Chapter Text
No matter how many times he sees him like this, it will never fail to ignite something in Chuuya to see Dazai so vulnerable beneath him.
His face flushed a pretty red, hair strewn across the pillow, tiny whines leaving his mouth, and giving Chuuya the faintest view of his tongue peeking out. His eyes were already hazy, the constant clarity and all-encompassing knowledge that dragged Dazai down having lifted temporarily to give way to pleasure.
Chuuya hummed, moving forward to push Dazai down further on the bed with one hand while he used the other to grab at his thigh, massaging small circles into the skin as he moved it downwards, fully intent on finger fucking Dazai until he was crying when his hand stopped mid-motion. He moved his hand back up a bit more carefully, just to make sure he wasn’t imagining things, but that same horribly familiar texture was there in carefully organized lines and-
“Dazai, what the fuck is this?”
Brown eyes, still cloudy, peered up at him as if the words hadn’t even been comprehended in Dazai’s mind. His head cocked to the side in a silent question and Chuuya moved to push Dazai’s leg up a bit further, bringing it into the light so they could both see properly.
The near entirety of the skin was marred, of course, self-inflicted scars crisscrossing each other, old enough to have turned a faded white, but that wasn’t what he was focused on.
The issue lay in a series of fresh ones. They were scarily recent, probably only a few days old at best, and scabbed over. None looked bad enough to have needed stitches but they were pretty damn close.
Those hadn’t been there the last time they’d done this. In fact, nothing of the sort had been there any of the times they’d fucked since before Dazai left the Port Mafia.
Dazai lifted his head up from the bed with a sigh, looking almost bored as he took into account what he’d done to himself only days prior. He regained clarity quickly, already back to schooling his expressions in mere seconds despite his earlier state.
“You’re not seriously going to make me explain it.” Chuuya stayed silent, staring at the jagged lines Dazai cut into his own skin until the other scoffed, pushing himself up slightly and moving his leg away from Chuuya’s grip. He replaced it with his hand, threading their fingers together. “Chuuya, it’s nothing new. You already knew about this.”
“No, Dazai, I knew you used to have issues with it,” Chuuya said, meeting Dazai’s eyes. “But you stopped, you stopped that shit sometime after you left. I know you did.” He’d been pleasantly surprised to see it the first time they fucked after Dazai’s defection. There were an unfathomable number of new scars sure, but they were scars , even the most recent looking months old. That was the first time it hit Chuuya that Dazai was really doing better outside of the Mafia.
“C’mon don’t tell me you suddenly became squeamish?” Dazai asked, leaning back down and using their linked hands to tug Chuuya with him so that he was caged above Dazai. “You never minded before.”
The worst part was that he looked almost genuinely confused.
Actually, no, the worst part was that he had reason to be.
Because it was true .
Dazai came to him in much worse states before his defection, and Chuuya rarely questioned it or did anything more than make sure the cuts were wrapped up well. Hell, he’d even joked about it a few times, treating it as if it was merely another aspect of Dazai’s personality and not a glaring cry for help. It wasn’t like wasn’t worried; more like that feeling was so foreign to him in the context of Dazai that it was too confusing for him to truly process it. It was easier to pretend that it wasn’t really anything important at all.
Chuuya had his alcohol and Dazai had his blades. Neither were healthy but nothing in the Mafia was, so it was as normal as everything else in their life was.
But that time was gone now, and at some point in between all of that, Chuuya had grown up and realized that teenagers shouldn’t be drinking themselves to sleep or slicing themselves up nightly.
“I minded,” Chuuya muttered in response, leaning to stare a bit more directly and taking full advantage of the positioning Dazai had returned them to. “I just didn’t know what to do.”
“Eugh, whatever. Chuuya’s being borinnnngg,” Dazai said, drawing out his syllables as a small pout formed on his lips and he turned his head away.
Chuuya sighed, reaching out to grab Dazai’s chin and tilt it back up to face him.
“Dazai-”
“No.”
“ Dazai , we’re talking about this.”
Even pinned into place, Dazai rolled his eyes and shot him with a deadpan look. “Seriously? You’d rather talk about feelings than fuck me?” After Chuuya didn’t relent, he tried a little harder, widening his eyes till they were almost doe-like, and dropping his voice into that sweet, submissive tone that he knew Chuuya always fell for. “C’mon, I’ll be good for you.” His tongue fell out, running against the edge of Chuuya’s thumb and if Chuuya were a weaker man, he probably would have fallen for it.
“You can’t seriously think you’re going to seduce me out of talking about your relapse?” Chuuya responded with a scoff, moving his hand away from Dazai’s reach.
“Fine. It was worth a shot,” Dazai sighed, pulling away from Chuuya and moving to sit up. “Can’t believe I came all the way here for nothing.”
“Don’t cry because you can’t get your dick wet. Fucking whore.” Chuuya rolled his eyes and moved to reposition himself into sitting properly.
Dazai rewarded him with a lopsided grin in return, “Call me that again and we’ll be right back where we started.”
“Dazai.”
“What? You walked into that one.”
“Deflecting isn’t going to get you anywhere.”
“Fine,” Dazai huffed, dragging his legs closer to himself. “ What do you wanna know?”
“When did you relapse?”
“Tuesday night,” Dazai answered flippantly, staring at the wall directly behind Chuuya.
Chuuya pursed his lips, taking in Dazai’s demeanor carefully. “If I ask you why will you tell me?”
“I got bored,” was his response, said with a smile dancing across his face, and Chuuya had to restrain the urge to shake him and yell until that stupid smile was gone and he got a proper answer.
“That’s what I thought,” Chuuya said instead, eyes flickering back to his thigh, barely visible now with the way Dazai positioned himself, but the edges of one wound, jagged and raised could just faintly be seen. “Does anyone else know?”
“C’mon Chuuya, you can’t seriously be asking me that.” And he sounded almost offended as if his skills had been put into question. “If any of them found out, I’d have to deal with Yosano sending me passive-aggressive referrals to a physiatrist again.”
Chuuya closed his eyes, trying to quell his anger at the mere fact that every person in that stupid agency had seen him for hours on end daily and not noticed a single thing off about Dazai. Even more the fact that none of them had caught onto it beforehand and stopped the relapse from happening in the first place.
The fact that he hadn’t caught onto it beforehand.
“Maybe you should take her up on one of those,” Chuuya says instead of voicing any of that aloud.
Dazai laughs and it’s a soft careless thing. “As if that would work on either of us. We’d walk in there and get sent straight to the psych ward. Or jail.” Dazai frowned, slightly as if he was actually putting thought into it. “No, definitely jail.”
“Did something happen to make you want to do this?”
“I don’t know. I was just bored.”
“Dazai.”
“I don’t want to talk about this.” Dazai’s gaze met his, finally, and the look in his eyes was empty. There was nothing there, it was barely Dazai, lingering on the edges of something darker, it the same look he saw in corpses.
Chuuya looked back, even more determined than before. “Give me a reason. I’m not asking for an explanation. But if you’re starting this shit again I want to know why. You fucking owe me. If I have to get ready to start getting calls from your dumbass asking for help because you’re on the verge of bleeding out then at the very least, I deserve to know why.” It was a cheap shot, and Chuuya could tell it had some effect on Dazai in the way that he turned away, swallowing and fidgeting with the edges of the sheet.
Still, he chose not to respond.
So, Chuuya sighed, grabbing his phone with one hand and waving it ever so slightly so that Dazai’s eyes caught it, and laid down his trump card. “Tell me or I’m telling the agency. I’ll send a message to every single member in there right now. I swear to God, Dazai, I’ll do it right now if you don’t tell me what the fuck happened.”
Dazai’s head flew back to face him, eyes narrowed. “You wouldn’t.”
“I will,” Chuuya hissed, leaning forward. He was sincere, and Dazai had always known when he was lying, so he knew damn well that the other could see just how serious he was being. “Even the tiger kid. Every one of them, Dazai. I have their numbers.”
At the mention of the tiger, it seemed that Dazai cracked. He looked to the side and muttered a curse at Chuuya, legs drawing in even further and his hands moving to cover the spot Chuuya had looked at before almost instinctively. “I can’t explain it properly.”
There was something terribly vulnerable in his voice. Defeated in a way that was so unlike him and empty in a way that Chuuya was all too familiar with.
“I don’t need you to,” Chuuya replied, as softly as he knew how to.
Dazai’s eyes met his once more, large and even duller.
“I don’t know what’s happening, Chuuya,” Dazai admitted, and the world seemed to zero in on him, in the panic peeking out from beneath the emptiness, the tremor that fell from his voice to his hands, and the breathy laugh that crept onto the edge of his words. “Everything is starting to feel like an ending.”
A sharp breath in.
“What do you mean?”
“I did what he told me to. I experienced the light, I saved some orphans, and he was right. It was more beautiful…But I think I’m done now.”
“You’re not,” Chuuya insisted, and desperation was crashing into him in waves, his hand reaching out to grab Dazai’s almost instinctively, as if that would somehow fix anything. “You can’t be.” I still need you.
Dazai’s smile morphed into one of pity and Chuuya hated him for making him mourn before the other was even dead.
“Ok, Chuuya. I’m not.”