the wall in front of the bed. He looked different up close, more fragile. His skin had the faint yellowish undertone of someone whose body had grown tired of fighting.

Chuuya’s gaze moved over him — the bandages, the dull pallor of his skin, the way the flickering light of the program on the TV reflected in his dark, chocolate-colored eyes. Dazai wore a bandage over one half of his face, along with the mask that covered his lips and his chin. His hair, messy and slightly thinned, framed his face perfectly, collecting in the middle of his forehead and on the edges of his jaw, giving his bangs a pretty heart shape.

Chuuya scowled inwardly. God, what a stupid thing to notice.

“Hey, quit staring at me, Chuuya!” Dazai whined, a noticeable lack of bite to his voice. The redhead was surprised at the lack of honorific — were they really close enough friends for that?

Chuuya bit his lip and turned away, not wanting to admit he was staring. He hadn’t even noticed. “I wasn’t,” he muttered. “Don’t flatter yourself.”

Still, something about the way Dazai had dropped the -kun caught him off guard. It made something tighten in his chest, though he couldn’t say what.

“What’d you even invite me for anyway, asshole?”

Dazai shrugged, pulling the mask off his face after complaining extensively about how much it hurt the backs of his ears. “I dunno, I just wanted to annoy you. I doubt you have anything better to do.”

Chuuya scowled as he watched Osamu’s lips curl up into that familiar, wicked smile — that same smug that made him want to throw a pillow at his face. Or kiss it. No, he snapped at himself. Not that. Definitely not that.

The other boy was truly a menace, through and through. That stupid smile of his had no right to be attractive, especially not on someone who looked like he hadn’t slept in a week.

“You’re staring at me like you want to ask something. Just ask,” Dazai spoke, a bit more seriously now. Chuuya shifted, feeling his self-confidence wither away like a child’s chalk drawing in the rain.

He was curious, that much was true… but it was awfully rude to interrogate someone about their illness, and he wasn’t sure if he wanted to pry.

Still, Dazai offered…

“You have cancer, right?”

“Well, duh, genius,” the other boy huffed, which made Chuuya feel stupider than it should’ve. Chuuya took off his own mask, feeling strange being the only one wearing it. “You wanna know what kind, right?”

Chuuya nodded. Why was he being so shy about this? It really wasn’t like him. He wasn’t someone who tiptoed around topics, especially not ones that were already laid bare in front of him.

Usually, he was direct. Blunt, even, sometimes to a fault. He said what was on his mind, and if people didn’t like it, that was their problem. But this was different. Maybe it was because he knew too well what it felt like to be on the other end of those questions. The way people tilted their heads just slightly, feigning concern while really just satisfying their own curiosity. He hated that. The last thing he wanted was for Dazai to think he was doing the same. Or maybe, and Chuuya hated this possibility even more, it was just because it was Dazai.

That insufferable bastard made him feel weird things. Things he didn’t have names for. Things that left him second-guessing himself, which was something Chuuya almost never did.

“It’s some kind of aggressive bone marrow cancer. That’s why I bruise really easily. Oh, come on, don’t give me that look, slug, it’s no big deal~” Dazai said it offhandedly, like he was talking about a scraped knee and not something life-threatening. He reached out and poked the redhead’s cheek, to which he rolled his eyes in response.

“I’m not giving you any look, ya damn bastard! And don’t act like it’s not serious… You look like you’re half-dead,” he mumbled, quieter than he meant to.

The older boy watched as Dazai’s expression seemed to change for just a moment, before it morphed back into that familiar, carefree smile.

“C’mon, that’s the second time Chuuya’s said that. Don’t tell me you’re starting to actually care about me?~” he teased.

“Ugh, in your dreams, asshole.”

“Chuuya-kun is such a liar! You care about me!”

“Shut up!” Chuuya hissed, elbowing Osamu in the shoulder. It was automatic, a knee-jerk reaction, the kind of thing he did without thinking. But the second his elbow connected, he froze.

Right. He’d forgotten about the other boy’s tendency to bruise, so he bit his tongue as the brunette hissed in pain dramatically.

“Owww, Chuuya! It’s like you’re trying to kill me!” Dazai whined, exuding a level of drama that one might use when they were pretending to be shot in a stage play.

“It’s your fault for being such an annoying prick,” Chuuya replied, raising his chin with a sense of pride.

“Hmph. Chuuya’s so mean, I think I might just drop dead right now,” Osamu complained, clutching his chest as if the very idea wounded him.

“Don’t be dramatic, Osamu,” Chuuya scolded, before immediately realizing what he had just said. God damnit, why did he do that?

“Oh?” Dazai leaned in, that shit-eating grin spreading across his face like he had just found gold. “Osamu, huh? I didn’t know we were on a first-name basis already~ I never told Chuuya my first name.”

Chuuya just crossed his arms as Dazai tried to provoke him — he hated to admit it, but the feeling of the latter’s breath on his cheek was really getting under his skin.

“I heard it from Sigma,” Chuuya conceded, trying to obscure the pink dust of embarrassment burning on his cheeks.

“Oh, Sigma, hm? Well, he only uses my first name because we’re quite close, you know? If I didn’t know better, I’d think you were a little jealous, Chuuya~” Dazai goaded, a mischievous glint in his eyes. It was an awfully ironic paradox. Dazai was so hypocritical to the point that he used Chuuya’s own first name while chiding the redhead for using his. It was the kind of twisted logic only Dazai could wield like a weapon and still somehow make it sound playful. If Chuuya weren’t so irritated, he might've laughed at the sheer audacity of it.

“Jealous? Of you? In your dreams, asshole,” Chuuya laughed, doing his best to make his tone as condescending as possible. But no matter how hard he tried, Dazai’s smile didn’t even falter, as if he had seen right through the redhead like he was made of nothing more than glass.

“If you say so, Chuuya~ You’re so fun to annoy, y’know,” Dazai sang, reaching for the remote as he did. Chuuya was starting to believe the only reason Dazai invited him over really was just to annoy him.

“And you’re a pain in my ass,” Chuuya replied, watching the brunette switch the channel. He put on some kind of cartoon that Chuuya had never seen before, looking all too pleased with himself.

“What the hell’s this, huh? I don’t watch cartoons,” Chuuya snapped.

“Oh, c’mon, lighten up a little. It’s just a TV show, Chuuya~” Osamu insisted, putting the remote down in his lap. Chuuya thought about grabbing it, but that would definitely be awkward… damn that bastard Dazai. He definitely did that on purpose.

“Ugh, whatever. I can’t believe that I agreed to come here with you,” Chuuya began to complain, even as the other boy watched the program on the TV intensely. The redhead sighed, resigning to simply sit through the stupid show until it was time to leave.

They were watching some show that was apparently called Chiikawa. Chuuya wasn’t even sure what was happening most of the time — the characters didn’t talk much, and those who did spoke in Japanese that was comparable to the prestige of a grade-schooler.

According to Dazai, there were three main characters: Chiikawa, Usagi, and Hachiware. Chuuya thought it was all quite stupid at first, but somehow, he started to enjoy it — whether he wanted to or not.

Of course, he didn’t admit that to Dazai, though.

“My favorite character is Momonga,” Dazai said as they witnessed the character in question terrorizing the others on screen.

“Of course it is. They’re just as shitty as you,” Chuuya replied.

“Hehe, Chuuya knows me so well~”

“What’s that damn thing even meant to be?” the redhead grumbled.

“A squirrel, stupid Chuuya. Isn’t it obvious?”

Chuuya rolled his eyes, continuing to watch the episode Osamu had put on. He would never tell the brunette he was starting to enjoy it.

“I like that one,” Chuuya begrudgingly spoke up, referring to some character who apparently hunted monsters. According to Dazai, he was a sea otter and also Hachiware’s trainer.

Chuuya hated feeling infantilized. He didn’t like to be seen as a baby. He couldn’t stand the way people sometimes looked at him — like he was fragile, like he needed protecting. So he did his best to do things that made him seem like he was strong.

Chuuya had noticed that most of the time, Dazai, too, tried to act more mature than he really was. But right now, watching this stupid cartoon, seeing how Osamu’s eyes sparkled as he stared at the television… Chuuya could see how Dazai enjoyed this, how it was fun for him, enjoying something this simple.

But Chuuya still hated it. It was still stupid, and it was still much too childish for him. And more than anything, he hated how he was starting to like it too. Still, he sat beside the brunette with a scowl as they watched it together. It felt... nice, for once. It felt normal. To simply relax and forget about all his problems, all his issues, and responsibilities.

For once, Chuuya felt like a normal teenager.

Well, as normal as he could get, anyway.

For some reason, Chuuya didn’t want to say no to the brunette beside him. And, even stranger, his expression shifted into something like concern as he watched the other boy cough, sputtering up something like blood.

“I’m fine,” Dazai spoke before Chuuya could interfere, swatting the redhead’s hand away. “It just happens sometimes. My nose bleeds a lot.”

Chuuya froze. The excuse didn’t sit right, but he didn’t push it. He stayed still, staring at Dazai as he pressed a tissue to his nose.

He hated how it made him feel. He hated Dazai, the annoying bastard, but right now, he just looked so… weak, so vulnerable, like a baby bird fallen from the nest. Dazai was just a boy his age. A boy who was suffering.

Chuuya bit his lip, hard, hating the heavy feeling that settled in his stomach. Dazai looked tired. Worn thin. Like he was holding himself together with spite and sarcasm and nothing else. So unlike the arrogant, cocky idiot he always pretended to be.

“It’s almost lunchtime,” Chuuya replied, the words escaping before he could think of anything better. It was clumsy, he knew it, but it was the only thing he could come up with to try and shift the topic to what he hoped was something lighter.

“Is it?” Dazai said after a moment, pressing a ball of tissue to his nose. His eyes didn’t quite focus. “I think my nurse will just bring it here…” he coughed, “she has to check on my chemo, anyway.”

Chuuya opened his mouth, but nothing came out. He’d never been good with words. Never knew how to fill silence, especially now, when it mattered. All he managed was a stiff nod. That was all he could give.

He wished he knew what to say. Something comforting, maybe. Or something dumb, just enough to make Dazai smile like usual. But nothing came. The words sat heavy and stuck, just out of reach. Because he’d never learned how. How was he supposed to comfort someone when he didn’t even know how to comfort himself?

No one had taught him that kind of softness. Growing up, all he learned was how to hold back tears and pretend nothing ever hurt. He knew how to hide things, how to keep standing no matter how bad it got — but not this. Not how to reach out, not how to sit with someone else’s pain.

Dazai didn’t seem to notice. Or maybe he did, but didn’t care. He switched off the cartoon they were watching just as a young nurse with black hair entered the room.

Chuuya barely looked at her. All he could think was how much he hated this. Hated not knowing how to help. Hated how useless he felt sitting there.

“I see you have a friend,” she said, approaching Dazai and flushing his IV. Chuuya watched as she checked his vitals before writing the results down in his chart.

“Hmph, he’s not my friend,” Dazai complained dramatically, huffing like a child who had been denied their favorite toy.

“My name is Yosano Akiko,” the woman said, glancing at Chuuya. She didn’t offer that warm smile, but she also didn’t sport that cold, clinical look some of the other doctors did. She was an enigma. “I’ll bring you two your lunch once I find your chart. Your name?”

“Uh, Nakahara Chuuya,” he replied. She simply nodded, turning on her heel pointedly to exit the room. Chuuya looked back at Dazai. The silence was uncomfortable, but he wasn’t sure what to talk about.

“What are you doing this weekend?” the redhead asked idly, a foreign feeling creeping under his skin as he tried to have a normal conversation with Dazai. Their chats were always full of animated bickering, so these topics were strange to speak about with the other boy.

“Nothing,” Dazai replied casually, as if the question itself was obvious. “Why, what are you doing?”

“Uh, not much,” Chuuya replied, feeling out of his element somehow. “I’m just going to see my parents. Yours aren’t coming to see you?”

It was a simple question, really. Chuuya hadn’t thought about it too much when asking, but he came to regret that soon after. Dazai cocked his head, staring at Chuuya like he didn’t understand the question.

“Huh? No, don’t have any,” Dazai said, before looking back at the television. Chuuya tried not to let his eyes widen, but he was stupefied. How could he say that so casually?

“Oh…” he mumbled, shifting uncomfortably. He hadn’t expected that answer; now he didn’t know what to say. “I’m sorry.”

“I don’t care that much,” the brunette shrugged, but Chuuya still didn’t understand. How could you not care about something like that? Not having parents, being alone… that would be a weight on anyone, even someone like Dazai.

“Maybe you can come with me sometime. We can do something,” Chuuya offered before he could second-guess himself, with an audible tone of sincerity in his voice that surprised even him. He knew Dazai would definitely tease him for that.

“Aww, does Chuuya really want to spend time with little old me? I feel so special~ You care about me!” Dazai chirped, his voice somehow both grating and as beautiful as a morning bird’s song.

“Shut up, asshole,” Chuuya growled. “Don’t make me change my mind about that offer.”

“You wouldn’t,” Dazai giggled, his grin both enormous and evil. “Chuuya loves me too much~”

The redhead just crossed his arms, huffing in reply.

Dazai only continued to smile.

After a moment, a smile tugged on the corner of Chuuya’s lips, too.

Notes:

twitter though ive been pretty ia ...anyway i love angst thanks for reading

i havent actually watched chiikawa i will soon i promise guys trust trust

Chapter 7: and they found you on the bathroom floor

Notes:

this chapter is named after and slightly inspired by cemetery drive by mcr. sorry for the scarce uploads... i am very busy with work and writers block i fear. i hope you enjoy

Chuuya didn’t know where he was.

The place felt familiar, like somewhere he was sure he’d been before — but it was too distant, too blurred by time to recall when, or where, or how or why. There was something like dread settled in the pit of his stomach, but that, too, he couldn’t assign a reason for.

In front of him stood a door. It looked completely ordinary, nothing special about it — and yet, for some reason, it filled Chuuya’s lungs with some kind of heavy alarm, like whatever was behind it was something horrible, something terrifying. Still, there was another part of him pulling, gnawing at his brain to push it open, so, reluctantly, he did.

The sight before him was just as horrifying as his brain was expecting it to be. A bathroom — stark, sterile, and cold. Lifeless and empty, except for the sound of something red, something like blood, dripping from a short distance onto the floor.

But the room wasn’t empty.

There was someone there.

A figure sat against the cold wall, their back hunched and posture still. Their head snapped up as Chuuya entered, fixing him rigid with a stare that was similar to a terrified cat, skittish, like they’d seen a vicious dog and wanted nothing more than to flee.

It was a boy. Brown, tangled hair falling around his face, and dark eyes that darted nervously around the room. Bandages hung loose from his arms, unravelling as his fingers trembled — wait, that was…

“Dazai?” Chuuya tried to speak, but the words came out faint, swallowed like a small boat lost in a sea of vicious waves. He sank to his knees beside the brunette, but Dazai didn’t respond. Instead, he stared at Chuuya with a look of raw horror — a look unlike anything Chuuya had ever seen on his face before. But the way Dazai was looking at him… it wasn’t at him, no, it was past him, at something that stood behind.

The bandages around Dazai’s wrists had come undone, stained a deep crimson now. Beneath them, scars riddled his skin — countless, jagged lines as if his arm had been repeatedly slashed by a knife.

Dazai was saying something — something important, Chuuya was sure — but he still couldn’t quite understand what the brunette was saying. It was as if someone had taken away the words and only left a vague stain of meaning.

Chuuya reached for Dazai’s shoulders, grimacing as he felt warm, wet blood squelch under his hands. But Dazai went limp, his body slack in Chuuya’s hands. Panic surged as Chuuya shook the other boy, but no matter how hard he tried, Dazai’s weight slipped from his grasp, and he collapsed onto the cold tiles.

There was a rattle as a bottle was knocked over, then it hit another, and another, and, like dominoes, they rolled across the slippery floor as Chuuya watched in horror. He tried to shake the brunette in front of him, calling his name over and over — desperate, panicked, but what he said, what he did… it was all lost to the wind, like fish being carried away by the ocean current.

His voice cracked with each syllable, broken by sobs that clawed their way out of his throat like razors. He didn’t even realize he was crying until warm tears blurred his vision, falling freely onto skin that was far too cold. His grip tightened. He was shaking him harder now.

Chuuya’s hands trembled violently as he pressed them to Dazai’s cheeks, his chest, anywhere he could touch, as if his own warmth might be enough to force some semblance of life back into the other boy.

He didn’t know what to do. He had blood on his hands, Dazai’s blood, and it was burning into his skin. The image of Dazai’s limp body was cemented in the area behind his eyes, haunting him perpetually.

His heartbeat was a war drum, pounding so loud in his ears he could barely hear himself sob. And then — movement. There was a shadow in the doorway, tall enough to cast over both of them. Someone was there. Watching. Someone was watching.

But they did nothing. Not a word, not a breath, not a step forward. The stillness remained. It was worse than silence. Their inaction was deafening. Cold. Detached. Mocking.

Chuuya couldn’t look away. Couldn’t speak. Couldn’t move.

All he could do was watch the boy in front of him bleed out onto the tile.

And then he woke up.

“Chuuya, dear, you overslept!” came his mother’s voice from above him, forcing his eyes to shoot open. Chuuya wasn’t the type to oversleep — he always woke before an alarm or before his mother’s intervention, like clockwork, cyclically moving inside of him. So, today was strange for him.

His shirt clung to his skin, drenched in sweat, and his forehead was slick, dripping like ice cream under the hot sun, thanks to the nightmare he’d experienced just a few seconds prior.

Here’s the thing: Chuuya was no stranger to nightmares. He had them every night: excruciating, haunting, but always the same. Predictable, in a strange way. Like the changing seasons, or the sun rising and setting — unpleasant, yes, but expected.

That nightmare… that was new. It didn’t belong in the cycle. It was an outlier. A glitch in the code. Was his brain, too, malfunctioning, just as his heart was?

“Sorry, I…” Chuuya began, blinking away remnants of the sight behind his eyes. He couldn’t tell his mother, no, she’d certainly begin worrying herself over him. He didn’t want that. He didn’t want to be the reason for her unease. She already had enough to carry.

“Did you have another bad dream?” she asked, a frown of concern plastered on her face. Chuuya hesitated. Of course she knew. It’s not like his parents were ignorant of his nightmares — they knew what he saw every night he went to sleep. They knew exactly what he was remembering, what he was reliving. But no one ever said it out loud.

The past was a wound they tiptoed around, as if ignoring it long enough would make it somehow go away. That if they didn’t name it, it couldn’t hurt them. So they lived with it quietly, never acknowledging it.

And sometimes, Chuuya wished they would. Just once. He wished someone would stop running from it and tell him it was okay to still hurt. That he didn’t have to carry it alone.

But another part was terrified that speaking it aloud would make it real again. And he didn’t know if he could survive that. So instead, he swallowed it down. Because even if it hurt, at least he knew what pain he was expecting.

“Uh, yeah…” he replied, nodding, sitting up in bed, and rubbing his eyes. She didn’t press, thankfully. Not like she ever did, anyway.

“It’s alright, sweetie. At least you’re home,” she smiled, straightening her back to allow him to slip out of bed. “Breakfast is ready already, so don’t take too long to come eat, alright?”

“Yeah, alright,” he answered as he slid out of bed, returning the smile out of habit more than anything. It didn’t quite reach his eyes. He didn’t yet reach for his phone, because his parents found it impolite to get distracted when someone was talking to you. So he waited, watched as his mother subtly encouraged him to hurry up, and then dropped his fake smile and reached for his nightstand.

You have 4 notifications from fishsamuu - TikTok

Chuuya blinked blearily at the screen, typing in his phone’s password to see what Dazai could’ve possibly sent him. The notification opened to a string of videos — all of seals. Baby seals flopping over. Seals waving. One even referred to them as ocean puppies. Chuuya sighed, forcing away the smile that tugged at his lips. Dazai was annoying, sure, but his love for certain things was almost… cute.

He shook his head. He’d only known the boy for a few weeks, so why was he thinking like this? It felt stupid, almost embarrassing. Sure, he wouldn’t deny Dazai was attractive, but he was just too fucking annoying for Chuuya to ever imagine them being together. The idea of them being anything was laughable.

Why was he even thinking of them together? He hated how his mind drifted into these tangled, confusing places. Dazai was reckless, loud, and undeniably the most irritating person he had ever met. Every word, every careless smirk seemed perfectly designed to push Chuuya’s buttons. And yet, despite it all, the thought of him lingered in Chuuya’s mind longer than it should have — in fact, it shouldn’t have even been there in the first place.

As much as he wanted to reply right now, Chuuya knew that his mother would come back to nag him if he took too long to come out for breakfast. So he quickly swallowed the medication they’d given him before sending him home for the weekend, went to brush his teeth, and headed over to the kitchen.

The hospital had been more understanding than he expected in allowing him to go home, so long as his parents ensured he only ate a special diet, continued in group therapy, and came in for his checkups at least four days a week. He was meant to stay in the hospital for at least three to qualify as urgent for a transplant, but for now, this compromise gave him a taste of normalcy.

“Good morning, Chuuya dear,” his mother smiled, a stark contrast to his father, who simply offered a nod from behind his newspaper.

“Morning,” Chuuya mumbled in reply, as if he hadn’t already seen her earlier this morning. He sat down at his normal seat at the table, feeling tense even despite his father’s stoic expression.

The food she was preparing was different from what he usually had every morning. The nurse had given his mother a strict list of approved foods, to which she had intently listened and asked many questions, all of which Chuuya couldn’t remember at all. It was like listening for the sound of a cricket on a concert’s floor — impossible in itself, but pointless to even do at all.

Chuuya didn’t care, really, about those small things — the special diet, the strict rules. He told himself he was fine, and he would be fine, because he was him. It wasn’t a question, but simply a fact.

“You overslept today, Chuuya. That’s not like you. Did you have another nightmare?” his father spoke up calmly, but just those words made Chuuya uneasy, despite his best efforts.

Chuuya didn’t usually get scared — he prided himself on his strength and bravery — but there was just something about his father that always made him second-guess himself, something that always made him feel inadequate no matter how well he did.

“Uh, yeah… something like that,” he replied, eyes drifting out the window to the sun casting over their garden outside. It was such a beautiful, delicate sight. So incredibly perfect. Such a stark contrast to the world inside of himself.

For a moment, Chuuya considered explaining what he’d seen in his dreams the night prior, but he quickly shut the thought down. His father wouldn’t understand, he never did — he simply thought the younger boy was being melodramatic or exaggerating. In the end, it was better to keep it to himself. Fewer questions, less disapproving stares. Fewer issues for everyone.

“You’re still having those nightmares?” his mother gently asked, but there was an undertone of something like displeasure in her voice. His parents both knew exactly what he had nightmares about, and they knew exactly why. They had done everything they could to hide the truth from the outside world, to sweep it under the rug. But, despite knowing, the topic remained almost forbidden, it was the glue that sealed their lips tightly shut.

Chuuya just shrugged as she placed his breakfast down in front of him, not trusting himself to say more. He reached for his chopsticks as his father began to opine as well.

“I feel we’ve tried everything with those nightmares of yours, son, and yet you never seem to get better. Are you sure that you’re not just being dramatic?” his father’s low voice was calm, almost too calm, as if he hadn’t just dismissed years of pain and fear as childish exaggeration. As if the torment behind those nightmares was something Chuuya could simply choose to ignore or outgrow.

He knew exactly what his father didn’t say aloud. He knew that his existence, and all his problems were vexing to his parents — a stain on the family’s reputation, just another thing holding back the perfect image they tried so hard to convey. He was a burden. He had always known it.

“It’s whatever,” he gritted his teeth in reply, trying to see through the red creeping into the corners of his eyes. He hated this topic so much, he hated having to explain to his father that no, he actually very much was traumatized by what happened to him so many years ago. Having to defend himself over and over again, proving he wasn’t just attention-seeking. The repeated nightmares for almost a decade of his life should’ve been proof enough of that. Should have been enough for his father to understand, to stop questioning him, to stop treating his pain like a choice. But he didn’t want to argue. He didn’t want to open that door again. Because every time he did, he felt more isolated, more misunderstood. And every single time, it ended with the silent treatment — because what else was there to do but pretend the problem didn’t exist?

“How are you doing?” his mother asked lightly, even despite the tense atmosphere as Chuuya began to eat his tamago-yaki, not taking too long to savor the taste. The taste was warm, appetizing even, but it barely registered. He wasn’t hungry. He never really was anymore. This used to be routine. His mother would always step in to soften the edges after his father said something too blunt, too cold. She always tried to de-escalate, even though, deep down, Chuuya knew that she rarely ever disagreed with his father about these types of things.

To her, and to his father, Chuuya was difficult. They both saw him the same way: as an overdramatic child, a constant worry, a chore more than something to be loved or treasured. He wasn’t a son, he was a responsibility.

Sometimes he wondered if that disappointment started the moment he was born. Or maybe it came later — when they realized he didn’t live up to their expectations. He was a miracle, a child they had finally been blessed with after so many failed attempts to conceive. Something perfect and beautiful in theory, but utterly flawed and troublesome in practice.

Their miracle turned out to be unpredictable, too sensitive, too intense. He asked too many questions, cried too easily, held onto things too long. He wasn’t simple, and maybe that’s when the shift happened. When he stopped being their blessing and started being their problem.

He didn’t answer his mother’s question right away. Not out of defiance, but because he didn’t know what to say. How was he doing? That depended on who was asking. And what kind of answer they actually wanted. Fine. I’m fine. Always fine. But never really fine at all.

“I trust the doctors are treating you well,” his father spoke without looking up from his newspaper, his tone not even a question, but more of an implication, or a command.

“Yeah, the medication’s working fine,” he answered, cutting into his omelet. His father nodded, not a single change in his stolid expression. Just a simple acknowledgment, like checking off a box on a long to-do list.

“Good, that’s good. I’ve spoken to a friend of mine who is on the hospital’s board of directors. I’ve arranged for you to be moved higher up on the transplant list.”

Chuuya froze mid-bite into his breakfast.

“Hah?” he set down his chopsticks, brow furrowed in confusion. Why would his father do that when he was doing just fine right now? “You don’t needa move me up, I’m doing fine right now. What if there’s a kid who needs that heart more than me?”

Chuuya’s father scrunched his nose, as if what he had heard invoked disgust in him. He looked at Chuuya with a disapproving glare, and the redhead tried not to let his self-confidence wither away like chalk in the rain. But it was hard not to. It always was.

“Nonsense, Chuuya. You are the only son of two very important people, it is urgent that we ensure you are safe and healthy sooner rather than later,” his father said, as if the words escaping his lips were about something as obvious as the color of the sky.

There was no hesitation. No second-guessing. The words were spoken with such conviction, as if the moral justification were obvious, leaving Chuuya staring at him, struggling to process the casual entitlement in his father’s voice.

He had heard that tone all his life. The unspoken implication that their family was not like others, that rules could be bent or erased if they so desired. His father didn’t even consider the ethical weight of what he was saying. He never did. It wasn’t really about Chuuya. Not about whether he felt sick, or he was scared, or he was okay. It was about image. It was always about their image. His parents certainly couldn’t fathom the thought of having something wrong with their child, something that might make him be seen as defective in the eyes of perfection.

Chuuya stabbed his knife into his food more aggressively than he needed to.

“What the hell’s that supposed to mean? Just because someone doesn’t have important parents, they don’t deserve to be saved, too?” The words came out without much consideration for the consequences, the blood boiling under his skin making it hard to think too rationally about what he might do. He felt himself pushing his chair back, the legs scraping harshly against the tile, slamming his hands on the table. The impact rattled the silverware, but not his father.

Against his greater judgement, Chuuya thought of Dazai. Dazai was no one important, and he certainly didn’t have any important parents.

If people like Chuuya were prioritized just because of who their parents were, then what happened to people like Dazai? Did they just get left behind?

Did that mean that Dazai didn’t deserve to be saved, too?

“Chuuya, honey—” his mother tried, placatingly, but she didn’t even get a full sentence out before his father’s voice sliced clean through hers.

“You’re being dramatic, son. This shouldn’t be a big deal to you. It’s not my responsibility to worry about the well-being of this hypothetical child you’ve conjured up in your mind. You will be getting this transplant as soon as possible, no questions about it. Do you understand?”

Chuuya felt his fingers twitch as they dug into the beautifully crafted wooden table, his nails sinking in deep enough to leave faint crescent-shaped marks. He bit down on his tongue, the sharp taste of blood filling his mouth, before standing up fully and turning away.

He couldn’t stand to look at either of them.

“I’m going back to my room,” he said, not waiting a second longer to hear his parents’ protests. He could already imagine the lecture waiting for him later — how he’d disrespected the conversation, how he’d made a scene, how he always overreacted. But he didn’t care. Not right now.

He stomped across their luxury vinyl flooring that his parents had installed specifically for when they invited their rich friends over, the reminder causing him to bristle with even more anger. Everything in this house was curated, artificial, made to please anyone but him. Even his house wasn’t for comfort, for living, it was all for face. The door to his room slammed behind him with a sharp crack. He exhaled hard, huffing as he made his way to the desk and sat down. He tried to calm himself, to dispel that rage that was choking him like a leash around his neck, reaching for his pencil and the folder of unfinished assignments on his desk. It was something to do, something to focus on. Something that didn’t require explaining or defending.

He planned to go back to school once the weekend was over, since it was almost time for summer break to begin anyway, and he’d already missed more days than he could count. Every time he thought about how behind he was, a heavy weight settled over him — a feeling like his life had been paused while everyone else kept moving.

Chuuya’d been quite busy before his diagnosis interrupted his schedule — he had football practice, martial arts lessons, and he’d planned to practice with his band back at school, until his hospital stay had thrown that completely out of whack.

Chuuya found that his mind wasn’t entirely there as he wrote down the answers for the math equations on the page in front of him. His concentration kept slipping. He kept thinking back to the conversation downstairs, back to his father’s cold, transactional words and his mother’s ever-placating silence. Neither of them had really heard him. But they rarely ever did. And then, there was Dazai. He kept thinking about him, too.

He wondered what Dazai would’ve said if he’d been there earlier, hearing Chuuya’s father talk about transplant lists like they were items on a shopping list. Dazai would’ve said something reckless, probably. Bold. Maybe even cruel. But at least it would’ve been honest. He wouldn’t have ignored it. Not like Chuuya did.

Chuuya found himself resembling his parents, even if he didn’t want to. It was something people always said to him — how much he looked like his father. Adults would say it like it was a compliment, smiling like they were giving him something to be proud of. But to Chuuya, it felt like a curse more than anything.

He hated being compared to his father. It was a reminder that no matter how hard he tried to be different, some part of him would always be tied to that man. His voice, his face, even the way he furrowed his brow when he was angry.

But he wasn’t like him. He didn’t want to be anything like him. He hated how people didn’t see him for who he really was. They only saw his last name, the legacy, his reputation. Always his father’s son, but never just Chuuya.

His hand faltered, his hold on the pen slipping like rubber shoes on a sheet of ice. He glanced up at the source of the noise in his room.

You have one notification from Tachihara

Tachihara: yooo dude i heard that u r outta the hospital wanna come hang with us

Chuuya blinked. He picked up his phone to type back a response, but he hesitated. Maybe getting out of the house would be good for him.

Me: yeah I guess so where will u be

Tachihara: probably the mall in an hour or so, gin wanted to go

Me: okay will probably be there but no promises

Tachihara: awesomeee

Chuuya set down his phone, pushing his chair back and turning toward the bathroom. A shower would do good for him — hopefully, the feeling of steam creeping up the back of his neck would melt away the thoughts crawling all over him.

This wasn’t new. Not really. Arguments with his parents were almost a household tradition by now. They’d clash, he’d snap, and inevitably, storm off and slam his bedroom door in their face. Chuuya had a short temper, and he tended to blow his top quite fast. He was aware of that. His father often told him he felt things too strongly. But Chuuya never saw it that way. He simply thought it was his father who felt nothing at all.

Chuuya got to thinking as he kneaded soapy fingers into his persimmon hair, feeling the bubbles hug the sides of his neck and jaw. The water was warm, but not too hot — the perfect temperature to make sure his hair didn’t fray too much, but just tepid enough for him to be comfortable while inside.

He thought about a lot as he rinsed the shampoo out of his hair and lathered it with conditioner. About Dazai. About the hospital — but he quickly pushed that thought away. That would put him in a bad mood. He wanted to have a good day today.

He moved through his hair routine methodically — finishing with his conditioner, then with his hair mask, and then with his hair oil once he was out of the water. Chuuya had always taken pride in caring for his hair. It was long, and washing it thoroughly could be a process, but he didn’t mind. There was comfort in the repetition, the familiarity that came with it. In the hospital, it had been harder, as they only had standard hair products that weren’t particularly premium or expensive, the kind that left his hair feeling stripped and dull.

Chuuya didn’t own many things — he wasn’t a very material person, really — but the things he did own were always of a good quality. Practical, good investments. Never flashy. Not for anyone else’s benefit. Just his own.

Even his room reflected that. He had comfortable, cool sheets, even though his room was almost as barren as a hospital ward — he had a few posters from his favorite bands on the walls, but he always felt strange being too open about his interests. Being human, leaving his mark somewhere. It felt… exposed. As if being too visible meant being too vulnerable. It just didn’t feel right to him, like he’d have to scrub it away as soon as he did, to remove the evidence of a human having been there. If he was human, anyway.

Chuuya wrapped a towel around his waist and stepped out of the bathroom, making his way back to his bedroom to pick out some clothes. He chose something comfortable, unused to wearing anything more formal than simple hospital pajamas. He quickly changed, wrapping himself in his favorite leather jacket. He only got to wear it when he went out with friends, since his parents saw it as too uncouth and graceless. They said it gave off the wrong impression. Chuuya used to care about that, but now he just didn’t care enough about anything at all. Or maybe he cared too much.

If his parents didn’t care about him when he wasn’t perfect, then did they really care about him at all?

The redhead reached for his phone and his wallet, typing a quick text to Tachihara to let him know he was on his way before slipping both into his jacket pocket. Chuuya smoothed back his hair, not bothering to say goodbye to his parents when he walked out of their heavy, ornate door.

He slipped on his shoes, stepping out into the cool air and heading for the bullet train.

Why should he care what they thought, anyway? After everything, did their opinions really matter?

---

“Chuuya-san, hi,” Gin spoke as she lifted her head from whatever she was looking at on Higuchi’s phone, offering a small wave as he approached them. Tachihara was already in one of the smaller shops off to the side, examining something that Chuuya was certain he didn’t actually need.

It was midday on a weekend, so the mall had quite a bit of people. Warm, golden lights hung from the rails and the ceilings, sparkling through the glass of the fence surrounding the edge of the linoleum floor.

“Hey,” he replied, feeling his shoulders relax. These past few weeks were tense, more so than usual, so to be with friends he felt comfortable with made that anxiety drain from him like sap leaking from a maple tree.

Gin was wearing her hair down today, something she rarely did — and she was wearing a simple dress, perfect for the warm weather outside. Higuchi, too, had her hair down, wearing something dressy that Chuuya couldn’t describe in his head well.

“He got distracted already, huh?” Chuuya felt a smile pulling at his lips as he glanced toward the store where Tachihara was occupied. He was utterly fascinated by some ornate-looking butterfly knife that was certainly priced much higher than it was really worth. Chuuya wasn’t feeling too sympathetic today, so he didn’t bother interfering to rescue the other redhead’s wallet.

“Tachihara-san got distracted as soon as we came in, aha…” Higuchi just laughed, smiling like she was hesitant to do so, like a butterfly coming out of a cocoon for the first time. The two girls were sharing a drink together, as they often did. Chuuya sometimes felt like a third wheel when it was just the three of them.

“Sounds like him,” Chuuya agreed.

“How are you doing, by the way?” Gin asked lightly, like she didn’t expect an answer that was too personal. It was more of a formality, sure, but there was a subtle sincerity in her voice. Chuuya could tell she genuinely cared, despite her lack of expression to prove it.

“I’m alright. I was just in the hospital for monitoring. I shouldn’t have too many complications now,” Chuuya replied vaguely, but the girl in front of him just nodded. She knew not to press too much; Chuuya assumed she realized that he was probably getting tired of answering that question so very often. It was starting to annoy him, like a sore on the back of his foot. Tedious and trivial.

“I’m glad that you’re okay, Chuuya-san! We were all worried about you,” Higuchi spoke in that usual cheerful, but self-conscious tone of hers, like her voice itself was walking on a bridge of sharp pebbles. Chuuya just laughed in reply, amused by the thought. Was he so popular at school that people missed him that much?

“Thanks, I’m glad to be back,” he shrugged, before he heard the sound of loud footsteps behind him.

“Oh, man, I was so distracted I didn’t even realize you got here,” Tachihara complained, carrying a bag of whatever he had bought at the store behind them. Chuuya just shrugged.

“It’s alright. We’re all here now, yeah? There anywhere you wanna go in particular?” the redhead said, glancing between the two girls. He didn’t come to the mall often on his own, but he’d been here many times before — with his mother, with his aunt, Kouyou, and with his friends as well. He’d been through most of the stores at least a dozen times, but it had become a comfortable monotony to him, so he didn’t mind.

“We could just walk around. There’s nowhere in particular I’d like to go,” Gin suggested, grabbing her shared drink as the other girl stood from the bench they were sitting on.

The three of them began chatting as they walked — something about school, or about their band, or something or another that Chuuya wasn’t completely present for. He was tapping his fingers against the outside of his thigh, trying his best to catch snippets of whatever they were talking about. The redhead’s mind was a million miles away, and it was impossible to slow it down with brute force alone.

“It’s next Thursday, right? That’s what Ryuu said,” he thought he heard Gin ask, her tone light and conversational.

“Yeah, practice starts around the evening, I think.” Tachihara replied, glancing at a dango stall that was situated in a nook of the hallway.

Chuuya was almost completely away with the fairies, only able to remind himself to keep pace with the other three of them. Damn it, why couldn’t he just enjoy himself for one day?

Just walking short distances was a chore for him, thanks to his damn heart. He was thankful none of them pointed out how short of breath he always was.

Chuuya continued walking alongside the others, glancing at the stores they passed. Suddenly, he stopped. There was one store — he hadn’t looked at what it was called — that had an entire stand dedicated to those stupid characters in that stupid show that stupid Dazai made him watch. He found himself wandering over.

The plushies were giant, almost comically so, all featuring different Chiikawa characters. Chuuya couldn’t help but wonder who on earth would actually want or need a stuffed animal so big. He reached for one, but then he paused. Damn it, where was the one Dazai liked? That stupid squirrel… what was its name again?

Without really thinking, Chuuya pulled out his phone, opening his messages with Dazai.

Me: whens ur birthday

He glanced back up at the plush display, but before he could start searching for the squirrel character, his phone buzzed with a reply.

mackerel: awww i cant believe u remembered!!!! its june 19th… r u gonna get me a present slug

Chuuya scoffed.

Me: in ur dreams

He didn’t want to actually admit to Dazai that he very much is going to get him a present. He didn’t want to think about why, either. If he thought about it too hard, he’d end up changing his mind.

mackerel: oh im just heartbroken

Chuuya rolled his eyes and slid his phone back into his pocket. There was a fond feeling tugging at his chest, but he decided to ignore it. He started shuffling through the items on display before he heard a voice behind him.

“Do you need any help with that? Looking for something for your girlfriend, maybe?” a woman spoke up from behind him, her voice confident but polite.

Girlfriend…? Dazai was definitely not his girlfriend! Chuuya felt heat spread in his cheeks, but he knew it would be too suspicious to deny it now, so he dubiously nodded.

“Uh, yeah… ‘she’ likes this show, or whatever… but they don’t have ‘her’ favorite character here,” Chuuya replied, the words feeling strange and uncomfortable on his tongue. This felt so goddamn stupid. All for a gift for a stupid mackerel whom he was supposed to hate. What a drag.

“Hm, well, is there anything else she likes?” the woman hummed, listening along as she brushed a strand of long, well-kept hair behind her ear. She was middle-aged, but she’d aged well.

His voice was unsure when he spoke, betraying the embarrassment he tried so hard to hide. He thanked the heavens that none of his friends were here to see. “I think… cats. And, uh, seals.”

“Cats, you say? Well, those are certainly quite popular. How about one of these?” she began, stepping over towards a nearby shelf that had a good amount of stuffed toys on it. There was a lot to choose from, and Chuuya felt utterly overwhelmed. It was like staring at a jumbled jigsaw puzzle, or a novel written in a foreign language.

He glanced around at the black cats. They reminded him strangely of Dazai — mischievous, yet also elegant in a way. There was one in particular that caught his eye — it had a cute, almost sly face, with long ears and a tail, and a lanky body. It looked just like that bastard Dazai. A patch of white fur surrounded its right eye, just like the bandages that the real Dazai wore there.

“How about that one?” he mumbled, pointing to the one that caught his eye. It was on a high shelf, and he was too short to reach. Of course…

“This one? This one has some beans inside, so it’ll be weighted. Are you alright with that?”

“Yeah, that’s fine,” he answered gruffly, nodding. In truth, he had no idea what that even meant — Chuuya didn’t collect stuffed animals, and he only had one or two from when he was a baby. The ones from his later childhood had been locked away long ago, just like the memories of that time were, too.

“Alright,” the woman shrugged, reaching up to grab it for him. “Do you need anything else?”

“Uh… I think that’s all,” he said, mumbling a thank you as she bowed and walked away, going off to help another customer across the store.

He looked down at the stuffed animal in his hands. It felt unexpectedly heavy, almost lifelike in a strange way. So that’s what she meant by weighted. He hoped that wouldn’t be an issue for Dazai…

Chuuya shook his head. Why did he care so much? It was just a gift, just some silly stuffed animal after all. If the brunette didn’t like his gift, then he could just go piss off. Right? Right. Yeah.

“Chuuya-san?”

The redhead blinked, looking up at the familiar figure in front of him. It was Gin.

“Oh… hey, didn’t see you there.”

The girl tilted her head. “What are you doing?” she asked, her tone careful, not too pushy or judgmental. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen you in a store like this.”

“Uh, just getting something for someone…” he said vaguely, scratching the back of his neck. He wasn’t sure how to explain this. All of his friends knew that he didn’t have any younger siblings he might be buying toys for. Chuuya just hoped that Gin wouldn’t press too much on the topic.

He looked around for Tachihara and Higuchi — he knew the other redhead would tease him endlessly if he saw what Chuuya was doing. “Hey, where are the others?”

“Ah? I got Tachihara-san to distract Higuchi-chan… I wanted to get a gift for her,” Gin said with a small blush on her cheeks, glancing at the piles of stuffed animals lining the aisles beside them. Chuuya thought for a moment.

“Hey, can you help me for a second?”

He could see the visible confusion in Gin’s face as she looked at him. “Huh? Of course, what is it?”

“Y’know, I’m not great at getting gifts for people,” he started, a little sheepish. Gin was listening intently, a tranquility in her gaze that made Chuuya feel a bit more comfortable opening up. “What do you think about this one?” he held out the stuffed cat to the girl in front of him, and she took it carefully in her hands. “It’s meant to be… weighted, or some shit like that. Dunno what that means,” he shrugged.

“Weighted stuffed animals, they’re meant to be comforting. Like a weighted blanket,” she explained, a hint of surprise still in her voice that Chuuya had asked for her help. He felt a little strange now — was he really that standoffish to his friends?

He thought about Dazai, about what he really knew of the other boy. Would he like something like that? It felt a little silly buying a stuffed animal for a guy who acted like he didn’t need anything. But Chuuya knew that, deep down, Dazai needed comfort, even if it came from an object rather than a real person.

“Who are you getting it for?” Gin asked in a gentle tone, but curiosity leaked out of it. She was always polite and soft-spoken, except when it came to practicing for their band — then she became a whole different person, confident and sharp.

Chuuya sighed. What was he supposed to say? Should he say a girlfriend? No, that was definitely not true. Dazai wasn’t his girlfriend; hell, they weren’t even dating! They weren’t even remotely close to something like that. He hated the guy!

But it wasn’t like he had any siblings or any cousins who would like something like that. He couldn’t say a friend, because, well, were he and Dazai even friends? Chuuya thought he hated the guy, but the more he thought about it, the more it seemed like maybe they were. They spent time together, talked about their interests, and Chuuya thought of the brunette often when they were apart… But Chuuya only hung around the bastard because Natsume forced him to!

God damn it — why were these things so hard?

“A friend,” Chuuya finally decided on, the words feeling awry as they rolled off his tongue. “He’s in the hospital. I dunno what he likes, just saw he had a stuffed crab last time I visited.”

Gin nodded, placing the cat back into Chuuya’s hands. “I think you know him better than I do, Chuuya-san. I’m sure whatever you pick will be perfect because you chose it with care. I think he’ll appreciate the thought no matter what,” she smiled.

“Yeah…” Chuuya nodded, staring down at the thing in his hands. The way she spoke made it sound so serious, so sappy — it really wasn’t that big of a deal, was it? It was just a small gift, and Chuuya had the money… it didn’t mean much, did it? Why was he suddenly overthinking this so much?

Chuuya groaned internally as Gin turned to browse the aisles for something for Higuchi.

Why did something this simple feel so damn complicated?

Later, Chuuya’s phone was buzzing as he walked along with the rest of the group, now reunited.

mackerel: oh chuuya, i fear i’m dying

Me: shut up, you’re not dying. You're fine

“Can we get some of that taiyaki?” Tachihara suddenly stopped, gesturing over to a food stall on the street outside the mall. Chuuya just barely glanced up from his phone as he followed whatever the three of them were doing.

He was carrying a bag that concealed his purchases well enough, though Tachihara had still questioned him about it, regardless. Not that Tachihara was any better — the guy was also carrying several bags that housed the products of his reckless and unnecessary purchases.

“Ooh! Yeah! I’d really like to get some — oh, did you want to share?” Higuchi chirped, glancing at the woman beside her. Gin just quietly nodded, carefully holding her own bags from the mall.

“Chuuya, do you want one?”

mackerel: i really am chuuya!! you have to come here at once… please… i’ve just seen a beautiful woman and i fear i may faint from this

Me: Stop texting me

“Chuuya!”

The redhead flinched.

“Hah, what the hell d’ya want?”

Tachihara just laughed, some smug, proud laugh like a father who had just seen their child ask someone out to prom.

“Damn, who’s got you so glued to your phone? And you’re actually smiling, too? Did you finally get yourself a girlfriend?”

Chuuya froze, feeling a flush creep up his neck and spread across his cheeks. He hadn’t realized he’d been smiling. God damn it, Dazai. Fucking asshole.

Chuuya rolled his eyes, ignoring Tachihara’s teasing question. “What did you want, ya bastard?”

“I was just asking if you wanted taiyaki.”

Chuuya shrugged and turned, making his way over to the small table where Gin and Higuchi were already sitting beside the food stall.

“Yeah, I’ll take one,” he nodded. He looked down at his phone again as Tachihara went to stand in line, soon reappearing with three taiyaki cakes: one for himself, one for the two girls, and one for Chuuya.

He mumbled a quick thanks, tuning out the conversation as Tachihara started to talk about his new girlfriend who apparently lived out of the city, or something or another that Chuuya didn’t particularly care about.

Chuuya watched as Gin and Higuchi shared their cake, giggling as they practically fed it to one another. He looked away, feeling like he was interrupting something. But beneath that, there was another feeling tugging at his throat — some kind of longing, yearning, envy — but for what, Chuuya didn’t know.

Chuuya didn’t think about relationships much. It simply wasn’t something important to him. He knew people had crushes on him; hell, he had almost a dozen girls ask him to school dances and festivals each time they came around. But he was never particularly interested in them.

Still, he wanted something like that, against his better judgment and his rational mind. Chuuya wanted something with someone. Someone who understood him, someone who could see him, really see him. Someone who cared without need to be told why.

Someone who was right for him.

Did that person even exist?

Chuuya looked down at his phone.

Me: i think i’ll visit on monday, probably after school, is that okay

mackerel: aww, chuuya wants to visit little old me? i’m flattered… of course you can~

Me: Don’t make me regret it, asshole

mackerel: you’re so mean, chuuya. and after i’ve done nothing to you!!! im so hurt, i think i might just die

Chuuya felt himself scoff, despite the feeling tugging the edge of his lips upward.

Me: don’t die until im there to kill you, asshole

mackerel: oh? how romantic. i make no promises!!

“Are you alright, Chuuya-san?” Higuchi blinked, the three of them all looking at him. The sudden attention caught Chuuya off guard. He scratched his cheek but found himself unable to suppress a small, honest smile.

“Hah, me? Yeah, I’m perfectly fine.”

For the first time in a while, he actually didn’t have to lie.

Notes:

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