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Chuuya Nakahara knocked, loud and hard against a certain brunette’s apartment door. Not in a soothing and gentle kind of way, but one that would make you crawl out of your skin if you were able too. Dazai Osamu is the man that the knock was meant for, but he knew it was coming. The sound of skin hitting against wood certainly wasn’t pleasant, and he would have preferred for Chuuya to just call out to him.
“Dazai, are you in there?”
Well shit. Looks like calling out wasn’t any better. Now he felt obliged to answer, which was the last thing that he wanted to do. Normally, he would in less than a heartbeat, but having blood streaming out of his stomach made this task impossible. Right now, he just wanted to focus on recollecting his breath, and avoiding any kind of conversation with that hat-rack.
Breathe in. Breathe out.
Dazai’s brown eyes were misty with pain, and they were struggling to keep on working. They wanted to close in on themselves, and sleep for a while. His hands were shaking, sweat at the very tips of his pallid fingers that left small marks whenever he touched a surface. His heartbeat was pounding inside his ears, every time it would whisper “Ba-dum, Ba-dum” in a mocking whisper, emphasizing how this whole thing was his fault.
“Dazai, I know you're in there. I can hear you breathing idiot.”
Breathe in. Breathe out.
The door slammed open, and there stood that mess of a man known as Chuuya. Oh, how Dazai hated him; those cold blue eyes piercing him with icicles whenever he spoke one word too bad, or his fists that would come into contact with his stomach at every sly remark. However, this time, he seems genuinely…upset? No, upset is the wrong word. Worried seems more appropriate.
For once, his brow was furrowed with worry rather than anger, and his hands were firmly in his grey pockets, not going to punch him anytime soon. And judging his lips, no insults were weaved in his tongue, and if there were any, they had been ripped free the moment Chuuya saw the crimson river at Dazai’s knees.
“What…What happened?”
“What the fuck do you think happened.” Dazai shuddered, glaring with distaste at the shorter male in front of him, silently begging him to go away and jump off a cliff. He didn’t like how vulnerable he felt.
His scars were visible to Chuuya, the pathetic diorite lines that were purple around the edges, it was such an awful reminder of his past, and no ammount of scrubbing would get rid of them. But it was worse that most of them were pure purple, wide and stretched by the skin, and the most hideous things on his body. But, Chuuya didn’t seem to care, for in his eyes, there was nothing wrong with Dazai, and he was only focused on the man as a person, not for his body. Chuuya walked over and got down next to him. The first thing he did was not try to stop the bleeding. Instead, he leant forward, and pulled Dazai close to him in a kind gesture, not one of hatred by far.
“Breathe in. Breathe out, Dazai. It’s all alright.”
Dazai started to shake, and then came the tears. Hundreds of them, flowing in long streams and never ceasing to stop: not even to focus on his heartbeat. Weep. That was something that he never thought he could do, especially to Chuuya Nakahara; the man he hated the most.
“Chuuya…do you hate me?”
“Sort of. But I’m not just going to let you bleed out and suffer because of it.”
Well, that was a relief, he supposed.
“You’re not going to tell anyone about this are you?”
“Why would I? I’m not your brother Dazai. I don’t go telling the world whenever you get back into a depressive episode.”
Dazai buried his face further into Chuuya’ s chest, allowing his head to rest. He’d forgotten about the bleeding, and just focused on the man in front of him. In fact, everything apart from his stomach hurt, insides and all. His eyes were growing more and more tired, but at least he’d stopped shaking. Nothing felt real in this moment, perhaps it was all just another one of his delusions. That would be nice, but everything that Dazai could want that’s nice would either not be real or stripped away from him the second it was in his dirty hands.
“Can I sleep now…?” Dazai whispered weakly, his cracked lips just able to murmur his question, but he felt a flower of regret bloom inside of him as soon as he spoke.
“Not yet. One day you will. But right now, we have to focus on fixing everything.”
Dazai started to shake again.
“But there’s no way I can fix anything! I’ve managed to fuck everything up, and there’s so way that I can make things right again! Its all wrong, its all wrong its all-“
“Dazai. There’s nothing wrong.”
That single sentence was enough to calm him right down.
“Breathe in. Breathe out.”
And he did just that.
Chuuya Nakahara was not his brother, but maybe he could be his lover.