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Chuuya wouldn't go so far as to call it a habit, but if he was pressed, he'd have to admit that drunk-dialing Dazai wasn't exactly an unusual course of action for him.
He'd actively avoid checking his phone history whenever he woke up particularly hungover. Chuuya knew exactly what he'd see. A long list, Dazai's insulting contact name dozens of times, appearing in increasingly frequent intervals as Chuuya got progressively drunker. It only served to piss him off all over again, when morning came.
Dazai never answered, of course. Chuuya kept calling anyways.
And now, sure enough, here he was: shoulders aching sore from a stressful day and three glasses of Bordeaux down, once again jamming the call button on Dazai's contact with a messy snarl.
If he'd been with Hirotsu and Kajii, they'd be exchanging a glance right now. ‘This again?’ it'd say. ‘Really?’
Chuuya hadn't felt like drinking with company tonight, though. He'd swung right through the elevator doors into his penthouse and beelined for the wine rack. Hadn't even hung his coat or hat up; just tossed them to the other side of the couch where he was sitting spread-out and draining the bottle.
Ring…
Ring…
Ring…
Dazai's irritating voicemail message began to play. He could recite the damn thing note-for-note at this point. Chuuya ended the call with a sneer. He drank another three sips. He dialed again.
Ring…
Ring…
Ring…
Voicemail. Chuuya hung up again. He was swearing a blue streak under his breath. “Stupid, selfish son of a bitch.”
He finished the glass, then stood up to use the bathroom. His head spun just enough that he had to adjust his own gravity to keep from stumbling over. Bleary-eyed, he caught his reflection in the mirror.
Man, he looked a mess. He'd had to do an interrogation today, which always left him in a particularly shitty mood. Now going down those basement steps reminded him especially of Dazai, too – chained up, bloodied, that dumbass smirk wiped right off his heart-shaped face as Chuuya squeezed his windpipe shut with force.
Chuuya had probably thought about that altercation more than he should have, in the months since it had happened. Definitely thought about it more than he should have. Another reason for his bad mood. He called again.
Ring…
Ring…
“Hello?”
Chuuya barely managed to keep his phone afloat with his Ability as his fingers loosened in shock.
He had been dialing this same, tired number for four years straight and not once – not a single time! – had Dazai ever picked up for him. It was one of his old numbers, from his Mafia days; a private line, the one he'd always text Chuuya irritating shit from when they were partners. He'd sort of thought Dazai had just jammed it in a drawer or a box somewhere to forget about.
“Dog got your tongue?” came Dazai's teasing voice again, while Chuuya was struck dumb.
He found his words after a moment. “So you do know how to answer a phone after all,” Chuuya spat.
“It's a new skill I've acquired.”
“Great, ‘cause I've got a big fucking bone to pick with you.” Chuuya leaned up against his granite countertop. His voice rang in the tiled bathroom, already ramping up to yelling. “You're such a –”
“Whoa, whoa. Is Chuuya just going to complain at me this entire call? Boooring.”
“Yeah I'm gonna complain! You got it way too goddamn easy at that little Agency!” Chuuya was pacing into his hall now, barely paying attention to where he was going. “Somebody's gotta remind you what a colossal piece of shit you are.”
Exaggerated snoring noises crackled through the line. “Boo. Get some new material.”
Chuuya growled. “The fuck am I, your entertainment? Don't answer that,” he immediately tacked on, at the same time as Dazai chirped “yep!”
He continued, “Do a little dance for me.”
“It'll be a cold day in hell the day I dance for you.”
“But you were halfway there with your debutante act. Can you do the voice again?”
“If I didn't think it'd get your rocks off, I'd fucken’ kill you,” Chuuya snapped, pressing down the speakerphone button and tossing the device on his bedside table carelessly.
Dazai laughed, delighted. “How lewd! Is that what you think? I'd get off on it?”
Chuuya paused, halfway through trying to fight an arm out of his cropped jacket. “You're a freak. No shit you would.”
“Mm, maybe if you were a beautiful woman,” Dazai mused. It sounded like he was putting real thought into it.
“Wow, real sorry to disappoint," Chuuya snorted, finally struggling his way out of the offending garment.
“You should be.” Dazai hummed again. “If I closed my eyes, though, Chuuya's hands are probably small enough I could pretend.”
Chuuya made a disgusted face, though there was nobody around to see it. “Gross. Like I said, freak.”
“Guilty as charged.”
There was a small noise – the unmistakable crack and hiss of a beer can being opened.
“You drinking?”
Dazai began to lilt out a hideously off-key rendition of the Sayuri classic. “You like whiskey, don't you? So let's talk a little mooore –”
“Jesus, you're murdering that.”
“The bottle filled with vanished looove –”
“Seriously, this is painful.”
“Who am I performing for?”
Chuuya frowned. “Huh?”
“I'm on speakerphone, aren't I?”
“Oh. Yeah, you are. ‘M just getting changed,” Chuuya answered thoughtlessly.
There was an almost imperceptible pause. “Chuuya's stripping to my dulcet tones and I'm the freak?”
Chuuya's face was already flushed from the alcohol. He felt it flush even more. “I'm not stripping! I'm taking my fucking work clothes off!”
“Hmm, sure sounds like stripping to me.”
Chuuya tore one sock off and then the other, bracing himself against the wall so he wouldn't fall over. “Yeah, well, some of us change our clothes more than once a week.”
A gasp of mock-offense. “I'll have you know I regularly do laundry now. Another new skill I've acquired.”
Tie next. Chuuya pulled it free from around his shirt collar, the ribbon sliding silky through the clasp. “Yeah? You do it?”
A beat. “Well, somebody does it.”
Chuuya rolled his eyes. "So you're forcing your subordinates to do your chores for you. Real classy.”
“I don't force anybody to do anything. I simply make suggestions.”
At that, Chuuya belted out a full-bodied guffaw.
“Bullshit!” he crowed.
Dazai sighed his world-weary sigh. “Of course a complete knucklehead like Chuuya wouldn't understand the gentle art of persuasion.”
“You are so full of shit!” Chuuya laughed. “‘Gentle art’ my ass!”
“What?” Dazai sounded affronted. “I can be gentle.”
The air in his bedroom felt thinner, suddenly.
“Bullshit,” Chuuya repeated, more firmly.
Dazai's tone turned coy. “Just because Chuuya has never been on the receiving end of my generous affections –”
“Nasty. Shut up,” Chuuya interrupted, cheeks hot. “I've seen enough women crying after you to know your affections ain't ‘generous’.”
“I'm a changed man.”
“Really doubt that.”
“What's that?”
“I said I really doubt –”
“No, I heard something jingling.”
“You're so fucking nosy,” Chuuya groused, though he'd done the same thing earlier, asking after the sound of that can opening. It was difficult not to. This one small, wavering line of communication, after nearly half a decade of radio silence. It was impossible not to focus on it, to cling to it despite himself.
“I'm going to guess.”
Chuuya raised an eyebrow. “This is really what passes for entertainment in the light? You're cracked.”
“Hmm, too heavy to be your hat chain – belt buckle?”
He had, indeed, been working his belt free from his trouser loops.
“You want a prize?” he asked sarcastically.
“Ha. Knew it. Do another one.”
Chuuya frowned. “You're a fucking moron. I'm not playing along with this.”
“Sounds like someone’s scared of losing,” Dazai taunted.
That specific, baiting tone shot straight through reason and activated Chuuya's competitive streak. It was a sickeningly nostalgic feeling.
“How's this even a game?” Chuuya snapped, irritated he was even considering it. “I get undressed and you guess what I'm taking off? That's so fucking dumb, even for you.”
“That would be dumb,” Dazai agreed.
For a fraction of a second Chuuya was taken aback by his easy agreement, until he continued: “Obviously we take turns.”
Chuuya's stomach flipped a little. Man, he should have eaten more before he downed that wine.
This is a bad idea, came the small, sensible quadrant of his brain that always seemed to have the volume dialed down whenever Dazai was involved.
“How would we score this, anyways?” Chuuya hemmed, eyes narrowing.
“You get a point if you guess the item of clothing correctly. Most points wins.”
“No shit. What about a wrong guess?”
“Forfeit your turn. Simple enough.”
That was pretty simple. Simple enough that even Dazai would have a hard time cheating at a game like this.
The opportunity to get a one-up on his beloathed ex-partner was too tempting to listen to his wine-dampened better judgement. The concept of this stupid ‘game’ was morbidly enticing, too, in a way Chuuya was refusing to inspect.
“You go, then. I just took something off.”
“Bossy. Fine.”
This was a massive waste of Chuuya's time, and not what he had called for at all. He should be tearing Dazai a new one for all the trouble the bastard had brought down on him, and the Port Mafia at large. He should be letting Dazai know, in no uncertain terms, that he wasn't gonna participate in this latest attempt to cause him grief.
Instead, he was straining his ears for the faint noises from the other end.
Not really a lot to go on. Just sounded like fabric rustling.
“Coat?” he guessed, playing it safe.
“In my own dorm? Good thing you're not the detective.”
“Fuck off. I didn't know if you were at home or not.”
“It's two in the morning, silly.”
Chuuya snorted. “Like I haven't dragged you out of some dive bar bathroom at this hour before. What was it, then?”
“Hmm, I wonder.” Dazai sounded amused. “Your turn.”
Of course Dazai wouldn't give him the hint of narrowing down his options. He clicked his teeth in irritation.
Chuuya wrestled his alcohol-drifting thoughts into attention. He had just removed his belt, so the pants would be too obvious. Socks would have been good, but he'd taken those off already, along with his tie. He settled on the vest.
There was silence on the other end as Dazai listened. Chuuya pictured it, involuntarily, and his stomach dropped a little once more. Dazai, phone pressed to his ear, listening to the sound of Chuuya undressing.
“Bolero jacket,” came the guess.
“Wrong.” Chuuya savoured the word.
“What was it?”
“My vest,” Chuuya gloated without thinking. “Wait, shit, I shouldn'ta told you. Fuck.”
“I'm gonna win in no time.” Dazai's smug smirk was nearly audible.
“Keep dreaming,” Chuuya retorted. “Your go.”
He focused every pickled brain cell on the collection of sounds. Mostly rustling again, but then a very faint zrrrp.
“Ha, that was definitely a zipper. Your pants?”
“Bingo.”
Of course he'd pictured that, too, with the sound. Dazai twisting the button free with his bandaged fingers, sliding down the zip as slow as he could to try and avoid making that telltale noise. It didn't sound like Chuuya was on speakerphone, so Dazai must have had his cellphone pressed right up against his booze-flushed cheek, held in place by a sharp shoulder.
Was he standing up? Laying down?
“Laying down. You?”
Chuuya hadn't even realized he'd asked out loud. Man, he’d have to be a little more cognizant of what he was saying, tipsy in this scenario.
“Like I'm gonna tell you,” he bristled, embarrassed.
Vivid and obtrusive was the mental image Dazai's answer had dredged up: the other man lounging on his futon, working his pants off, lifting his slim hips and sliding the beige slacks down his long, gauze-wrapped legs.
Chuuya's throat was very dry. It took monumental effort not to clear it.
“I think you're standing up. I haven't heard your box spring yet,” Dazai stated.
“I'm not giving you a point for that one.”
“But I'm right,” he cajoled. “Your turn.”
Chuuya opted for his dress shirt, his movements as careful and quiet as they could be. Halfway through fiddling with the buttons, Dazai guessed correctly.
“What the hell. How'd you get that one?”
“A magician never reveals his secrets,” he said, voice lilting and off-beat in that way that was distinctively ‘Tipsy Dazai’.
“I'm no magician, though, so I'll tell you,” he continued. “You were taking too long. When Chuuya is drunk, it takes him fooor-ever to unbutton his shirt.”
It ticked him off, Dazai knowing him that well. They'd gotten trashed together more than once as teenagers. The aforementioned dive bars, or getting wasted on cognac from some underworld hotshot trying to broker a deal with Mori's ‘right-hand man’. Those evenings always ended invariably in some kind of fight, either because:
a) Dazai had pissed Chuuya off and Chuuya wanted to hit him, or
b) Chuuya wanted to do something other than hit him, and that pissed him off even more.
That was a long time ago, though. Some weird, fucked-up hormonal response to their forced proximity. Not getting laid. A nasty cocktail of full-swing puberty and a high-stress environment. Whatever. Chuuya had never said a damn thing and he never would, and he was way, way past that confusing shit at this point.
Those convictions existed very far in the back of his head right now, in the same discard pile where reason had been tossed aside.
“Acting like you know me so damn well,” Chuuya grumbled.
He got irritated with the buttons and just popped the shirt open with force. A small rain of expensive mother-of-pearl discs scattered across his bedroom floor. That was a mess for tomorrow's Chuuya.
“Believe me, it's against my will,” Dazai sighed. The sound was breathy and exaggerated, and it made Chuuya's chest swoop.
“You were the lucky one, paired with me,” he shot back, tone brash and biting. Chuuya pulled his open shirt off completely and threw it towards some vague corner. He was just in his trousers now, sitting low on his hips without the belt, and his gloves, and his leather choker. The air in his room felt stuffy and warm against his bare chest. He suppressed a shiver. “Always dragging your ass out of trouble.”
“Half that trouble was yours, pipsqueak.”
“Bone-bag,” he shot back, automatically. “You trying to get out of taking your turn?”
“Wow, Chuuya really wants to get me out of my clothes that badly, huh?”
“You're the one who wanted to play this stupid game!”
Dazai laughed, small and tipsy. “Yep. And I'm winning.”
Chuuya did flop down on his bed, then. He knew that Dazai heard that traitorous box spring creak, but he made no comment on it.
“The hell are we even playing for?” he asked, taking his phone off speaker and pressing it against his own too-warm cheek, too.
It hit him in a way he wasn't prepared for, hearing that crisp and mischievous voice so directly, when Dazai answered him. Like he was right there, murmuring into the delicate shell of Chuuya's ear. “Hmm… the same old stakes? Winner gets to make loser do whatever they want?”
Man, Chuuya blamed it right on the wine, the insane image that immediately surfaced at those words. It flashed at him suddenly, like a TV turned on in a lightless living room. Dark-lashed eyes blinking at him, black mirrors, and a large, bandaged hand wrapping firm around his –
Jesus. Uncalled for. He felt fifteen again.
“Fine by me,” he said, hoping the gruffness of his voice disguised the lower register it was dipping into without his volition.
Fuck, if it wasn't for the fact that Dazai was a point ahead, he would make up some excuse and hang up. Or just hang up without the excuse. Not like he owed Dazai a damn thing. This was a bad idea. Really bad.
Dazai winning was worse, though.
Chuuya had to win. He could hear a lot more clearly, now that he'd taken Dazai off speakerphone. For purely competitive reasons, he held his own breath to listen intently as the other man removed another piece of clothing.
He took inventory. The coat hadn't even entered the game, and Dazai's pants were already off. One other mystery item of clothing, too. Dazai could have also removed his vest prior if he was just lounging around, but then again, the guy had eaten, breathed, and slept in his heavy work clothes when he'd been with the Port Mafia. Always looked like he was on his way to or from a damn funeral. Couldn’t count on that.
Fabric ruffling. A small, whispery slide, like leather pulled through a loop.
“Your b –” Bolo tie, Chuuya was on the verge of saying. But it was too well-projected, the sound. Playing with his tie while he was actually taking off something else was exactly the kind of underhanded shit Dazai would pull.
“My what?” Yep, there was that cat-that-got-the-canary voice. Dazai was absolutely trying something sneaky.
“Vest,” he decided on, after all.
Chuuya grinned stupidly when Dazai's voice returned, disgruntled. “Lucky guess.”
“Nuh-uh. I got a sixth sense for when you're being shady.”
“Acting like you know me so well,” Chuuya's own words were thrown back in his face. They sent a strange, warm thrill through him.
“I do,” he said. “It's a fucken’ burden sometimes.”
The thin glow of the nighttime city played across the ceiling, cut into bars by the window's blinds. He shifted in his bed, restless, and far too warm. All the blood was rushing to the surface of him, thrumming just under his skin, thinned by wine and stirred up by a stupid voice filtered through glass and plastic components.
Another shuffling sound from the other end of the line. Maybe Dazai shifting, too. “Only sometimes? I'll have to try harder.”
Chuuya could have been imagining it, the way Dazai's slightly-slurred voice was dancing just on the edge of – of fucking flirtatious. He really did know Dazai, though. He had heard this tone of voice before, many times, wheedling a phone number, or a piece of valuable information, or sometimes even a free drink, from some clueless giggling girl.
“Don't use that voice on me,” he scoffed, rolling his eyes. Mortifyingly, he felt his cheeks warming, despite his own irritation. He knew that voice was just a tool, but having it turned on him was a little…
“What? What voice?” Dazai's timbre was all wrongly-accused innocence now.
Chuuya growled, “You know exactly which fucken’ voice.”
“I think this overtired Executive is imagining things.”
“I'll give you something to imagine,” he bit back.
There was a small silence as the thoughtless retort was absorbed.
“Wh –”
“Not like that! That's not what I meant!”
“Amazing. I can hear Chuuya's stupid face turning red from all the way over here.”
“I will fucking kill you. I swear.”
The well-used flirtatious tone dropped a bit, revealing something darker, and realer. Less rehearsed-sounding. “Oh, but I might get off to that.”
Chuuya swallowed. That sound, too, he was sure Dazai caught. Chuuya was drunk, but not too drunk to blame the alcohol, the way the latent arousal he'd been steadfastly looking away from spiked.
Bad idea. Terrible idea. Hang up the phone.
“Yeah,” he said, throat dry. “You probably would.”
“How would you do it?”
Chuuya laid there, breathing shallowly. “How would I kill you?”
“Whatever else could I mean?”
Chuuya huffed a laugh, appalled with himself. Yeah, whatever else could you mean, Chuuya? Certainly none of the other obscene shit that was coursing through his head.
“You want me to participate in your fucked-up suicide fetish? Screw off.”
“Not suicide if it's Chuuya doing it.”
“Sick bastard.”
“C'mon, weren't you just so angry when you called me? Didn't you want to tell me how awful I was?”
Well, Chuuya had been angry. Still was, really. That undercurrent of irritated frustration permeated every interaction he had with this miserable fucker.
And he'd had a hell of a bad day.
And he was all pent up.
Fifteen really wasn't so far away.
“Fine. You wanna hear it?”
“Mhmm.”
Chuuya took a deep breath. It still didn't feel like it was filling his lungs. He thought of the basement, of Dazai in chains. A smear of blood running down his chin, dribbling from the lip Akutagawa had split. Blood, and the saliva he'd choked out in a thin, glittering arc when Chuuya had wrapped his fingers around Dazai's bandaged throat and slammed him back against the concrete, hard.
Capable of picking the locks at any moment. Only there because he wanted to be.
“I think I'd strangle you.”
A short, sharp intake of breath. “With your hands?”
Fucking hell, Chuuya thought, in macabre wonder. He really is getting off to this.
“Yeah. Definitely.”
“Gloves on or off?”
And wasn't that a hell of a question. Chuuya ran his tongue over the sharp point of a canine tooth. He rolled his hips, once, under the guise of getting comfortable, but really because his dick was starting to press distractingly into the seam of his zipper as it fattened up. “Off.”
“How flattering. Chuuya is serious about me, then.”
“Serious about –” wanting my hands on you “– getting rid of you.”
Dazai laughed, low and pleased. It was an intimate sort of sound. “Your turn,” he murmured.
The words hung there, ambiguous. They fed the racing of his heart.
Chuuya should hang up. Hang the fuck up! He should jerk off, frantic and sloppy, and then pass out, and then pre-emptively block Dazai's number the next time he cracked open a bottle of wine. Or block it forever, really. He should find a nice girl to blow off steam with if he was really this bottled up. Hell, even a hostess would be less humiliating at this point. If he ended this call right now, everything could remain tenuously moored in the bay of plausible deniability that he seemed to love treading water in when it came to Dazai Osamu.
Instead, Chuuya reached for his choker. His breath caught as his gloved fingers brushed his own neck.
He heard an answering hitch on the other end.
Chuuya tried to keep his own breathing even, as he worked the worn leather through the silver clasp. He failed.
“Too easy,” Dazai murmured. It sounded like he was right in Chuuya's ear. “That's your choker.”
“Shit. Guess we're tied,” he replied, a little hoarsely. He was massaging the tender skin where the leather had rubbed. His neck had always been kind of a sensitive spot for him, but wearing the choker made it even more sensitive whenever he removed the item.
He was more than half-hard now. He could feel his cock throbbing in time with his jumping heartbeat.
“What are you doing?” Dazai asked, voice low and interested.
“Rubbing my neck,” Chuuya answered, honestly. “Damn leather chafes sometimes.”
“Oh? Still thinking about choking me? Or…” Dazai made another breathy, interested sound. “Thinking about me choking you?”
He hadn't been, but he certainly was now. The idea of Dazai straddling him, scarred fingers pressing into his neck, should incite only anger in him. It definitely shouldn't make his dick twitch the way it did. This had gotten way out of hand.
“I'd punch you out before you got the chance,” Chuuya sneered, but the heat in the words didn't pass for anger at all.
“I don't think so.” Dazai sounded really interested, now. “Does your choker leave marks? When it chafes.”
He recalled seeing his own reflection when he got washed up for bed, on the nights he wasn't just passing out drunkenly or falling asleep fully-clothed on his couch, too exhausted to walk any further. There would be a faint red ring there, on occasion, where the choker had rubbed. “Sometimes, yeah.”
The hum Dazai made wasn't the light and airy sort at all. “I'd like to see that.”
“Bet you would,” Chuuya replied, tone to match. The pool of plausible deniability was getting shallower and shallower, each new decibel they slipped into. “You're up.”
“Hmm… what do you think I've still got on?”
“Not much,” he said, instantly. Anticipatory.
“You sound eager.”
“Eager to win. Stop stalling.”
“I know you won't,” Dazai replied, “But just for laughs, tell me what Chuuya would do with his win.”
“I…”
He thought about it. Scenarios swam in his head. Mostly crude, sometimes cruel. Both making him bite his lip to hold back the sounds he wanted to make.
What he'd honestly ask for, though, right now?
“I'd make you tell me what you're really thinking.”
There was a small silence. Chuuya could picture it, the way Dazai's eyes would go flat and black at that, the way he looked when anybody tried to peek inside the lockbox of his head.
“Chuuya really does lack imagination." A put-upon note of disappointment.
“Yeah? Is it that boring, what you're thinking?”
“I didn't say that.”
“Guess it's a real snoozefest.”
“Well, it does involve a bed, but very little sleeping.”
Opaque enough that he could be referring to kicking boots with anybody. The real game wasn't this auditory striptease; it was seeing who would put their toe over the line without drawing it back first.
They'd done this at fifteen, too, and sixteen, and seventeen, and eighteen, and right up until the day Dazai blew away like acrid smoke from a cheap cigarette. Standing too close in dim hallways, fighting as an excuse for contact, dark looks in darker eyes when the missions were especially grim and the small hours of the night ticked too long.
So maybe Chuuya wasn't over it, after all.
“Still waiting for you to go,” he said roughly. The sound reverberated in his own chest, haptic feedback purr.
“How many things do you have left to take off?”
“Why the fuck would I tell you that?”
“One of us might run out of clothing first. Then what?”
Chuuya hadn’t thought of that. As much as he’d doubted Dazai was wearing much, the thought of someone who was always cloaked in so many layers being exposed completely…
Unthinkable. Very thinkable. Too thinkable. Pale skin, though not as pale now as it once was, now that Dazai let the sun touch his face more than once a week. The guy used to only absorb any crumb of vitamin D when he was dragged out for missions with Chuuya, or when he was still awake after being wired for a twenty-four hour stretch.
The thing was, too, that even with all those layers and layers of bandages, the medical plasters and the rigid casts, Dazai could never quite cover all his scars. Chuuya saw them creep up the knuckles and palms of his quick hands, saw the silver lines snake along his temples from kicks to the face and near-miss headshots. How many others were there, laddered up the parts of his torso where the gauze didn’t hide? His shoulders, his thighs? Even after everything, Chuuya had never seen Dazai in less than trousers and a buttoned-up dress shirt.
“I have, uh…” Chuuya counted, numb lips shaping the numbers. Pants, briefs, gloves. “Three things.”
“Not much.” Anticipatory, too, under whatever odd, distant sterility Dazai sometimes seemed to be partially dipped in.
“You’d better tell me, too, fucker.”
“Mm… four things.”
“You went first. With my belt. So that’s fair.”
“Chuuya is up so late tonight.”
The non-sequiter caught him off guard. “So? You are too.”
Dazai chuckled. Very warm sound, almost all the distance stripped from it. Absurd how that made his cock harden, too. Chuuya was so fucked.
Slithering, rustling. A little onomatopoeia of unknown origin, fwish fwish fwish.
“Maybe tomorrow is my day off.”
“It isn’t.”
“Maybe I’ll call in sick.”
“You’re sick alright.”
“With what?” Dazai asked, sounding interested. Flirtatious, again.
Chuuya was trying to filter through clothing items, Dazai’s wardrobe, the foley sound collection in his mind, and only paying half-attention to what was clattering out of his mouth. “We’d be here all night if I started listing all that shit out.”
Dazai sure was taking his time with this item. Sliding it off slowly, drawing it long over his languid limbs, whatever it was.
“Sounds terrible,” he said, voice communicating the exact opposite. Dazai could do that, with his voice. Such a creature of deceit that even his vocal cords told two stories.
Sounds terrible, said his words. I'd like that, said his timbre.
Dazai spoke again, before Chuuya had a chance to verbalize something cutting. Or maybe it wouldn’t be cutting, which would be worse.
“Do you think it's contagious?”
“What?”
Sweat cooled on the smooth planes of his torso, wicked chill by the state-of-the-art air conditioning unit. Freon keeping him only barely from feeling febrile. The hardness between his legs was insistent, a counterpoint shock of animal heat overriding his short-term memory center.
“What I’m sick with. Do you think it’s contagious?”
“This is drunken bullshit.” Chuuya said, through one side of his mouth. He rubbed a gloved hand over the thick fabric at his crotch and the next words came out stuttered, through the other side. “But yeah. I – I bet is.”
“What are you doing?” An echo question. Heavy sounding.
“Not telling. I think that was your shirt, by the way.”
“It wasn’t.” Fuck. “I think I’ll use my win for the same thing Chuuya would. I think I’ll make him honest.”
He needed to hang up about twenty minutes ago. He wasn’t pawing at his dick anymore, but just resting his hand there, heavy and insistent as a calibration weight. Meant as a half-measure of restraint, but only serving to make him more desperate for friction, for pressure.
“I’m always honest. You’re the liar between us.”
“I’ll make you a deal. I never lie when I make deals.”
Chuuya’s chest rose and fell. He glanced down at it, saw the sheen of sweat over the sharp points of his hipbones, and the obscene tent of his pants. “If you’re gonna bargain for truth, then you’re paying up first.”
Silence. Then Dazai, sounding irritated and amused and something else, hot and low, underneath it all. “Fine. Take your turn while you think about your question.”
Shit. Gloves or pants. Either one was going to just send him further down this screwed-up hormone funfair ride. He knew, knew Dazai would immediately clock the sound of him peeling off his gloves. It was too distinctive, and something the other man had heard before many times. The curtain call to the very last act of their most memorable joint missions.
Pants it was. They were loose enough without the belt that he could shimmy them off without undoing them. He had taken care to ensure the garment made as little noise as possible; he really should have been more focused on himself.
A stutter-gasp moan that he bit into the tail end of a cuss was pulled out of him, when the waistband dragged across his erection. The humiliating sound seemed to hang there, in the too-hot air, suspended in the space between his mouth and his mic.
“So that was definitely your pants, then,” Dazai said, after the world's longest silence (approximately two seconds).
Chuuya squeezed his eyes shut, like that would do anything to swallow back the noise. “God damn it.”
“Chuuya's rather worked up tonight, isn't he?”
“Shut the fuck up,” he hissed. Heat shot through him at the same time his face curled up in some defensive facsimile of disgust. Still clinging to a rescue rope of denial.
This wasn't something they did. They'd dance on the edge of it, play chicken and pull back, but verbalizing anything was anathema.
Through a phone line, though? Verbalizing was the only option.
Dazai was like a magpie with words, collecting them and using them for his own devices. He'd turn this all around on Chuuya and humiliate him further.
Chuuya refused to be the only one humiliated. He flexed his jaw and his muscles tensed like he was going into a fight.
“Are you hard?” he asked, blunt and sudden as a punch.
Beat of silence.
“Is that your question?”
“Yeah.”
“How crude.”
“Answer it.”
He could picture this expression, too: Dazai's face blank in a different way as he ran the calculations. What to say, how to say it, what to hold back, what to misrepresent. It's why Chuuya's question had been so to-the-point. Can't pussyfoot your way around a direct hit like that one, huh, dipshit?
After a moment Dazai said, “Yes.”
That simple, reluctant word felt like victory. Another wave of arousal washed through him with the satisfaction. His cock had more freedom to fill out, now, just encased in his briefs.
“So I'm not the only one worked up, then.”
“I bet you're more worked up,” Dazai said, petty.
“Bet I'm not,” he sneered, pulled into Dazai's childish rebuttal.
“Let's find out. I still have my question. Tell me how turned on you are, in detail, and why.”
Fuck. “That's two questions,” he insisted.
“It's one question with a clarifier.”
This felt like the last line of defense. “You do know what asking me that sounds like, right?”
“Oh? Do tell.”
“Sounds like you're interested.” Chuuya swallowed. “Sounds like you're getting off to it.”
“You sure do have a lot of ideas about what I get off to, don't you?”
“Don't think I've forgotten it's your turn.”
Really, Chuuya was the one who had forgotten, briefly, caught completely by the ache of his stiffening cock.
“Start answering first and I'll take my turn.”
Dazai, stripping, listening to Chuuya detail what a raging hard-on he had. Completely normal Friday night, sure. Why the hell not.
“Whatever. Fine. You're the one who wanted to hear this,” he warned, defensively. “Just fucken’ remember that.”
Chuuya closed his eyes and cleared his throat. He focused on his body. Dazai was really gonna make him say this shit out loud?
“If I gotta be honest –”
“You do.”
“You wanna hear this or not?”
Chuuya could hear the amused smile in his voice. “... I do.”
That softened the embarrassment, a bit, that small admission. “I'm, uh, pretty fucken' worked up. I don't know how much detail you want.”
“You seriously need me to direct you in this, too?”
“Fuck off! Fine!” Chuuya tuned the embarrassed part of himself out viciously. “I'm rock hard, okay? Is that you wanna hear? You wanna hear that the front of my briefs is fucking soaked? You wanna hear that I'm a few good strokes from coming so hard I paint my whole chest with it? Huh?”
“...And the why?”
“Obviously because we're playing this stupid game! Because I'm thinking about you – you getting undressed, and listening to me getting undressed, and – ah,” Chuuya was breathing heavily, now. “Your annoying voice all tipsy and turned-on in my ear. Fuck. How the hell am I supposed to not get hard with that shit happening?”
No ambiguity there. He'd been forced to toss his lifejacket aside.
A noise. A staccato of short, sharp breaths, the last one catching and pulling into a moan.
Fucking hell.
“What'd I take off?” Dazai's voice wasn't teasing and aloof anymore. It was dipped low and almost sweet-sounding.
“Tell me what you're doing,” Chuuya demanded, breathless. “‘Cause it sounds like you're –”
“Jerking off. Yeah. Ah –”
Okay, they were doing this, then. No more pretending. Each hitched inhale and half-moan travelled right from Chuuya's ear, through his brain, and directly into his painfully hard cock.
“Took your underwear off, huh?” His heart was racing.
“Mm, yep. Looks like we're tied again.”
If Chuuya didn't get a hand around his own dick right now he was going to go insane. More insane than Dazai had already driven him. He actively ensured the sound was clear when he brought a hand up to his mouth and bit the leather, peeling off his glove.
Dazai swore at the familiar, crystal-clear sound. Dazai hardly ever swore. His voice was unsteady. “Not even trying to – hah – hide what that was?”
Chuuya brought the bare hand down and shoved it under his waistband. Little starbursts danced behind his squeezed-shut eyes when he finally wrapped a soft palm around his aching cock. He hissed, “Wanted you to hear that one.”
Skin-on-skin sounds. Wet pants. “Generous of you,” Dazai said between them.
His hips canted with the first stroke, chasing the feeling. Pre-cum smeared all over his fingers, warm and slippery. “Not generous,” Chuuya growled, through his own panting breaths. “Trying to make you bust first.”
“Sure sounds like a reward to me.”
Fuck. Chuuya had named his intent, but he was seriously on the knife's edge himself here.
“Tell me what would get you there,” he demanded, thumb pressing into the slit of his cock and stuttering out a moan at the almost-pain.
“Ah – keep making noises like that and I won't last long.”
Chuuya did it again. He didn't bite back the moan at all this time, and let it spill rough and wanton into the microphone.
“I heard you one time, you know,” Dazai said, a half-laugh threading through the other sounds. “In a safehouse, when we were sixteen.”
Chuuya's hazy eyes blinked. “You what?”
“Remember that place in Kotobukicho, above the internet cafe? Mm, Chuuya's so much louder than he thinks he is.”
A throwaway mission. Chuuya did remember, though, precisely because it had been smack in the middle of a horrible heatwave. Dazai had been drifting around the shitty bought-out flophouse in his shirtsleeves, dark hair sticking with sweat to the nape of his delicate, heat-flushed neck – that small exposed stripe that peeked just above the bandages – and biting a chocolate Papico between his teeth. Chuuya had turned the cramped bathroom fan on blast and pretended to himself that his furious, poorly-timed masturbation session had nothing at all to do with the flophouse's other occupant. Just puberty. Just hormones. He was thinking of the girls in the hostess clubs nearby. Absolutely.
“And what? You listened in? Fucking pervert.”
“Yep. Got off to it, too.”
“Fuck,” said Chuuya. His dick pulsed in his palm and his hips jerked.
He'd have to revisit that admission, when he was capable of higher thought again. That his confusing teenage attraction had evidently been far from one-sided. Right now he only had the brain cells to register how much nearer to the edge that got him.
“Ah, shit, I'm pretty close,” he stumbled out.
“What happened to making me cum first?”
“You told that fucking story, dickwad.”
“Tell me a story, too, then, idiot.”
Chuuya tightened his grip around the base of his cock, stilling his hand with a heroic effort. The molten heat subsided barely enough to keep him held together. “Uh, shit – maybe the dungeon.”
An especially sharp inhale. “Go on.”
“You pissed me the hell off. Fuck. I think about it all the time. Knew you could spring yourself at any moment, but I think…”
“You think?” He sounded hungry.
“I think about if you couldn't. Having you there at my mercy, choking you, working you up and taking you apart and you couldn't do a fucking thing about it. I, ah –”
No way he could keep his hand still at this point. Chuuya gave up, twisting his wrist and biting his lip with every sharp, rhythmless stroke. He reached his other hand up to thumb at a nipple. “Shit, licking the blood off your split lip. You fucken' deserved that one.”
Dazai's panting started getting rhythmless, too, and choppy. Chuuya could hear the slick snapping of him jerking himself off faster. He moved his own hand to match the pace.
“And I think about how once you were all worked up and begging me to stop, I'd pin your hips to the wall and get on my knees and – fuck – I'd suck you off. And you couldn't do a damn thing to stop me.”
That part, he hadn't even admitted to himself.
There was a broken, blown-out moan. Half of it was Chuuya's own name.
His hips arched right off the bed and he felt the coilspring of his insides pull tight and snap. Chuuya tumbled straight into a storm of white-out electric pleasure. He was probably saying something, too, but he couldn't register it at all. Once, twice, three times his cock pulsed liquid hot all over his hand, and splattered up across his stomach and his chest.
His heart was beating like a jackhammer. He felt it everywhere in his body. Chuuya collapsed back into the sweaty sheets, shaking, squeezing his hand one more time and shivering hard at the aftershock.
“Shit,” he rasped out, panting like he'd run a marathon. “I came a lot.”
Dazai sounded undone, too. Chuuya'd never heard him like this. It was as heady as the wine. “Wow. Me too.”
“You cum that much when you jerked off to me in that safehouse?”
“Ugh. Don't sound so smug about it.”
A contented smile twitched the corners of his mouth at Dazai's deeply annoyed tone. “Maybe sometime I'll tell you what I was thinking about.”
“Tell me now,” he whined.
Chuuya rolled his eyes. “Like hell. Your refractory period can't be that short.”
“Wanna find out?” Dazai said, but the words were all slurred with more than just whiskey and a post-orgasm haze. Fucker was falling asleep. So he was that kind of guy, huh?
“You're about to pass out, moron.”
“No fuuun.” The words were partially obscured by a yawn. It was contagious.
“Yeah, boohoo, you just had plenty of fun,” Chuuya said through his own jaw-cracking yawn.
“It was terrible.”
The words: it was terrible. The tone: let's do it again.
Definitely fucking not. The rosy glow of Chuuya's own orgasm was fading and the BAD IDEA neon signs were flashing belatedly through the fog.
There would be a mountain's worth of regret to dig through tomorrow, in the sober light of his poor decision-making. For now, he was barely keeping his own eyelids open. They were as lead-heavy as his limbs. He had barely enough energy to half-heartedly wipe the cooling jizz off his stomach with his discarded pants.
“Agreed,” he thought he said. “Really terrible,” he thought he said.
Maybe Dazai said something, too. He was drifting off.
Chuuya fell into sleep like that, the soft sounds of Dazai's sleepy, even breathing trailing up from the still-going call.
A hell of a hangover. A whole breakfast spread of furious self-disgust. A call he pressed 'end’ on clocking in at just over seven hours, Dazai still fast asleep on the other side.
But for the first time since Chuuya could remember, when he did crawl out of his always-dreamless sleep, it was lacking something distinctive.
For the first time in his entire adult life, Chuuya woke up without the sensation of having been trapped in an unrecalled nightmare.