Work Text:
00:22 AM
Dazai hates Nakahara Chuuya.
Thinking about it, even a statement such as 'hate' might be too light to cover the extent of how deeply, terribly, abysmally, he can’t stand the man.
He hates him so much that, if the world were to fall and Nakahara Chuuya were to die, Dazai Osamu would cease to exist too. He would have no reason to live on without the person he hates the most, he’d have no purpose.
What would be the point of happiness, if he can’t rub it in Chuuya’s face?
He’d be lost.
A song with no rhyme, an earth with no sky.
Just like the moon and the sun, different enough that they can’t share the same space, they despise each other and their linked fates.
And, occasionally, they meet and cause a big ruckus. The sun and the moon meet: it's chaos.
It's darkness and light, day and night.
Eclipses happen, then.
As an entirely scientific phenomenon, Dazai will confidently insist that science itself dictates that people like himself and his (short) Slug of a partner can’t do anything but hate each other.
What is sure, though, is that there are not enough words in the dictionary to express his bond with Chuuya.
Hate, grief, disgust, trust, love, dependency, hurt.
Love.
Love is at once the most remarkable and the most malleable emotion among the ones listed above: like any other currency, it’s disposable. It’s exploitable.
Dazai knows it well.
He is twenty-three and lying in the bed of a cheap love hotel that smells like dust and vanilla perfume, freshly escaped from prison and with the taste of a watered-down Old Fashion he got for dinner lingering in his mouth.
He hates healthy foods, a repulsion that comes from the impossibility of keeping them in his stomach, so dining with alcohol is nothing new for him.
Canned crab is fine. Whisky is better.
So he can’t complain, can he?
He has his whisky, his freedom, a hotel room and a half-naked partner just a kiss away.
Ah.
That’s not quite right: an ex-partner slash rival slash soulmate just a kiss away.
“You truly are a piece of work,” Chuuya is saying, voice throaty, sitting on the side of the bed. He slipped on his pants again, and there is nothing Dazai wants more than to feel the bite of Chuuya’s belt around his wrists. “First you call me here, say it’s urgent, pluck me out of a mission complaining that your shoulder hurts, and then last a grand total of five seconds the moment we touch the bed.” The executive wrinkles his nose, lips pursing into a scowl. “What the hell was that? A joke?”
“That, Chuuya, was the appetizer.”
“Screw you, I’ve got no time for your shitty games. I’ve got places to be tonight.”
“No, you don’t,” Dazai corrects him, starfishing on the bed. “I cleared your schedule.”
“Ha?!”
“You’re home with a very contagious flu.” He beams. “You’re welcome.”
Arching one eyebrow, Chuuya levels him with a glance. They both understand how much outstanding work the Port Mafia is dealing with after the vampirism outbreak, and Dazai has his very own newly recruited colleague to take care of, but work can wait until tomorrow.
Yokohama can wait until tomorrow.
“Aren’t you a resourceful bastard?”
“I always work hard to spend time with Chuuya.”
“Only when you have something to gain from it,” the executive replies, but it’s matter-of-factly.
Chuuya knows how their dynamic works and is fine with it — they both are.
Dazai accepted it, too and… Ah, he wishes Fyodor could see them now.
A shallow bond, hm? God, Dazai wishes that were the case.
It’d make everything so much more simple.
Instead, they meet in love hotels so things never get too personal, but it‘s an exercise in futility when Chuuya’s name is carved under his skin. He’s in his bones.
Everything about them is personal, from the insults they trade to the confessions they ingest so they’ll never see the light of day.
Compared to the rest, sex has always been a far less intimate predicament.
It’s easy to pretend that Dazai is not affected by the way Chuuya calls him ‘love’ only on the brink of the orgasm, when the roaring cars out of the windows muffle their moans.
“Dazai,” Chuuya calls him.
By the tone he uses, Dazai knows the following question will be about work.
It doesn’t surprise him; they always end up talking about work.
Sometimes, they discuss classified information that should never leave the Agency or the Mafia — but the intel gets lost and buried among the sheets of an unmade bed, whispered in between sighs and moans. It's alright if they spill secrets, as long as the words that could damage their organizations ensure that their rival stays alive.
Call it treason, if you dare.
Maybe they are dishonoring their organizations.
But that’s the thing: their mutual loyalty will always come first.
They are Double Black through and through. They aren’t Double-Black-that-has been-separated-and-now-it’s-no-more. They will only ever be complete together.
“H’m,” Dazai answers, meaning the wordless sound as a sign of encouragement.
“Now that the vampirism outbreak is dealt with, who do you think will be moved from the Agency to us?”
Chuuya says ‘us’ as if the Port Mafia is still Dazai’s family, even if that was never the case.
Dazai shrugs. “Anybody but Yosano’s on the table, so it might be Tanizaki. Sigma, who is new enough to be turned against the Agency.” His mouth twists at the prospect. He would not like that, after all the trouble he got through to make them join. “But it doesn’t matter, because I might volunteer. I have a track record in the Port Mafia, and would need less time to adjust.”
Chuuya’s eyes narrow. “You’d hate it.”
“It’d be easier for everyone else.”
“Well, fuck everyone else.”
“That’s not how I see it,” Dazai says, quietly. “And that is exactly the reason why we are the good guys, and the Port Mafia will always be a rotten place.”
Chuuya scowls.
In actuality, Dazai doesn’t expect the executive to understand.
Ever so dedicated, with an earnestness that makes Dazai want to repeatedly headbutt a wall, Chuuya has a tendency to let people walk all over him and call him a doormat. A useful one, invaluable even, but a doormat nonetheless. That is not selfless.
That is the product of the layers of trauma that shaped him — the Sheep, Verlaine, N, Dostoyevsky. Dazai claimed his fair share of damage, too.
Nakahara Chuuya is a byproduct of anguish and exploitation. A ripe fruit of sorrow.
Dazai would just want to free his partner from that burden.
But that doesn’t mean that the organization Chuuya works for isn’t evil.
And, the day he joined the Agency, Dazai also understood that the whole point of selflessness is doing the right thing without caring about the reward or the risks.
Losing Odasaku taught him that.
“Good guys?” Chuuya scoffs from his nostrils, pinching the bridge of his nose. “Fuck me, the only thing you bastards are is cringe and broke.”
“Who do you think saved the city?”
“Huh… we all did it?”
Dazai smiles, although it stops at his lips. “While you were drowning, shooting me in the shoulder, or while you were working for Fyodor?”
“I was possessed, you jerk,” Chuuya scoffs. “Cut me some slack here. It’s not my fault I got vampirized, and that doesn’t give the Agency the right to brag about being good n’ shit. It’s annoying.”
“Well, I’m sorry,” Dazai says. He’s not sorry at all. In fact, he makes a mental note to fuck the annoyance out of Chuuya and call it a night, because this discussion is not even worth a fight. “I’d just rather avoid anyone else a life of crime if I can. The Port Mafia— I wouldn’t send my worst enemy in that hellhole for a single day, and I certainly won’t send my comrades there.”
Chuuya’s eyes narrow.
I’m there too, he seems to say; I’m still in that so-called hellhole, you know. Dazai ignores it.
“One would think that falling with a fuckin’ elevator and being shot would humble you, but you’re still a bastard.”
“The people at the Agency are the good guys, Chuuya. Deal with it.”
“But we used to be the good guys.”
You and me. Us. We.
With a strangled noise, Dazai wets his lips. Were Double Black ever the good guys? “That’s what we told ourselves to do our jobs.”
“And it was fine for me, because we were together.”
“Yet you shot me.” Factual. Simple.
“It was your idea.”
“And you went with it like I knew you would, because I know you. I know us. But as long as you work for the likes of Mori, I—“
As long as we stay like this, there’s no ‘us’.
“Fuck Mori. Honestly, Dazai? Fuck you, too. I’m no villain.” Chuuya’s voice softens, raspy. “I don’t think, at least. I think I’m trying my fuckin’ best, here.” Chuuya flashes him a somber look, and Dazai shudders. “What if I do not feel any different from how I was before you left? What if bad and good people are just a matter of perspective?”
“That doesn’t make sense. The law is laid out and, in case you didn’t notice, you are not exactly respecting it.”
“The law is an unfair piece of shit and you know it.” Chuuya’s voice stops abruptly, and he tilts his chin with loyalty shining in his eyes. Half-naked and proud, the executive is a vision worth billions. “We are Port Mafia, and we take care of our own. That’s more than the government can say.”
“You are still the mafia.”
“And, like I said, I am not a villain,” Chuuya counters. Pride soaks the sentence. It sounds urgent, as if he needs to be heard and understood — as if the recognition of his intent is necessary for his survival. “You said we are the enemies of the bad guys, right? You and me. And I don’t appreciate being cast as a bad guy myself just because you switched sides to that Agency of yours.”
Oh, so he heard that. “You were supposed to be asleep.”
“Well, guess what? I fucking wasn’t.”
“Whatever. That wasn’t the point anyway,” Dazai counters, dismissing the subject in the hope of concealing his faint blush.
The good thing about their arguments is that they get so heated that they quickly forget what they were yelling about in the first place.
Chuuya scoffs.
“Right,” he agrees, leaning forward. A grin dances in his voice, and his hands find Dazai’s hair and the world suddenly shifts back in place. “What were we arguing about, again?”
I left the organization, but I didn’t leave you. It lingers on the top of Dazai’s tongue, trapped in a kiss.
The Port Mafia is bad, but Chuuya is good.
It’s too late, though.
02:00 AM
Double Black is a partnership based on the existence of two halves: Double Black (small) and Double Black (smart). If you ask Dazai, that is.
However, what has always been undeniable was that the two of them used to occupy the same position in the strict Port Mafia hierarchy.
The Chibikko might be a maid and a dog, and Dazai often directed him during joint operations, but it was always with the humble knowledge that he was talking to someone at his level. Another prodigious kid. His other half.
His human half.
As a result, they don’t order each other around.
Dazai only ever whispers orders in Chuuya’s ear — and they are soft, they are throaty and endearing, but they are effective.
“Do you think I can fuck this shallow bond out of you, Chuuya?”
“Jesus fuckin’ Christ,” Chuuya groans. “Let that go, will you?”
“Never.”
Dazai grins saying that, lowering to fan a puff of warm breath in his lover’s ear.
He nips at the top of the Chuuya’s ear shell, coaxing a low moan out of him that sounds like a victory and a curse at once.
“Come on, partner,” he whispers. “Show me how well you follow my orders.”
As Dazai kisses his cheek, his mouth, and his collarbone, Chuuya still rolls his eyes at him. “Possessive bastard,” he mumbles, and Dazai sees no lie in that statement.
He refuses to let the accusation stop his ministrations.
By the time he’s nibbling at the executive’s nipples, though, nothing outside their hotel room seems important anymore.
02:50 AM
There are limits to their present arrangement, and boundaries they have learned not to cross.
For example, he can never talk about his (possible) flings when he’s with Chuuya.
Once, Dazai tried to talk to him about the waitress at the cafe Uzumaki, and how she wouldn’t succumb to his charming words.
That was a mistake.
Moody dog that he is, Chuuya got all sullen, shoved him away and went to take a stroll.
As he slammed the door behind himself, the executive made sure it would almost blast out of its hinges. Bang!, and he was gone.
When he returned, drenched in rain, he asked Dazai if he wasn’t enough.
“Enough for what?”
“This,” Chuuya insisted, a little feverish, gesturing between them while small pools formed at his feet. “Enough for— this. Whatever this casual sex thing we do.”
“Are you jealous?”
“I’m pissed off.”
To this day, Dazai doesn’t understand the reason for that silent fight, though; Chuuya should know that no woman will ever be him.
He should know that no one-night stand will ever be him.
But Dazai doesn’t like it if Chuuya talks about his subordinates either.
The existence of an Executive Nakahara fan club makes him want to start fights.
And the people who flirt with Chuuya? It’s cute of them to think they can look at his dog and live to tell the tale.
No, Dazai doesn’t like it when he has to share the other man with the world.
A stone settles in his chest, and the discomfort makes him violent.
Jealousy isn’t a new feeling for the former Demon Prodigy, but the lack of control over his dog (part-time lover, part-time rival, full-time bugging thought that clutters his nights) is, indeed, unfamiliar.
As he watched Chuuya drown, Dazai realized that saying goodbye would never sit right with him: they’d either have to win or die together. No in-between.
Compromise is for cowards, anyway.
“You can’t sleep,” Chuuya declares.
It’s not a question or a judgment of Dazai’s fucked-up sleeping schedule (that ship sailed a long time ago anyway), but an acknowledgment as they lie on opposite sides of the same bed. Their bare limbs don’t touch.
“I was considering something.”
“Such as?”
“How I said goodbye and let Chibi drown,” he answers. “How that Rat thought he could send you after me. How we made it out in one piece, and now we...” Ah, what now? How he sleeps, and dreams of Chuuya. He swallows. “Now we’re here, I guess.”
“Glad you made it out of prison, Mackerel?”
“I miss the white suit and the atmospheric lighting,” Dazai hums, relishing in the lively sound of his partner’s laughter.
The bed bends under their combined weight as they roll to the side and drift closer. They move in perfect synch, finding the other as if the jokes are pulling them together.
They face each other and, suddenly, Chuuya’s fingers are cupping his cheek.
The executive’s hands — so kind and giving, so warm and loving; hands of a murderer — have something special that Dazai never found in any other lover.
His touch is searing, his kisses unrelenting.
And, for all his reputation of being a genius, Dazai doesn’t understand the reasons and secrets that make Nakahara Chuuya tick. The man’s mechanics are a beautiful mystery.
“Talk to me,” Chuuya murmurs. “What’s wrong?”
“Dostoyevsky,” he answers.
Chuuya’s thumb skims over his bottom lip, and the redhead cracks a grin. “That asshole.”
“He said ‘partners of seven years’.” With a low, strangled noise, Dazai turns to kiss the palm of Chuuya’s hand. He wants to kick his legs under the blankets and fight the bastard rat all over again. “God, he’s right. He’s right. We never stopped, did we? And when I realized he had you, I…”
I lost sight of the mission. I forgot about the game.
With another low chuckle, Chuuya scoots closer.
“You got yourself hurt,” he murmurs, lips against Dazai’s own.
(Please, don’t get yourself hurt again.)
“I got distracted.”
(He made me angry.)
“You scared the fuck out of me.”
Dazai lets out a strangled sound, drowning in that confession.
Ultimately, Chuuya is the side of Double Black who is not scared of the truth.
He’ll say things as they are just before covering Dazai’s mouth with his own and pulling him into a tender kiss.
Dazai gets lost in it, laying his bare self on the altar of his partner’s embrace.
It doesn’t make sense how, after all this time, Chuuya can take his pain between his hands and turn it into something shiny. Something gold.
The muddy hell of his overthinking blossoms into a garden full of flowers under the executive’s touch.
The question that has been torturing Dazai lately, however, is simple: should it still be this way?
Is he betraying his new life if, no matter where he goes or how far he strives, he still crawls back to Chuuya?
Not to the Port Mafia — see, that’s the difference, never the Port Mafia — but Chuuya.
“…See, that’s the one thing I can’t understand,” Dazai admits, pulling away as he’s suddenly reminded of something. “I left the Port Mafia, and joined the Armed Detective Agency.”
“You did,” Chuuya agrees. His fingers comb through Dazai’s hair.
“So, really, I don’t understand why I keep crawling back to Chuuya, and why people still think we’re a partnership. I don’t even like you that much.”
That last one is a lie that they both let slide. Instead, Chuuya lets out a rough chuckle. It echoes in Dazai’s skull like a scream in an empty church.
“Because you might live in a world full of light, but you can’t be in the light all the time.” With that, Chuuya leans in and bumps their noses together. “You still need a bit of darkness to fall asleep.”
Dazai smiles. “I do sleep better when Chuuya’s around.”
“I know.”
Maybe that’s that: even a life basked in light needs a corner of soothing darkness.
Just dark enough to rest his eyes.
Just dark enough to rest his heart.
03:30 AM
“Oi, Dazai?”
He doesn’t like that tone.
“Why did you bomb my car?”
And he doesn’t like that question.
If Dazai were an honest man, he would admit the truth.
‘I couldn’t let them think you aided my escape, so I made it look like I had tried to slow you down. I would never touch Albatross' bike, so the car was a no-brainer.’
It’d be an offering of reckless honesty, a shard of truth behind the mask.
But honesty is exactly what Dazai can’t afford.
“A better question would be, why have you never told Mori where I was hiding after I defected?”
Chuuya scoffs. “I didn’t know.”
“Lies. You always know where to find me.”
“Not that time.”
“Do you think I didn’t know who sent me that Hakutsuru sake bottle for my twentieth birthday?”
Chuuya hesitates. Bingo.
The admission of guilt is woven in his pause, in the way his voice is slightly trembling when he finally speaks: “Why did you blow up my car, Dazai?”
“And why didn’t you kill me in that prison?”
That’s how they never answer each other’s questions: they just pile in doubt after doubt, knowing they don’t need a straightforward answer to trust each other.
Their common language is trust.
Their bond thrives on devoted silences and unspoken oaths.
They’d burn the world while looking for their partner just for the chance to fight one last time. That’s how much they hate each other.
The human heart truly is terrifying.
03:31 AM
The truth is, he didn’t want Chuuya to have sex with anybody else in that car.
04:25 AM
“I don’t want to go back to the Mafia.”
Dazai whispers that confession in the night, mouth against Chuuya’s bare shoulder.
He speaks around the tiredness, lips still swollen with kisses and brain dizzy with the orgasm. The intimacy — Chuuya’s taste on his lips, the feeling of his body under him — makes Dazai sloppy and uncharacteristically vulnerable.
Tomorrow morning he’ll blame it on the alcohol and the sleepiness.
Now, though, Chuuya just hugs him tight.
“I will file a fuckin’ formal complaint if you come back to the organization. I don’t wanna work with you.”
A lazy smile curls his lips. “I don’t want to work with Chuuya either.”
“Seriously, I have better things to do than put up with your lazy ass. You’ll be annoying as hell, and you’ll put cayenne pepper in my coffee and shove all your paperwork on me.”
“That sounds like fun,” Dazai hums, languid, knowing that Chuuya would hate every second of it. He’d love that part of going back, though.
Caught between desire and sleep, he toys with the idea of offering Chuuya a place in the Agency instead.
When he swallows his words, though, they taste sour. They taste like hopeless hopes and impossible pipedreams.
“It sounds like a goddamn nightmare. Seriously, Dazai, stay away from my workplace.”
“It’s not up to me.”
“As I said, I’ll fight anyone who suggests your name even as a joke.” A pause. “And your shitty agency won’t let you go if you don’t want to. I’m sure of that, and I’ll camp out of the Boss’ office if I have to— that’s how much I hated working with you. Never again.”
You won’t have to go back.
And maybe Dazai has to blame the excessive drinking, maybe the months in prison stuck with a rat made him a buffoon, because he smiles and whispers: “Thank you.”
“So it’s settled,” Chuuya declares. He sounds pleased with himself; Dazai is pleased too. “You’re not coming back.”
Dazai swallows and kisses him again. “I never wanted to make you worry,” he offers.
It makes Chuuya smirk, and he sees a joke flash in the depth of coneflower blue eyes. “It’s not your fault. We’ve been partners for too long.”
“Seven years.”
“And counting.”
Dazai hmms, scooting closer. Chuuya’s body has always been warm — warm enough that he can feel it even through his bandages. “It’s a long time, when one points it out. Almost a decade.”
“Fuck,” Chuuya groans, though fondness rounds the harshness of his tone. “It really is a long time, huh.”
“I never thought about it before, but yes, it is.” And it barely just started, because they are aiming for forever. “Ah! I knew it, Chuuya loves working with me~”
“You wish. I’ll kill you, someday. I'll surely kill you because your sorry life is mine to claim, but I’ll do it when I decide it’s time, and not because Dostoyevsky orders me to. That is what pissed me off ‘bout that mission.”
“So Chuuya saved me to kill me?”
Happily, Chuuya touches warm lips to the back of Dazai’s hands. His mouth is dry and familiar against his knuckles. “You bet.”
Satisfied enough with that plan, Dazai nods.
He won't mind dying, one day, if it's with his partner.
Seven years of partnership, huh?
As he thinks back to the good and the bad times, Dazai supposes that they have been seven terrible, horrible, annoying years of babysitting a Chibikko.
For now, that is enough.
They are nothing but two passengers on the same last train to no-man's-land, two strangers who can’t hear each other’s voice without getting goosebumps.
They can't promise each other a future, so they gave each other their present.
It’s not much, but it’ll do for now.
And one day, when there won’t be any foe left to defeat, Dazai will be able to admit that there were good times during those seven years. Times that he cherishes.
And he savors it already: the day when they’ll stop meeting in love hotels booked under pseudonyms; the day when they won’t have to talk about work to avoid admitting that the separation is tearing them apart.
How he wants there and then to be right here, right now.
05:48 AM
“What are you thinking about?” Chuuya hums, tracing patterns on the hill of his naked hip.
His fingertips are featherlight over the gauze, but his voice is gravelly in the semi-darkness of the room.
The feeble light outside is nudging them to go back to their daily lives — they just paid for a night, and that time is running out — but Dazai is not quite ready to leave the hotel.
Not now.
Not yet.
“You,” Dazai says — not untruly, even if he knows that Chuuya will hardly believe him.
“Still? Is this about Dostoyevsky or the Agency?”
“No,” he says, mostly to avoid a fight. “No. I’m thinking about you, and me, and no one else.”
“And what are you exactly thinking about me?”
“Chuuya knows me better than to expect an answer,” he chirps.
Although Chuuya scoffs, he doesn’t pry further. Dazai supposes the executive is just silently assuming that he’s thinking about new ways of annoying him, and that would be fair. That’s what he normally does, anyway.
“Ne, Chuuya?”
“Hm?”
“What are we?” Dazai hears himself asking.
He spits out the question before he can even consider the reason behind this urge to clarify their relationship.
His bond with Chuuya used to make him smile when he was a teenager, but he’s not laughing anymore. Frankly, he's worried about it. He supposes that’s something that comes with adulthood: this sense of uncertainty, clinging to the few fixed things in his life.
And he supposes Chuuya never cared to find an answer, but he needs one now.
(As you can see, there is a lot of supposing going on between them.)
Chuuya rolls on the mattress; the springs creak under his weight.
“I don’t know,” he mulls. “Enemies.”
No, Dazai thinks, that can’t be right.
Enemies don’t look at each other like this. Enemies don’t beg for a caress, for a sign of unspeakable recognition. Enemies don’t stare at each other across the battlefield, wishing they were alone in a room.
So what are they? Acquaintances? That seems reductive. Partners. Not quite friends. Never soulmates.
Whatever they are, it never lasts longer than a night. What they are will mean nothing come morning, but it’s torturing Dazai now.
“You don’t treat me like an enemy,” Dazai points out. It’s not untrue, and Chuuya scoffs. “If you did, I would be dead.”
“Fair enough.”
“A partner?”
Chuuya side-eyes him. “I mean... if we gotta be for real, you have a partner already.”
“Then I guess I’m a traitor?”
“That’s for me to decide, Bandages.”
It means no.
He’s not a traitor; or, at least, Chuuya doesn’t consider him as such. For some reason he can’t and doesn’t care to pinpoint, the realization makes Dazai smile. His feet look for Chuuya’s bare legs, intertwining with the executive’s shins.
“What about friends?” Chuuya asks.
“I wouldn’t tell a slimy Slug the things I tell a friend, I don’t think.”
Chuuya barks a curt chuckle. “Suit yourself,” he says, but doesn’t offer another option.
He ran out of definitions, and Dazai understands the frustration that comes with it because he doesn’t have anything to offer either.
As he mulls over a more appropriate explanation, he pillows his head on his folded arm, lying on his back to stare at the ceiling. White, white ceiling. It reminds him of Meursault.
He always liked small spaces — the prison cell, the safe houses, the shipping container he called home.
Yet, when he’s with Chuuya, he can’t breathe.
“I'm asking because I came here with the intention of breaking up with you,” Dazai murmurs, eventually.
When he borrowed (read: stole) a car and called his old partner, he had a plan: he was going to set Chuuya free.
They would fuck one last time — one last encore if you will — and he would back out before sex could turn into love, and pining could turn into resentment. Dostoyevsky already used their rotten joke of a bond once.
Dazai will be damned if he’s going to let it happen again.
Clearly, with a lump melting in his throat at the idea of letting half his soul walk out of his life, his plan backfired.
He can feel how Chuuya arches an eyebrow, turning to glare at him. “Break up with me?”
“H’m, exactly. But I suppose that doesn’t necessarily make us lovers, right?”
“If you had tried to break up with me, I would have told you we were never together in the first place.”
“Is that so? Come to think of it, I never officially broke up with Chuuya.”
“You did the night you left the organization,” Chuuya says — and it’s leveled, almost matter-of-factly, but his voice dips and Dazai suddenly finds himself breathing through mouthfuls of glass. “That’s what I mean: you didn’t say it, but sometimes words are unnecessary. You never told me we were broken up. You just made it happen.”
As Dazai swallows, the words burn in the depth of his chest.
“Did it hurt you?”
“I understood why you did it.”
“Yes, but did it hurt?”
“What do you want me to say?” the other growls — his voice suddenly bordering on defensive. And Dazai realizes that his need to know that he was loved clashes with Chuuya's pride, so he won’t point out the raw heartbreak in the executive’s dismissive scoff. “You left, I lived on and moved past it. We both did.”
Did they? They’re still in the same bed, after all.
“Maybe we are strangers,” Dazai says. It’s a hard conclusion to reach when it involves the person who knows him best. “Strangers with intertwined fates, meeting on the sidelines. After years, that’s all we still are.”
“Maybe you should stop talking nonsense and we should shower,” Chuuya replies. “Aren’t ya a Mackerel? You should enjoy being in the water.”
Dazai gnaws at his bottom lip. ‘But see, Slug, here’s the issue,’ he thinks. ‘I don’t think I can leave this room without knowing what we are.’
Not after what happened at Meursault.
Not after almost killing each other, not when he fears that he might lose the most important person of his life to the murky waters of resentment — not when his partner’s blue eyes are corrupted with a leftover drop of crimson. He can still distinguish Dostoyevsky's shadow in the depth of Chuuya’s gaze.
He wonders if Chuuya can see Sigma in his own.
“I feel like we need to talk.”
“Let’s take a bath,” Chuuya answers.
“Seriously? Is ‘strangers’ good enough for you?”
A dismissive, raspy chuckle settles between them. “It is more than enough, as long as I can kiss you, or fuck you. Or be with you.” Another wave of laughter. “If I can do even one of those things, semantic matters little.”
“Chuuya—"
“Osamu,” he interrupts. It sounds final. It always does, when Chuuya calls him Osamu — or any variation of his first name, really.
He used to be fond of ‘Samu, but Chuuya stopped using it when he turned eighteen. But then, the redhead also cups his cheeks and drives him in for a kiss. “You think too much.” Another kiss. “Ya want to define this thing we have going on? We resonate. You do all the thinking and risk your neck, and I remind you to breathe and save your ass. We’re complementary, and that’s the end of the fucking story. Now stop overthinking, because we stink and I swear to God I’ll carry you to the bathroom if I have to.”
We’re complementary.
Somehow, Dazai finds himself satisfied with that definition.
Because Dazai Osamu truly hates Nakahara Chuuya — he hated him with blood in his mouth and venom in his veins, in Yokohama and in a Western prison that now haunts his nightmares.
They hate each other so much, they can’t help but find the other over and over and over and over again.
They hate each other so much that when Dazai says ‘partner’ he means 'lover,' and when he said,"Chuuya, this is my goodbye to you" his cheeks hurt for the urge to smile and laugh and cry and die at the same time.
They say that anger is felt in the liver. Well, then: Chuuya is his liver. And his stomach, and his legs, and his lungs. His heart.
Nakahara Chuuya is his lifeblood, and everybody knows Dazai is in love with death. So, you see? They hate each other.
They resonate.
And that is truly the end of the story.