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The Yokohama skyline is dark and silhouetted against a deep red sky, and if not for the dead bodies littering the street, it would be easy to call it the most beautiful sunset Chuuya has ever seen.
Unfortunately, his perch on the Landmark Tower isn’t far up enough to escape the stench of death, however beautiful the blood orange sun may seem.
“You’re less emotional than I’d have expected.”
Chuuya doesn’t have to turn around to know that the voice is his former partner’s. Somehow it seems only fitting for Dazai to be there at the end of it all; the one who was there at the beginning of the end should grace the conclusion as well. Even as he flew up to the tower an hour before, Chuuya had at least partially expected him to show up. And if he knew anything about the way Osamu Dazai thought, it had been a mutual expectation.
“You are too.”
Dazai sits next to him on the edge of the building, feet dangling over the side. Neither looks at the other, opting to stare at a city plunged into darkness. “You really thought I’d be all that excited with this?”
“Of course. I assumed the looming threat of your own death would make you happy.” Chuuya ignores the thought that Dazai was able to recognize what he meant by saying he expected him to be emotional. In his last moments or hours or whatever they may be, he at least stays consistent in his hatred of the fact that he and Dazai are the only two people that have ever been able to understand the other.
Dazai laughs. It’s fake, but then, it’s rarely ever been real. “Maybe a lot of things change at the end. Why aren’t you out there fighting corpses like there’s someone to be blamed among them?”
Chuuya considers the question. That had been his first instinct, actually- as he walked through the Port Mafia headquarters in the early hours of the morning, he’d narrowly avoided activating Corruption in a fit of rage. It had taken a few hours before the realization that destroying anything in sight and killing himself in the process wouldn’t do anything; maybe this was how it was always going to end. Maybe everything in his life had led up to this- a quieter end than anyone had ever expected of him, sitting on a roof and waiting for death to wash over him like it had everyone else he’d ever known.
He settles on saying, “Maybe this city isn’t worth it all.” Dazai will know exactly what went unsaid, for better or worse.
“What happened to your whole ‘protecting Yokohama’ attitude? I’ve always considered it a defining trait of yours.”
Chuuya looks at the city that raised him, that kept him alive with knives to his throat, kept him burning like a fire in a pit, refused to spit him out despite all of it. “Not many good things happened to me here, did they?” Dazai hums in response, and he keeps talking. “Everything shitty thing that has ever happened to me was in this city. The Sheep, you, Mori…” He trails off.
“You love it anyway, of course.”
He laughs drily. “We both do.”
Chuuya wonders again if it was all meant to end like this. Whether this was a fluke of nature of some sort, or if he was always destined to spend the end of his all-too-long life sitting on a roof with Dazai, a thousand words left unspoken but understood anyway. He suspects the latter- for all they are and all they’ve done, maybe it was always going to be him and Dazai at the end of the world. It takes a few more minutes to respond, time during which neither moves and he realizes that for the first time he’s experiencing complete silence.
“Good riddance to Yokohama.”
“And good riddance to us.”