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Dazai hates it when Chuuya’s eyes are closed.
—No, it’s not because of something as juvenile as losing his attention. Chuuya could never ignore him; it’s simply not in his nature.
(Though, the poor thing does try to. But in the malleable space that surrounds Chuuya, Dazai orbits his senses without restrictions. Like a leering moon, waxing and waning from fullness to invisibility, never truly disappearing. He enjoys idling by the extremities of Chuuya’s periphery, allowing this anomaly of gravitational forces his moments of ‘solitude’, like a scrap of debris is allowed fake solace in the shadow of the gaping maw of a black hole.)
The mafia is a large but loosely gathered organization and Dazai is at the end of every other thread that Chuuya trips, jumps, is tangled over.
(Once, Dazai even concedes to sharing this inevitability with the boy who may very well be Kouyo-nee’s successor, with all the strings attached.
“You wouldn’t look worse in gold,” Dazai had said to the slighter shadow walking just a half step ahead of him, and Chuuya had thrown a blithely scathing look over his shoulder to meet Dazai’s amused gaze, replying, “You wouldn’t look worse with my fist in your face.”
Something fluttered in between Dazai’s lungs then, and after a tumultuous night of examination he’d identified it as Pride.)
And so, Chuuya’s attention is never a question – or, if it ever was, Dazai has never been known to give a wrong answer.
.
.
Still. Dazai hates it when Chuuya’s eyes are closed.
But even losing sight of those grit and grime-stained imitations of precious stones (Lapis lazuli, or sapphire) as they’re shielded by layers of starched white bandages isn’t worth any measure of concern, feigned or otherwise.
Kouyo-nee takes on the role best associated with the nebulously static emotion and Dazai happily lets her, content to watch the master tend to her pupil with delicate hands and lilting words. He counts the flower petals on the sleeves of her kimono and is never surprised when they number less than the rest days that Chuuya is subjected to.
(Mori-san, with all the pride of a warlord surveying a newly tempered sword: A good investment, wouldn’t you say?)
In the future, Dazai counts thirty-three petals and twenty-one days in the confines of a hospital and is not even marginally less of a thorn in every tender joint in Chuuya’s body, whether his convalescing partner’s eyes are conscious enough to recognize him or not.
(Dazai, with his hands on Chuuya’s arm and the inconceivably brittle bones under it: Yes. Perhaps even after it breaks.)
.
.
The hollow-heart of the matter is this:
If Chuuya’s eyes are closed, then the first language is rendered null and void.
And that meant Dazai had learned it for nothing.
.
.
Ages and lifetimes and acres of black-bile-blood ago, Dazai meets Kouyo-nee’s pupil and ward.
The boy, who is shorter than him by the width of a hand even when seated, has crystal-cut eyes that regard Dazai with nothing more than polite interest, and Dazai is distracted enough that the awkward syllables of his name on the boy’s tongue is catalogued for later probing.
Instead, he exclaims, “You look just like a doll!” and Kouyo-nee titters like a little girl who’s been told her toys are pretty. Dazai has no trouble believing that this is exactly how it looks. Mori-san lauds Kouyo-nee’s taste and the boy’s eyelids flutter in one, two blinks – not a Thank you but certainly nothing less than a You’re too kind.
The boy starts to speak (“Self-presentation is important—”) but Dazai cuts him off without pause, “You’re just as small as one, too. A toy chest would suit you better than a child’s coffin, probably.”
Opaque, tarnished jewels melt into liquid, diluted spite – the color reminds Dazai of the waves he’d once seen at the piers after dark, mired with blood in their depths and he is, in one momentous fraction of a second, sincerely mesmerized—
“A pair of cement shoes would suit you better,” the boy opines, his voice high like the smallest death knell, his accent charmingly atrocious. He tilts his head, and his lashes dip, the slightest of movements edging into coyness (given perhaps another five years) and he continues, in terse and prim English, “Probably.”
This time, Kouyo-nee does not smile. Mori-san laughs, but, like most expressions, it does not reach his eyes. And Dazai—
Dazai laughs.
(The boy shoots him a look of precise befuddlement: his eyebrows draw downwards, his gaze snaps to focus on Dazai’s expression, the liquid rage in his eyes cools and spreads to wary suspicion.)
Oh, Dazai thinks, he’s so lovely.
.
.
The aftermath of Corruption is Dazai’s thirteenth hour – removed from any and every clock, save for his own. Not even Chuuya knows, though he is, in a sense, a starring participant.
Or better yet, the main prop.
Chuuya is so still, so lifeless if not for the pulse that beats like an afterthought through his veins. Vulnerable, after reducing another opposing faction into an absence of blood, ashes, bones. It’s been months since their first meeting, and just shy of thirteen days after the mafia hissed their new name like a benediction from fork-tongued vipers in a shadowy pit – and the thought has not lessened in intensity.
He’s so lovely.
Dazai touches his fingers to the aristocratic line of Chuuya’s cheek, following the blunted edge of his bones until he reaches the curve and depression of the socket.
With his thumb against the supple skin just between Chuuya’s eye and the bridge of his nose, Dazai imagines:
He imagines taking Chuuya’s hold over gravity and its vectors unto himself, manifesting a force paradoxically delicate and powerful enough to rip through skin and muscle and bones as frail as a hunting eagle born and bred in a cage, and with these bloody fingers, he would ply Chuuya’s beautiful, stained eye from his head, and then—
(Chuuya, exactly four hours and thirty-three minutes ago: He’s looking at Dazai with a familiar fierceness, manhandling his ratty collar with the same finesse as the play of emotions in his gaze; and even before Chuuya says, “Don’t say that shit as if I’ve got a choice!” Dazai reads his intent in his eyes, This better work, you shitstain.)
—with a flare far less fluid than anything he’s ever done, Dazai removes himself from Chuuya’s space.
The next time they see each other, Dazai reads muddled but sincere frustration in Chuuya’s gaze, this time made striking by the miles of pristine white-bandages around him, and the rattling disturbance in Dazai’s mind quiets itself with no further fuss.
(Kouyo-nee, to Chuuya, overheard behind a paper screen: Regrets will stain you. Find something to cover it up, or else live so that you’ll never have any.)
.
.
It’s just that – Dazai hates wasting his time.
(Though if you asked Chuuya, that’s what his existence amounts to, in its poorly quantified entirety.)
If he already has one noose around Chuuya’s neck, there’s hardly any reason for him to acquire two, three more. One is a leash, the rest would be accoutrements – like the thread of gold in everything Kouyo-nee had ever owned, the black that spread through every breathing crevice of the mafia. Certainly, it wouldn’t be useless, but the effort would be suspect.
Dazai’s excuses, muffled under his own bandages, hold up until the sixth language (and could he be blamed, what with chuuya so still and unmoving and—l o v e l y) and then, and only then, does he consider that there’s some merit to being able to see through Corruption’s vessel as if he were but a sheet of fine silk floating to its death over the sharpened line of a sword.
(And if sometimes, Dazai finds himself wanting to make good on his word about the toy chest, well—those are the times when disgust and fear lace together in an intimate, self-destructive dance in Chuuya’s eyes, and the thought is worth that sight, that irrevocably honest message: I shouldn’t have trusted you.)