Chapter Text
When Dazai is fifteen, he buys himself a camera.
It's a camera he purchases with the sole purpose of recording all his pranks on Chuuya and immortalizing his reactions. It's an old thing, with a dim and grainy quality, just about all he can afford.
That's what he uses it for, indeed, for the first several months of their partnership. More than once, Chuuya nearly breaks it in half, but Dazai finds he is strangely possessive of it and ends up bargaining with Chuuya for its safe return.
Chuuya must have noticed. By the third time, he stops threatening to stomp it to pieces no matter how much it pisses him off to have it in his face all the time. Dazai barely ever gets so protective of anything, after all, and Chuuya seems fascinated by this display. He always is a sucker for anything that hints at humanity, especially in Dazai.
"What else you got on that thing, huh?" Chuuya asks as Dazai zooms in on him in the screen view. He is reclining back on Chuuya's bed as if it's his own, recording Chuuya as he is folding up his laundry.
His apartment is small and bare with cracked and mildew walls and water in the ceiling, the only furniture a bed and a wardrobe. Neither of them can afford much on their meager, low rank salary. Dazai himself lives in a shipping container.
"None of Chuuya's business~" Dazai answers in a sing-song.
"I bet there's some secret shit in there," Chuuya says, "I never see you without it."
Truth be told, there's really nothing on it except shots of Chuuya, capturing the exact second he suddenly notices the camera focused on him with a frown and he reaches for it with a hand, his face flushed as red and pretty as his hair, devolving eventually into threats that he'll crush it under his foot, or screaming at Dazai after a merciless teasing session, recording his enraged reactions to Dazai's pranks.
In several of them, the camera drops as they are wrestling on the ground like children, sometimes out of shot depending on how it fell. There are a few unflattering pictures and videos of a drunk Chuuya that Chuuya doesn't know about. Dazai is always waiting for Chuuya to do something embarrassing so he can catch it on film.
Chuuya smirks suddenly, "Is it a video diary, Dazai? Do you talk about all your sad little nihilist philosophies to it?"
"It is, actually," Dazai tells him, "but it's not nihilist philosophies. It's all my grievances with you."
He begins to take many videos that are just ones in wait for something interesting or mortifying, but they often end up fairly mundane and boring to watch later. They are just fragments of conversations that he has with Chuuya at his tiny apartment, some banter here and there, or maybe they are at the arcade playing games, or eating out at a cheap restaurant.
Somehow they are still there in his gallery, weeks later.
It's just that it's too much work, trying to sift through what he wants to keep and what he wants to delete. The videos just collect until he has to get another memory card. He could probably save up a bit if he just cleans up the ones he has, but it's not like he spends the little money he does have on anything except cans of crab and sake, and they both last for a pretty long time and don't need to be restocked all too immediately.
Chuuya seems to grow fairly comfortable on camera over time as opposed to his initial shyness disguised as fury. Dazai often is just talking to the camera himself, making comments and observations and telling Chuuya stories or facts, or recording things he finds interesting, and that's possibly why Chuuya doesn't care as much since he thinks it doesn't have a lot to do with him. Maybe it's true that it has become a video diary at some point. (And so what, if a lot of his gallery is just thumbnails of blue eyes and fiery red hair?)
***
Towards the end of December, the winter sky is of a gray and somber kind of beauty. Christmas colors the city in the gold of fairy lights and marts full of tents lit up from the inside like sky lanterns.
Dazai commemorates the coming end of the year alone, lying in a bathtub full of bloody red water.
The last time he ever tried this seriously was the day Mori found him. Last year, was it? Was it really just last year?
His life has always felt so exhaustingly slow, dragging on and on by its last legs. He should have been a hundred years old by now, and yet it's as if he never really grew at all from that little boy cold and crying and hungry on the streets until he stopped feeling anything; not warmth, not emotions, not bodily signals.
He stopped being human at some point. When he was four, he had realized, suddenly, that the suffering was not so much in his external predicament as it was in the way he felt about it, in the way he felt, and so he killed his feelings inside so nothing would ever hurt. He never accounted for the fact that such an internal death was an entirely different kind of suffering all on its own.
He can go days without eating because all his hunger pangs are so repressed he has become numb to them and hardly even registers them. He can spend hours in the cold and not know how much is too much.
He will never connect with people, or find love, or have friendship.
And the funniest part of all is that he doesn't know if he even cares. He doesn't know if he cares about anything.
You hardly count as a person, Dazai-kun, Mori once said, smirking in amusement, there is nothing inside of you, after all.
It didn't hurt or anything. Nothing ever really does. But it did stay on his mind. It stayed on his mind for a long time until everything around him started to lose the little color it regained all over again, until he couldn't remember what exactly he is still here for, pretending he deserves to live, or that there is any point to it all.
He sees through this illusion of life so clearly some days that it drives him insane. Everything looks artificial. Everything is chaos going nowhere and everywhere. Everything is unnecessary suffering. And everything is predictable and boring.
Months ago he stayed to see what would happen, just to see. He stayed because he wondered if he would find a reason to go on.
(Some part of him thinks he could still stay; it's the face in the thumbnails of all the videos in his camera. It's just that it's not enough to make him want to stay. Nothing ever is, in the end.)
As consciousness and life begin to bleed out of him, he wonders briefly if it might matter to anyone, but can only think of people who would either be happy to be rid of him (Chuuya, and just about everyone in fact) or people who would be angry at having lost an asset (Mori).
He thinks he might not care about that either; the fact that no one cares about him. Such is his void.
The next thing he knows, he is waking up in a hospital bed, strapped to the bed with an oxygen mask, just like the day Mori met him after his last serious suicide attempt.
Chuuya is there beside him. It must have been Mori who found him, because nobody else knows where he lives.
Chuuya's eyes are red-rimmed, furious and staring at Dazai. His jaw is tight. Dazai wonders if Mori, with his weird and obsessive notion that they need to get along and become great partners, forced him to be here, so enraged he looked. He looks all but like he wants to be anywhere but here. Dazai wonders, somewhere vaguely, if Chuuya was wishing he had died in this attempt.
The gray and painfully bleak despair that takes Dazai up in its tide is the most overwhelming thing he may have ever felt; at having woken up, at still being here, at having to continue living again. It's the first time he has ever come so close to crying in forever, and he realizes too late it must have showed, that he looks like a pathetic and helpless child on the verge of tears. It's too late to stop himself by then, to grapple for control.
I want to die, comes the desperate thought that is more of a physical sensation, a violent flood of grief through his body that takes him over, until it's all he can think about, I want to die, I want to die, I want to die, please God please let me die —
It's all he is thinking when he does begin to cry, when the oxygen mask is taken off his face by the gloved hand of a doctor, and he doesn't even realize that these thoughts are no longer just in his head; he is saying them out loud feverishly, over and over.
"Please, I want to die, I want to die, I want to die…" His voice is so thick he is barely even comprehensible, through the sobs sucked through his clenched teeth, his wild and pained eyes fixed somewhere afar and unreachable. The world is fraying at the edges, a blur. I can't bear this anymore, I can't…
He loathes his existence more than he ever has in that moment. He loathes his very being, the fact of his consciousness, that he is sentient and supposedly experiencing and perceiving in this world, all the while feeling as if he is sitting in a theater somewhere far in the back of his head, watching his disgusting and nauseating self, watching his worthless life play out like a film.
He is never really here.
It takes a while for him to register the cocoon of warmth that is surrounding him; that of a small body curling up around him, an arm across his collarbone and the cold press of a nose to his cheek. The arm is moving down to his waist and squeezing him tighter, closer, against that body.
***
For an indecipherable amount of time, Dazai is in a disconnected sort of haze, so heavy he can barely move. It's a strange feeling; some part of him is aware of how he is not present, and yet, it's as if nothing around him is brushing by his skin, touching his awareness, connecting to his mind. He sees shapes and hears sound but he recognizes them in a cognitive and detached kind of way, not as if he is perceiving them fully. One minute the light of the day is streaming in through the small window. Next, he can barely see anything except the dim and pale blue of moonlight.
Slowly, however, he begins to come back, like his soul is settling into his body once more. Slowly, but surely. One minute he notices that he is in a bed, a hard and familiar mattress. In other moments, he notices there are sounds sometimes; singing, humming, a voice always talking, or a film playing.
These fragmented moments of awareness repeat until they grow into greater bouts of awareness. The more he comes back the more he registers that his arms are always in pain, long and deep gashes stitched up, sometimes the only thing that jolts him back into his body for a brief moment again. He has come to notice the solid warmth against his back, so often, and it takes him a while to recognize who it belongs to; the red curls as fiery as a flame against his temple, the soft lilting breaths of almost-snores.
The night he awakens with a full regaining of his lucidity, Chuuya is there sleeping with his arms around his waist, cheek to the space between his shoulder blades. It's absolutely still and silent, but for Chuuya's soft squeaks of inhales, exhales of small snores. Dazai doesn't really understand why this ugly slimy slug is stuck to him and isn't sure he cares to find out how this happened, or why. He can only imagine that Chuuya is so stupid he must have ended up here by mistake.
His head is full of thoughts of reopening these stitches and ending it before he goes away into the disconnection of his mind again.
He doesn't really understand why Chuuya is stuck to him until he tries to get up and out of bed, and immediately, Chuuya stirs behind him. Dazai freezes, though he's not sure why. Chuuya is not known to be such a light sleeper. In fact, he sleeps like the dead, so it must be the surprise.
Yet, now Chuuya stirs slightly just by a bit of movement from Dazai, a small snuff as he half-awakens, his arms dragging against Dazai's waist.
In heavy movements he pushes himself up on his elbows until his head has moved off his back and he is hooking his chin over Dazai's shoulder, cheek sleep-hot against his, and oh…
Dazai has never known this hunger in his skin until now, how good it feels to have someone touch him. He becomes aware of the arms around him much more vividly.
"Osamu…" Chuuya mumbles sleepily. It's impossible. It can't be.
Chuuya knows who it is he is holding and continues to hold him anyway.
And Dazai realizes it suddenly. He remembers it suddenly, that day he first woke up; the body curled around him like a cocoon of warmth and protectiveness. He remembers the vague registrations of the voice that was singing, humming, speaking as if trying to call him back. He realizes, suddenly, the reason why Chuuya is holding him like this, as if to hold him safe, to make sure he doesn't go anywhere.
Dazai relaxes under the arms, the face drowsy against his cheek. His head is still full of it; full of gray cotton, a peripheral sense of the empty and hopeless future to come, and the way the gashes on his arms sing to be reopened, this bone-deep exhaustion and craving to sleep forever.
But he stays. He does not go anywhere. For the first time in years, he can feel warmth again, the hunger in his body, the wild and near painful beating of his own heart.
_____
When Chuuya climbs the ranks and his salary amount skyrockets, he rents a massive apartment in an extravagant building with more rooms than he needs, affiliated with the Port Mafia. Not long after, he learns about the conditions Dazai has been living in to make do.
"Shit," is what Chuuya says, "No wonder you smell gross all the time."
The next day, Chuuya grabs the little things Dazai has in his shipping container and shifts him into one of the rooms of his apartment. He forces Dazai to eat every single meal and makes sure he doesn't hurt himself, and Dazai can't tell if he feels relieved or dismayed.
One thing is for sure.
His life becomes much more interesting, living with Chuuya.
He has always had a bit of trouble mustering up the will to get out of bed. He has practice in forcing through anyway so he always does get up in the end. But it's a bit easier now, and it's hard to pinpoint exactly why (just that it's the image in his mind of Chuuya in the kitchen, wearing a large shirt and pajamas and pouring the two of them coffee and making breakfast). Maybe it's the camera on his nightstand, looking forward to his mission of collecting as much embarrassing ammo against Chuuya as possible.
Some mornings Dazai wakes up early enough to catch Chuuya in the bathroom, and they brush their teeth next to each other and Dazai makes faces at him in the mirror while Chuuya stares at him impassively or ignores him or flips him off.
One day, Chuuya laughs, toothpaste whitening his teeth even more, and Dazai is startled.
His mood seemed to have been better on that day, so that explains it. But maybe it becomes a bit of a game to see if he could get that reaction out of him again, though he's of course not particularly hoping for it or anything. He doesn't care about making Chuuya smile or laugh or whatever. He just likes how it surprised him, with the sudden flooding of adrenaline jolting right through his body, how it lingered for minutes after in the wild beating of his heart, came back even as he was thinking about it again hours later.
He just likes the way Chuuya surprises him sometimes, that's all.
***
After a few months, they have all the wealth to buy themselves luxuries and Chuuya spends it on wine and wine and wine, and then a few hats and fancy suits and clothes and shoes and a guitar. Dazai can't think of anything he wants. His money just sits in his bank account.
Chuuya tells him, "Why don't you spend that money on renovating your damn room a little? It's fuckin' boring to look at. There's nothin' in here!"
It's fitting. Isn't it?
Dazai is just a void of nothing. No desires or interests.
He can't think of anything he wants to buy.
The things he does want, perhaps, can never be bought.
"Not all of us are unnecessarily extravagant brats, Chuuya. But I guess you have to compensate by showing off how rich you are, with all that you lack in size and brains."
Chuuya grits his teeth and flings a kick at his face. Dazai dodges it easily, jumping aside. "You!"
Chuuya then blinks, suddenly, as if a thought occurs to him.
"What about a new camera?"
Dazai, it turns out, has grown a fondness for one thing. He finds that he can't let go. Even when he does buy a new camera it gathers dust on his shelf as he sticks to his old one.
Caring about something as solid and material as a camera is safe, perhaps. Even if he has to lose it, he can take out the SD card and get another one to replace it.
People, on the other hand, Dazai thinks, as he watches Chuuya's blue eyes light up in triumph at his silence, at having figured this out.
In the end, Dazai does end up liking something for his room. It's not much. But he discovers he does have quite an interest in beautiful things, which is why he has always found himself so drawn to nature, to sunsets and oceans. It's just that he never perceived it so much that he liked those things at all.
There are times they all begin to look like illusions too, like decorations on a play stage, or as if he can see the clear pencil lines on a work of art to remind him none of it is real, and so the interest detaches and falls away, but there are also times he likes to sit on the balustrades of high buildings or on the edges of the shore and become absorbed by the vastitude of this incomprehensible, chaotic and accidental universe.
Chuuya helps him set the features up in his room. When he closes the lights at night, his entire room goes as dark blue as the night sky, with illusions of neon stars and galaxies via a projector all around him. It becomes soothing to look at. Even on the nights he can't sleep, it's just soothing to look up at it.
One such sleepless night leads to Chuuya barging into his room with an armful of large space-themed objects. "Oi, bastard! Look at this shit!"
Dazai blinks as Chuuya drops them all on his bed, "and...what am I supposed to do with these?"
"Nothing. You just sit back like you do best and wait for the show." Chuuya is climbing up onto his bed and wriggling beside him.
The objects all light up on battery, a glow flickering into life from the inside. They are rich and bright colors, far more so than the real planets themselves, but it's stunning against the backdrop of the black-blue sky; silver Mercury, sapphire blue Neptune, Mars as red as ruby, and the sun star the largest and brightest.
Chuuya stands to his bare feet on the bed with Saturn in his hands, all small in pajamas and a white t-shirt, his head tilted up to the ceiling with wondrous and focused eyes.
Saturn glows red in his hands and he lets it rise into the projector sky.
"Hand me another," Chuuya says with his hand low behind him.
"This is stupid," Dazai says, but he does hand him another; Jupiter. "You're a child. No surprise there with how you look."
For once Chuuya ignores him, too engrossed in what he is doing. He effortlessly casts his ability on all the planets, and finally, the sun in the middle. He sits back down on the bed and scoots back to lie beside Dazai as they all orbit around the sun.
And this, Dazai doesn't expect; for him to come so close to him.
He begrudgingly acknowledges, even if in secret, that the end result is beautiful.
Chuuya's eyes are on him as they lie together. It takes him a while to notice that Chuuya is looking for his reaction. He must have looked some way himself, for Chuuya to have that small quirk at a corner of his mouth.
"Well… what ya think?" Chuuya asks, stupidly, ridiculously hopeful. That's Chuuya; forever with his heart on his sleeve. Dazai wonders who might take it in their hands and break it one day.
"I still think you're a child," Dazai tells him, as he turns to look up at the sight and they watch it together until Chuuya falls asleep beside him. He falls asleep slowly and little by little, Dazai notes. The objects have all fallen at the foot of the bed, some on the rug of his floor. Nobody would be able to tell in the dark that he is not looking at the galaxies in the blue-black sky, who he is really looking at.
***
Chuuya does a good job indulging on all the expensive wine he has been buying; vintage and rich with flavor. Dazai pretends to hate most of the wine tasting Chuuya forces him on, but some of it is, actually, not bad at all.
Nonetheless, it makes for a lot of fascinating moments.
Dazai is nowhere near being drunk after the wine tasting process whereas Chuuya is currently doing bad impressions of every adult in the Port Mafia. Dazai is laughing so hard he can't even breathe.
"Okay," Dazai manages, between trembling breaths of his laughter, his eyes watery, "Now... now do Ane-san."
On the camera screen view, Chuuya holds up his arm in front of his face, as if behind the sleeve of a kimono, and speaks in a bad feminine voice, and says the word 'lad' after just about every sentence he says.
Dazai throws his head back and laughs even harder. He has to hold his stomach with one hand, the camera held high. It's all shaky from his movements, and would just miss the way Chuuya's glazed eyes are on Dazai, taking in his delight brightly, how it would lead to him milking his act all the more.
"Do Hirotsu-san now," which leads to a stroking of an imaginary beard, a clasp of hands at the front, an imaginary monocle made out of a finger and an overly solemn, deep voice as he speaks.
"Now Mori-san!"
It's the most fun Dazai can remember having in his entire life.
"Hey," Chuuya then says suddenly in a small voice, swaying slightly on his feet, stumbling a little before steadying again. He has a worried frown on his face, the furrow between his brows drowsy with intoxication. "Ya ain't gonna show it t'anyone… are ya?"
"Oh, of course not, Chuuya! I would never get you in trouble like that," Dazai says with a wave of his hand, rather exaggeratedly. Chuuya, of course, is too far gone to notice how fake he sounds, relaxing at this assurance. "Can you do Ace now?"
A while after, the camera viewer is full of a Chuuya bent over a music player, picking out a song. Chuuya likes music of all kinds and languages; Japanese and French and English, though he doesn't understand a lot of what the English songs are saying. It doesn't stop him from settling on Do Ya Think I'm Sexy by Rod Stewart, beginning to bop a little with a slow-growing grin as he glances at Dazai and builds up to a dance. There is a captured moment where Chuuya is close to the lens of his camera with his eyes up on Dazai, hand out for him outside the shot as he is trying to call him over onto the christened dance floor that is his living room slash joint kitchen. Dazai's voice from behind it is saying cheerfully, no thanks, but you go on! Have fun!
Dazai is fluent in English between the two of them, and sometimes when they're in a car or at a party undercover, a song comes on that Chuuya likes the tune of so he asks Dazai about what it means. There are times Dazai makes it all up entirely; namely when it's a song about sex, especially hardcore sex, and so Dazai frames the meaning as something cool and fun, and helps Chuuya download the song merrily so he can hear him hum along to it later. It's always a secret delight to hear it, and to be the only one knowing what it means, to imagine Chuuya's reaction as he keeps learning English and begins to realize what he is listening to.
(There are other times when Dazai murmurs the true translation along with every line, leaning close to Chuuya's ear so they are the only ones that can hear, and watches Chuuya smiling a little to himself, almost without noticing, because he likes what it means).
Chuuya only knows a few basic words of English. He is trying to learn it. But he still manages to memorize the sounds of the words in the song by tune and mouths along to it blindly.
When Dazai leans back against the couch with a smirk and holds the camera high to record Chuuya's ridiculous, drunken antics, excited to see the outcome of this when he shows it to Chuuya the next morning. This is the hilarious and embarrassing ammo he is forever in search of. This is what he bought this camera for.
Come on, sugar, let me know…
It is unexpected, how something shifts in the way Dazai is seeing this moment in the strangest way: this silent and still night, but for the music and the fall of feet against floorboard, and hair like autumn against the golden sconce of kitchen light behind him. He is a small and chaotic force in his pajamas and black t-shirt; a different kind of storm than when he is dominating a battlefield, breathtaking all the same.
Chuuya is the most beautiful thing Dazai has ever seen.
This one, Dazai never shows to anyone, keeps to himself.
Dazai does, however, show the impressions to just about all the adults in the mafia except Mori, because he can't explain the way he just doesn't want Mori seeing Chuuya in any way at all; especially not like this, so at home and free and wild.
Most of them laugh. Ane-san represses the twitch of her mouth before she does end up breaking into a quiet laugh, politely hiding it behind her sleeve. Hirotsu-san clears his throat roughly and tries to look completely composed. Ace is, in fact, very annoyed and offended, which is how word gets back to Chuuya at all.
"I'm gonna bash your fuckin' head into a wall, bastard!" Chuuya yells, as he grabs his collar and leans up in his face.
Dazai whistles obnoxiously in rapid succession, as in training a dog, "Down boy! Down!" His hands are wrapped around Chuuya's wrists, holding him back from his throat.
Chuuya's growl builds up to end on a high scream, shoves harder against his grip to try and get to his head, as if he wants to tear his hair out by the roots. Dazai's head tilts back, his smirk slacking in a half-grin, tutting, ah ah ah.
"Stay," Dazai orders.
Inevitably, Chuuya manages to get him pinned on the floor, gloved hands around his throat with a press of his fingers to the underside of his jaw. Dazai smirks up at him, and doesn't mind it as much as he should; the feel of the u of Chuuya's hand around his neck and his own fingers tight around Chuuya's wrists, wavy brown hair in a glazed eye, lips soft around his teeth.
Chuuya's irritation with him lasts through the meeting that follows after, in which Dazai makes faces at him across the room. Chuuya flips him off with a middle finger. Many of those around him are awkwardly trying not to look, and yet can't help getting distracted by them.
It's only when Dazai makes dog ears with his fingers, tongue hanging out of a shit-eating grin, does Chuuya really snap, slamming his hands on the table as he stands abruptly to his feet and screams, "If you don't stop with this bullshit, I'll fuckin' cut your throat out!"
Dazai, in that instant, makes himself the picture of confused and blandly innocent, one leg crossed over an ankle. "What am I doing?"
"You!" Chuuya looks around at everyone, but Dazai knows no one would say a word because everyone is too afraid of him. Chuuya gives up and points a finger at him and hisses, "You were making stupid faces at me! Everyone saw it!"
Unfortunately, Mori is well aware of what Dazai's capable of.
So they both get kicked out of the meeting.
The many instances they sit next to each other results in a furious battle of footsie at worst, and at best a fervent tapping of their fingers on each other's arms or knees by their non-verbal code language insulting each other or telling jokes that get each other choked on laughter until they are, as more often than it should happen, told to leave by Mori.
____
"Odasaku?"
"Yes?"
"Have you ever lost a friend?"
"I haven't." Odasaku drinks from his glass. Dazai can sense the sideways eying. "Why do you ask?"
"No reason. I was simply wondering what it must feel like. Loss."
The silence comes over them. Dazai knows it must be a rather confusing question; it's not like Dazai has any friends he could have lost. They both know that.
Ango shows up soon after.
"Hello Ango!" Dazai says cheerfully, raising his whiskey glass to him.
"I had a feeling I would see you both here today," Ango says as he takes a seat beside Oda on the other side "What are you thinking about so deeply, Oda?" He leans forward onto the counter, gestures to the bartender for his usual tomato juice, and eyes Oda.
"The loss of a friend. What must it be like?"
"Have you lost anyone recently?"
"No. Dazai was asking. I am trying to think of an answer for him."
Ango looks at Dazai with wonder.
"Loss is a curious thing," Dazai says, putting his cheek to his hand, "Is it not? What makes the absence of a person so painful?"
"I suppose it's the emotions that link them together, the memories that hold those emotions," Odasaku answers.
"How unfortunate, then, that loss is inevitable," Dazai says, knocking a finger against his glass. He thinks of a stab wound in the ribs, the bodies that lay scattered on the floor of a billiard, in pieces and halves, and the recovered bodies killed by their own abilities, the red haired boy that came back from the throes of a raging beast inside him, and when all his rage had drained out of him, crumpled into himself with grief as he turned his face into Dazai's lap, "All things come to an end after all. And the ending of every story between two people is that one of them must leave." He smiles slightly and looks at Odasaku, at Ango. "I suppose that is one good thing about not having emotions nor friends then, don't you think? People like me will never know this pain. Not betrayal. Not loss."
"Has someone you know lost a friend?" Ango asks. There is something knowing in his eyes. He must have spent hours, writing the biographies of those very people that this someone has lost.
Those friends of Chuuya's were a rather prominent and loud bunch, weren't they? Of course he must have been seen with them by everyone, and everyone has seen Dazai with Chuuya. Nowadays Chuuya looks rather small, eyes sunken in with exhausting grief, so strikingly singular. Lonely, is maybe the word, despite how adored Dazai knows he is. It was how he looked, too, after the Flags. Somehow he always ends up here.
Odasaku is the first to leave. There is always a strange feeling in Dazai's chest, to see him or Ango go, as if the hollow in his chest has just widened, deepened.
(No matter. Loneliness is just another limb on his body.)
It's after a very long time of drinking together in silence that Ango says, "Sometimes it helps to have someone simply show up for you." He sounds uncomfortable, quiet, but determined to speak. "Sometimes it helps to just have someone who will keep your mind off of it, when it becomes too much to bear. That is what I have heard, from those who have lost."
"I don't know why you're telling me this."
Ango is not looking at him. He is just looking down at his drink.
That's the note they end on. Ango sets his empty glass on the bar, stands to his feet and makes his way to the door.
***
Chuuya usually recovers from Corruption in about three days and goes to work by the fourth, no matter how the pain and weakness lingers. But this time he doesn't go to work even by the end of the week and Dazai never sees him come out of his room. Ane-san comes by every day to check on him. Dazai is picking his lock when he is asleep to put the heating pad on his stomach and leaves okayu and rice balls and eggs (which are all he knows how to make) on his nightstand, but rarely does he stay for when Chuuya is awake the way he usually does after Corruption.
Physical pain is easy to deal with. It's all methodical, clear-cut. A heating pad helps. Dazai's touch to keep the raging beast from screaming. Chuuya's meds.
Emotional pain is hard.
It's complex and confusing and Dazai doesn't know how to deal with emotions he himself can't feel.
After the entire fiasco with Verlaine ended and the Flags' funeral happened where the grief seemed to hit Chuuya suddenly and violently, it was almost a kind of relief to not be able to see him, simply because Dazai didn't know how to act around him except how he usually did, and it didn't seem like Chuuya cared to keep up or react in those days so it was boring (so it didn't sit well, so Dazai didn't know what to do about it, to make him the way he used to be).
It's strange, then, that he buys all the latest video games and consoles and spends the morning setting it up in Chuuya's room while he is asleep so they can just play from his bed, or purchases a wide range of movies on hand, old and new, so they can watch it on the TV.
Even when Chuuya is sleeping all day long, he wakes up looking exhausted and like he didn't sleep at all. He doesn't dream, but his sleep is still light and troubled. He must not have slept at night at all.
"Get outta here," Chuuya rasps, at Dazai holding the consoles in front of him. He looks unbelievably tired, his eyes sunken. "I can't deal with ya right now."
"Chuuya hasn't had to deal with me for a week. Isn't that enough time?"
"Dazai, please," Chuuya breathes, and his voice shakes, and he looks like he is about to cry, as if the thought of Dazai bothering him or making fun of him is too overwhelming to bear, "Come on. Not today. Not… shit. Probably not for...fuck, I don't know, I don't know how long this is gonna last, 'cause it's on my mind and I can't stop— Whatever. You don' give a shit, but..." The sound of his breath is desperate, heavy with distress, eyes blinking fast and darting around, "But… the least you can do is not bother me and make it worse."
"I'm not here to bother you."
"Then what are ya here for?"
Dazai doesn't know how to answer it.
Sometimes it helps to have someone simply show up for you.
Sometimes it helps to just have someone who will keep your mind off of it, when it becomes too much to bear.
"I got all these new games and movies." Dazai feels unbelievably uneasy, squirmy under his skin and blank-minded, "You said it's all on your mind, right? I thought maybe you'd like to get out of it."
They do end up on Chuuya's bed side by side against the headboard, consoles in hand. Chuuya's even worse at Mario Kart than he usually is, but Dazai keeps his mouth shut and plays on without a word. It gets mind-numbingly boring pretty fast because there's no challenge and Chuuya isn't screaming at him or tussling about with him, but Dazai stays. He just stays.
He stays when the first sound comes; choking down the oncoming tears, abruptly silenced. Dazai doesn't look and keeps playing. It comes again, in a burst, as if against his will, and again, swallowed down painfully and trying to regain composure.
The third time it happens, Chuuya drops the console tremulously and clamps a hand over his mouth and heaves a sob, and before Dazai can even think about it he puts away his own console and grabs Chuuya by the waist and pulls them both down onto the bed sideways, maneuvered so Chuuya's back is against his chest, as Chuuya begins to cry in earnest. Dazai holds him tighter, closer, arms squeezing him in by the belly, and nobody told him what to do here after this. (Nobody told him to do this either. This, he learned on a hospital bed, from a small body curled around him, warm and safe. The heat of a cheek soft with baby fat to his own. A sleepy murmur, Osamu .)
"I'm tired of losing friends," Chuuya gasps out, "I'm tired of everyone leaving."
Dazai doesn't know what to say to that, so he doesn't say anything at all.
Chuuya gradually steadies, after a while. Dazai thinks he must have fallen asleep for a split-second, but a quick focus on the sound of his breathing pattern proves otherwise.
"You're gonna leave too," Chuuya says thickly after a very long time, quiet and broken, "And I know how you're gonna leave me."
Dazai knows too; by the edge of a high building or the edge of a knife, a bullet, water in his lungs. By his own hand. He can never promise otherwise.
That is how all stories between two people end; someone must leave, one way or another.
"I don't know why you'd be so sad," Dazai says, "when you're always talking about wanting to kill me." Somewhere inside himself, he knows it's the wrong thing to say, but he doesn't know what else to say. He can't make promises he can't keep. He can't tell Chuuya he would live for a long time when all he wants is to die most of the time. He is not made to last.
Dazai wouldn't have even believed it would matter to Chuuya, once, before he came aware in a hospital bed to Chuuya curled around him tightly to make sure he would know if Dazai is trying to get out of bed and hurt himself, to keep him down, to keep him safe.
Sorry, Dazai thinks, keeps thinking, sorry, sorry, sorry, as Chuuya closes his eyes and turns his head away, tears falling silently down his cheeks. But he never really manages to say it out loud.
But I would live for you as long as I can, is the thought that comes unbidden, as he is raised on an elbow and looking down at the side of Chuuya's face after he has fallen asleep, still pink and tears dried on his cheeks. He brushes a strand of red curls behind his ear. Maybe Chuuya would have liked to hear that. It's too late now. Dazai doesn't know if he would have been able to say it anyway.