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Bypassing pleasantries and simple polite manners, Dazai greets the fragile collection of skin, bones and murderous intent swaddled in mute white plasters and linen with a gleeful exclamation – “And you call me a waste of bandages!”
Chuuya’s upper lip (soft, faintly pink, tastes like a slap in the face) curls into a sneer and his breath (hot, ragged, littered with monosyllabic misnomers, “fuck, fuck, fuck you, shit, yes”) hisses between his teeth. Dazai’s eyes catalogue every tic and every twitch of muscle, translating effortlessly, What do you want, Get out, Come closer so I can bite that smile off your face.
(Chuuya is seven different languages all on his own. Dazai is fluent in four, five – wholly by accident – and now, six, by necessity.)
“Now, now, Chuuya,” he begins, sweeping into the room with twice his usual pompousness, hands spread in a placating gesture completely at odds with the shit-eating grin on his face, “Such a lively convalescent you make. However do the nurses put up with you?”
They don’t, and Chuuya’s gaze cuts away from his visitor and trails over the bandages that have all but replaced his skin, a seamless counterpoint to Dazai’s question.
(“They tie me down instead.”)
Dazai laughs, tugging at the sheet draped loosely over Chuuya’s legs, making a show of peeking under it before whispering conspiratorially, “I’d watch out for the cuffs, if I were you.”
Chuuya’s left hand twitches in its plaster-cage. The sight of it is so novel and jarring, Dazai almost sighs audibly at the clear threat: Shut the fuck up before I make you.
It takes a moment before Dazai realizes that Chuuya has not spoken a single word since his arrival.
Half of that to realize that he can’t.
(Mori-san, paternal pride rolling off the shadow of a smile on his face: He did a good job. It’ll be worth it if he can do it again.)
Something bubbles and broils under Dazai’s skin. He feels the distinct urge to throw himself against the window, glass and iron railings and all, arms stretched wide for the embrace of the earth, five floors below.
Instead, he murmurs, with condescending pity dripping from every word, “Making threats while you’ve been forbidden from using your ability? That’s a little more disobedient than you can afford, isn’t it?” Dazai sits himself close then, his lips brushing against the strips of bandages woven through russet locks as he breathes, “Chuuya?”
Disappointingly (though expectedly), Chuuya does not even possess the strength to lean forward and bite Dazai’s ear off.
Something tumbles and troubles under Dazai’s skin. The blood running through his veins is staging a visceral reaction to Chuuya’s weakness, to his own disgust. It feels like how he’d always imagined the Corruption to be like, if on a cellular, molecular level. Black holes erupt in the very fibre of his being, and Dazai aches to tear the bandages off of Chuuya’s face.
Instead he hops off the bed, making a show of checking his watch and fussing with the flowers propped up in a vase at Chuuya’s bedside “I’d love to stay and chat, but I only dropped by to say hello, you see. I’ve got errands to run, work to slack off on, the usual.” He winks, and Chuuya rolls his eyes in the perfect eloquence of his first language.
(“Spare me the theatrics, Dazai.”)
He doesn’t say I’ll visit again. Chuuya doesn’t reply Don’t you dare – I’ll be discharged by the time you get back.
.
.
Only one of those statements is a lie: the toll that the Corruption takes on Chuuya’s body, unchecked and uncontested by Dazai’s nullification, is greedy and merciless no matter if it’d been activated for six seconds or six hours. Chuuya will be bedridden for a solid three weeks, and will be discharged on a limp and a reminder ‘not to overdo it’.
Still, the collapse of his own body is a small price to pay for a job well done, and the twenty-one day period of Chuuya’s temporary half-life is forgotten in the wake of attention and conspicuous praise.
Dazai, who crushes every remaining individual even tangentially involved in Chuuya’s previous mission with the detached viciousness of a child training a magnifying glass over an ant farm, spends a considerable number of those twenty-one days barging into Chuuya’s hospital room without so much as a proper greeting.
Still, he also never quite says his goodbyes.