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Once again, Dazai is feeling unwell. The twitchy pull and ache in her legs from her medication is bothering her to the point of no sleep, and she just wants to not be doing any of this right now. Any of it. Her head feels simultaneously melted and fried, as it has been for weeks now of no clarity, and she suspects she might want a drink, or at least a spot of company at the drink. So, she hoists herself out of bed, dresses, and heads downtown to her usual lurkings.
Downtown, past the walk, she descends the stairs to find a dapple of familiar red hair, tied in its ever present ponytail.
“Ah, Odasaku, what a pleasant surprise,” she says, delight pouring from her tone.
Oda turns her head to notice, and politely nods in acknowledgement. She says, “I had a feeling you would show up tonight.”
“Really?” Dazai blinks big eyes as she removes her coat, taking a seat beside her friend.
“Just a gut feeling I couldn’t place. That’s usually how I know when I’ll see one of you here,” Oda says with a shrug.
This spreading warmth spawns born from Dazai’s cheeks and down into her body, a comforting kindling to hear such a sentiment. That she exists as a concept in someone else’s mind, unprompted.
She turns away from the glow to the bartender, requesting her usual, before she feels the twitchy tug in her leg again. She stretches it under the bar counter, feeling the raw ache of worn muscle. No use to quell its distraction, and she pulls it right up underneath herself, balanced on the barstool. She turns her attention to Oda to best not give it any more of her focus. It must go away on its own eventually, at least in consciousness.
“So,” Dazai says, once her drink is acquired and she’s rested her cheek in the palm of her hand, against the curl of her fingers, “anything interesting happen to you lately?”
“Mm, not so much, to be honest,” Oda shares, her short nails tapping against the bar counter. “No bomb disarmings or anything like that. Recently my jobs have focused on the retrieval of things, like money or supplies from various people who have stolen from the Port Mafia.”
“Oh like heists! But that’s very interesting!” Dazai says, absolutely dazzled. “Much more fun to get out and do things, unlike I who have been stuck at the headquarters all month now in between executive paperwork and otherwise.”
Dazai censors herself, yet again, when it comes to her other usual tasks of torture. It’s something like a sense of shame; she doesn’t want Oda to think badly about her that she pulls people’s teeth out with pliers, their blood and saliva dripping down her hands, her sharp nails digging gashes into their cheeks to hold their thrashing heads steady, and finds lukewarm enjoyment out of it. She doesn’t know why she bothers—Oda is in the Port Mafia too, she knows what sort of life and work it leads to. She’s certainly heard of Dazai’s reputation in gossip amongst the lower level grunts. And yet… Dazai does not want to sully this image in front of Oda. She’s too special, too good, that a rejection or disgust from her might be just too much to bear. Might lead Dazai to a quiet walk off of a bridge, or something similar.
Oda turns to look at her. Pretty eyes and pretty lashes study, up and down. She then says, “I never knew so much of being in the Mafia was simply just paperwork. Ango, too, always seems behind because of paperwork.”
“And he never has the time for a drink these days,” Dazai idly comments, glancing over to the seat that he would usually occupy, when it is the three of them.
“It’s a shame,” Oda says with a shake of her head, lifting her drink to her mouth.
And it’s the familiar surge in the gut and in the chest; this nasty, jealous thing, when Dazai simply cannot stand Oda to seem so forlorn about Ango. Of course Dazai values their friendship, the three of them, but if she asked Oda if she had to choose, her or Ango, she wants it to be her. Always, desperately. They were friends first, weren’t they? Doesn’t Oda know that Dazai-
Or, no. Oda wouldn’t know that. Dazai has never confessed to such things. Too ashamed to be caught in such a human-like act of loving someone. Too disgusted in herself of just how obsessively it engulfs her being. Thinking about Oda. Wanting to be around Oda. Wanting Oda to think about her. Want her.
But, no. Oda is simple, and Dazai does not mean that as an insult. She is simple and elegant in thought, she does not read into Dazai’s messy displays of desperate attention-seeking. She calls Dazai her friend, and do not get Dazai wrong, even just an utterance of that is enough to satiate Dazai for all time. To have anyone consider her a friend, and especially for someone like Oda to consider her such… It’s a warmth like none she has ever felt before. Frankly, a warmth she thought herself incapable of feeling, at all.
Dazai too wants Oda as a friend, but she also wants her as something else. Something entirely personal, that not even Ango would have with her.
It causes an innocently, noxious jab to slip from Dazai’s lips. “Oh well, at least the two of us alone make wonderful company.”
“Wonderful?” Oda echoes, with a pursed brow, mulling it over; any snide connotation going over her head. “I think that’s quite a nice word.”
Dazai blossoms with a smile, first directed at Oda, and then tilted down into her drink.
Mori has always warned her behaviors such as alcohol use might not mix well with her medication, or her state of mind in general. She’s already chronically in a fragile stage of reality that the intoxication might only exacerbate. But he’s also always said such with a wry little smile and a certain gleam in the eye. Oh what would a doctor be without the sickly patient? He’s never truly been all that concerned, so Dazai has never either. If it ever really gets so bad in the head, she can crawl back to Mori for the other sorts of medications he can give her. The kinds that can make her sleep for ages, as to not have to be conscious to the confusion and the distortions. And if need be, she can put herself to sleep like an animal too, without Mori’s help at all.
But it’s not bad like that right now. It’s only the mild confusion, where she doesn’t quite remember how she got here anymore—the bar and with Oda—and then she only notices having this thought when she looks around, and the drinks are gone, and they’re not at the bar at all, anymore.
Or, no, she does remember. It replays in the mind like recalling a dream—where it happened to you, but did it really? The conversation was about boredom, and what sort of reasons for why the neither of them were asleep at this time of night, when work had no jurisdiction tonight. Oda admitted, she did not have any more drinks at her apartment, but she did have cards… And Dazai jumped upon such an invitation with a reply on the side of too eager, yes.
They are sat in Oda’s apartment. A place Dazai has only been a handful of times since Oda’s moving to it after taking work up with the Port Mafia. Once it was the three of them, Dazai, Oda, and Ango, when Oda did have more drinks, and the bar was closing. They played cards then, too, she remembers. And remembers dominating because Ango was no good and Oda was too kind. The other time, she remembers a bit less. Perhaps due to the blood loss, injured, self-inflicted, and Oda’s hands pressing firm into her wounds as she cleaned and bandaged her up, and her expression like there were things she wanted to say to Dazai… but didn’t.
“Don’t do things like this again,” she had simply said, firm, wet, like she might cry. Dazai has never seen her cry before.
Dazai almost wished Oda would’ve said something devastating, like, don’t leave me, although perhaps it was for the best she never did. Because the scary, devastating part is how Dazai just might listen to her, if she did.
They sit in a sprawl on the floor around Oda’s coffee table, cards atop it, cards in hands. Dazai’s knee bounces uncontrollably in the criss cross she sits in, and she shifts uncomfortably to sit on her heels instead as she stares down at her cards.
She must admit, the last time they played cards together, she was not in an episode like this. The numbers and symbols bleed together in ways that shutting and squeezing and reopening the eyes does not resolve. She draws a card, cannot read it, and lays it flat atop her two already placed cards.
Oda raises a brow, glancing down at it, then up at her. “You were at twenty and you didn’t stay?”
“Huh?” Dazai blearily replies. She glances down, too, again, at her cards.
The first two below did, in fact, add up to twenty. She counted wrong. The Queen of Spades that she had drawn, on top, blinks at her. She looks away.
“Oh, I guess I was hoping for an ace,” she laughs off.
“Your leaps of faith do tend to work out for you,” Oda comments.
“Do they?” Dazai replies, amused. “My leaps elsewhere never seem to.”
Oda’s eyes drop. Dazai feels a cold flash wrack the body, guilt. But then Oda mumbles, “Maybe that’s the lucky part, if I be so selfish to say.”
Afterwards, Oda looks up, back to her cards. To Dazai. Like nothing happened. Like she said something that Dazai wasn’t supposed to actually hear.
But Dazai did hear. And, involuntarily, earnestly, she says, “I’m sorry.”
“What for?” Oda asks, too kind to simply accept it.
“For being concerning. As you can see, I don’t have very many friends because I tend to ruin the mood.”
“You don’t,” Oda says back, again, too kind in the way she says it so distinctly different than a lie would sound. “I like being your friend. And I only have concern for you because you are my friend. You understand that, right? That if you ever wanted to talk to me, about anything… you could?”
Dazai blinks at her. The twitch is not only in her legs; now, it’s in her jaw, her skull. The body so uncomfortable to the sense of being seen. The urge to twist it about to purge it… But that would only cause more to be seen and-
“Or, I’m sorry,” Oda now says instead. She rests her cards to the table. “I’m overstepping. I shouldn’t have said that.”
“Overstepping?” Dazai echoes, airy, like a ghost of the word.
“You’re an executive,” Oda simply states, and it breaks something in Dazai’s fragile heart.
“That means nothing.” Dazai fists her hands down against her thighs, her nails digging into her own palms. “You said it yourself just now: We’re friends. And I do understand. We can talk about anything, can’t we?”
They meet eyes, across the small coffee table. Dazai holds her breath, sunk into the sea of her blues. Oda almost blinks, the half millimeter shut of her eyes aborted, to not break it. A moment, more, passes. Dazai does not breathe and Oda, seemingly, listens.
“I suppose we can,” Oda finally says. And then, with a tilt of her head, delicate, curious, “Is there anything we should talk about, then?”
Dazai exhales. Should is such a funny little word. What an endless and entirely unknown depth such a word withholds. Should they talk about Dazai’s obsession with death? Should they talk about how Dazai loves Oda so? Almost equally as strong as the obsession with death? Maybe even more?
Dazai picks neither, to instead be honest about something else altogether. “We should talk about my legs.”
“Your… legs?” Oda asks, clearly caught off guard.
“Yes,” Dazai says, finally pulling said legs out from under her, to stretch out flat in front of her. She smooths out her skirt down to the ankles. “They’re causing me such miserable pain, all night, and no distraction holds it off for very long. Oh, Odasaku, can’t you do something?”
“You’ve been in pain?” Oda then asks, that tone of concern again, but Dazai does not shy from it, this time.
Instead, Dazai just nods, a pout of her lip. Suddenly, with the permission, to have the insatiable desire to have Oda play her knight in shining armour.
“I think I have some pain medication,” Oda says, getting up from the floor, taking a step towards her kitchen, but pauses. She glances back down to Dazai. “You shouldn’t be sitting on the hard floor, then. Come up, I’ll have you lay down.”
She rounds the corner of the table and extends out a hand. Dazai stares up at it, almost dazed at the angle, but decides to take it. She lifts her own hand, clasps it with Oda’s. Oda’s calloused knuckles and blunt nails a contrast to Dazai’s slim fingers and sharp but paint-chipped black nails. She helps her to her feet.
Dazai is about to take a step for the couch when, by the hand, Oda tugs her in the opposite direction. Dazai catches herself before she stumbles, and follows, readily, where Oda goes instead. To her bedroom.
Oda brings Dazai to the bed. Beside it, she tugs on the small lamp chain; a humble glow it emits around them, and she gestures for Dazai to sit on the bed. And once Dazai does, by the calves Oda reaches down to scoop Dazai’s legs up, onto the bed, until she is laid out along it. And, there, a hand stays. On Dazai’s leg, just below the knee.
“I didn’t know you were hurting,” Oda says, soft. “What happened?”
“Huh?” Dazai says back.
Oda blinks up to look at her. “Your pain, what caused it?”
“Um.” Dazai presses her lips into a firm line. Resistant to share. Embarrassed, because, despite proclaiming that they can talk about anything together, Dazai doesn’t actually want Oda to find out she is diagnosably crazy and takes crazy people pills that make her muscles twitch and strain and hurt. That any physical exertion more than a walk can cause aches and pains for days after. So she lies. “Oh, I don’t know… Must’ve pulled a muscle somewhere…”
Oda does not seem to believe it, but does not pressure. The pensive draw of her brow. Her hand, she strokes down the side of Dazai’s leg. “I could massage them, if you would like.”
Dazai swallows. Her eyes flicker down to visibly watch Oda’s hand on her leg. Touch, forever will be something Dazai does not know what to do with. So engrained to mean gross obsession, or violence, either in jest or with intent. No one touches Dazai’s legs, really, outside of Mori when she’s on his operating table or in his bed or sat next to him in executive meetings, underneath the table. And that’s all she does know. That it feels icky. Even when sometimes she wants it, it still feels icky.
Oda has never touched her like this before, though. Could someone as wonderful as Oda possibly make it still feel icky? She doesn’t know. She’s terrified of any possible reaction and outcome of such a thing. But she also can’t help but to just might want to try it out.
“It really does hurt,” she admits. “I think I would like that.”
So, Oda takes Dazai’s legs up into her hands again. She positions her, sliding them up so she can sit on the edge of the bed. Dazai’s toes against her thigh, raised at the knee. Oda takes one leg, her hands slipping up under the lengthy skirt to massage around the calf. Gentle but firm pressure, fingers knead past the bandages and into muscle, down to the ankle, up to the under knee. So slow, so tender. Dazai is mesmerized, feeling her hands move like a magic trick, a sleight of hand away from the audience’s gaze, beneath the fabric of her skirt. She’s rooted in place.
Oda moves to the other leg, does the same care to it. Her hand slips against the underside of her knee, where the bandages part for the joint between lower and upper leg, and Dazai’s breath hitches in her throat, through her teeth. It’s so sensitive to the skin.
Oda glances up, hands stilled. “Did I hurt you?”
“No I-” Dazai takes another breath, refusing to meet where she knows Oda is looking at her. Her eyes stay down. “It’s good.”
Because it actually… is. It doesn’t hurt or anything like that. It’s also that it doesn’t feel… icky. Like, Dazai’s heart is still pounding, weighted and bleeding in her ears, and she’s still frozen on the spot having someone’s hands on her… But it’s not in a fearful anticipation, nor a disgusted one. It just is. And maybe that is good.
Oda moves her hands again. Dazai dares to bask in it.
Dares to, after a moment more of it, to say, “It’s actually… up in my thighs too. The pain.”
Wordlessly, Oda’s hand slides up over the knee, a gentle cupping around Dazai’s outer thigh. A shiver runs down Dazai’s back in tandem to the movement upwards, under the skirt. Only dutiful to work where the mass of skirt would get in the way if tackled above fabric, obviously, innocently. Oda rubs her fingers into the muscle there too. Dazai feels it especially here, how her own tenseness presses back against Oda’s hands, and she takes another breath to try and relax a bit more. Her chest pangs otherwise.
Oda’s hand slips over the top of Dazai’s thigh, to the inside of it, and involuntarily Dazai tenses all back up again. It’s like ignition, up into her neck and face, a warmth she almost thinks is a burn at first. Fears it is a burn. Almost sensing a threat that needs to be pushed away immediately. But she doesn’t. Oda’s hands smooth over her thigh, and they do not creep any higher, like it always has been before. And Dazai tries to just breathe. It’s not a burn, she tells herself. It’s just kindling.
Oda does all the same to Dazai’s other thigh as well. The same tenderness and kindness, things so unfamiliar to be associated with touch. And when Oda presses and rolls her thumb into her inner thigh, a small noise escapes Dazai’s lips. Because it feels good, and it’s not the pained-sounding noise from before, it’s more like a moan.
And, promptly, the heat in Dazai’s face scalds, embarrassed. Her hand flies up to cover her eyes, fingertips trembling against her forehead and her bangs.
“Are you okay?” Oda asks, and, almost, Dazai just wishes she wasn’t so oblivious to these things sometimes so Dazai wouldn’t have to sit there feeling so dirty and dumb.
“Fine,” Dazai chokes out. Mortified upon feeling the freezing of Oda’s hands; mortified that she’s ruined this too.
Although Oda’s hesitation becomes entirely unrelated as she suddenly goes, “Oh, the medicine.” She rears back, removing her hands out from under the skirt and from Dazai.
The abruptness of it is a shock enough to shake Dazai from her self-anguishing and actually peer past her hand, to Oda. The shock, also, to Oda saying something she shouldn’t know about. Dazai never wanted her to know about her medici-
“The pain medication,” Oda says more, standing. “I completely forgot to give it to you.”
And, oh. The pain medication, she spoke about earlier. Not Dazai’s medication. Dazai doesn’t recognize the panic until it’s thumping against her ribs in relief and she sighs. “Right…”
“I’ll be right back,” Oda says, and leaves the room. Leaves Dazai all her lonesome in Oda’s bed in Oda’s room with the phantom touch of Oda’s hands on her body.
Dazai sits there, ashamed, repulsed, for some familiar reason.
Oda returns shortly, pill bottle and glass of water in hand. She rests the glass on the night table beside and opens the bottle, shaking out two before presenting them to Dazai, nicely. Dazai presses a smile into her face, accepting them and then the water. Afterwards, says, “You’re so kind to take care of me.”
“Of course, we’re friends,” Oda replies, but Dazai isn’t so sure this is what friends do. But then again she would hardly know. The closest to her only other friend would be Chuuya, and even when he’s post-Corruption, Dazai’s not rubbing his thighs for him.
So, Dazai just accepts it. Instead she says, “We should have a sleepover, then.”
“A sleepover?” Oda repeats with the cock of her head to what must be an unfamiliar term to her.
Sure it’s a bit unfamiliar to Dazai as well; she’s only ever seen them in movies, but she thinks they could be fun with Oda. “It’s a thing friends do. I stay the night here. Sleeping over, you see?”
“Oh,” Oda says in hesitant understanding. “But… I only have the one bed.”
Dazai smiles, reaching out her hands to grasp Oda by the wrists and shake her gently. “No worries, we can share, can’t we?”
“I suppose we can,” she says, agreeably.
“Wonderful!” Dazai exclaims.
“You shouldn’t sleep in your work clothes, though,” Oda then says, eyes drifting down to Dazai’s form and her button down blouse and tie and long skirt. Dazai too glances down. It wouldn’t be the first time she’s slept in these clothes, not by a long shot, to be honest, and is about to say as much, but Oda speaks first. “I can lend you something.”
Dazai blinks. Oh. A thought that hadn’t even crossed her mind. A thought she now couldn’t ever be capable of turning down. Numbly, she replies, “Oh, thank you.”
Oda goes to her dresser to pull some clothes out. She delivers them to Dazai. “You can change in my bathroom.”
Dazai smiles and scooches up off the bed with the clothes in hand. Off she goes to change, out the room on quiet, padded feet to the bathroom. She flicks on the weak overhead bulb and softly shuts the door behind her. Alone once more, she takes a breath, setting the change of clothes down gently, sacredly, onto the edge of the sink.
Her fingers work slow in loosening her tie, undoing her own buttons, and then her fingers work even slower running over the worn fabric of Oda’s clothing, given to her to wear. She slips the shirt on over her head, hauls her mass of hair out from the collar, pulls on the sweatpants. They fit loosely on her stick-like frame but Dazai thinks she loves it. Being engulfed by Oda’s fabric and smell.
She folds up her own clothing for tomorrow and carries it back with her to the bedroom. She pushes open the door, a funny little greeting on the tip of her tongue that dies as her eyes widen at the sight of-
Oda’s dressed into her sleep clothing, it’s not like she’s undressed or anything. It’s just… her hair. Not in the usual ponytail, the only way Dazai has ever seen her… Her hair is down.
“Oh…” escapes Dazai’s lips weakly.
Oda turns to notice Dazai’s entrance. “I’m sorry,” she says, Dazai only partially noticing it in her stupor. “I don’t own anything with long sleeves comfortable enough to sleep in. I hope this is okay…”
Only then is Dazai able to tear her gaze away a moment, down to herself and the short sleeve shirt she has changed into, exposing her thin limbs wrapped up in bandages, save for the elbows peeking out, for lack of chaffing.
“No, it’s alright,” Dazai says. It is. She didn’t even notice or care, too lost in the bliss of getting to wear Oda’s clothes. “I’m comfortable.”
Dazai leaves her clothes on top of the dresser, then takes rather nervous steps to the bed and to Oda.
“Are you comfortable?” Oda echoes. “I mean, your legs. Do they feel better?”
“Uh,” Dazai doesn’t know where to look, like looking at Oda with the way her hair cascades over her shoulders is too holy for someone so damned as Dazai to dare lay eyes upon. “Yes. A bit better. I think I could sleep without them bothering me. Thank you.”
“That’s good,” Oda says. “I’m going to wash up. You can get in bed, if you’d like.”
She departs the room and Dazai teeters on her feet a moment longer before she decides she needs to be horizontal. She climbs into the bed this time, under the covers, not atop, and sits.
Dazai idly listens to the running water, the quiet noises of an apartment building in the middle of the night, the sound of someone breathing—but she isn’t sure if that’s her own breaths playing in her ears or a hallucination again and ignores it.
When Oda does return, she comes to Dazai’s side of the bed. She reaches for the lamp and says, “I’ll turn the light off now, if that’s alright.”
Dazai peers up at her, at this angle above her, her hair damp at certain places framing where she must’ve washed her face that curls so carefree and beautiful. The warmth of the lamp light close against her cheek, a glowing lining to her skin. Dazai can’t even blink, can’t look away, can’t speak. She feels the deep claws of unreality sink deep into the flesh, dig, and hold. How could someone look so much like an angel? How is it possible? That this angel cares for her, lets her stay the night in her bed with her? The mind shatters under such a concept. Dazai could almost cry. She’s so, so beautiful. An ethereal being put before Dazai’s very eyes. How can this be real?
“Oh…kay…” she whispers over a frayed breath. Oda turns out the light.
Dazai’s eyes flash black in the sudden darkness, she cannot see at all. This must be what it’s like when you see something so beyond the human plane of existence. If that’s the last thing she gets to see, she wouldn’t mind that.
But quietly, creeping, do the eyes acclimate to the level of dark, and she watches Oda’s form come around the end of the bed, to the other side, and get in. Life goes on after such an event, somehow, and now Dazai will sleep and share a bed with Oda.
“Thank you,” Dazai finds herself repeating.
Oda looks at her, she senses eyes on her. “I thought you said that already.”
“I did,” Dazai says. She allows herself to sink down and lay her head on the pillow. “But it bears repeating. You’re so kind to me.”
I love you, she means to say, does not say.
“Well, thank you too,” Oda then says. Dazai turns her head against the pillow. The darkened sight of Oda’s head on her pillow too, looking at one another. Serene and intimate the only kind of space left between them. When Dazai hears breathing this time, she knows it’s Oda’s. “I’ve never had a sleepover before. I think I like it when you stay.”
Dazai’s heart aches, but in the way that feels good. Like a reassurance of its existence, to be felt. Not like the twitchy ache of her legs all night up until now. Quiet, the ache in her legs is now. Calmed. She says back, “I think I like it too.”