Chapter Text
Water rushed forward at a startling pace, throwing itself over the edge of the cliff into the pool below with great dramatics. It made for a beautiful view, surrounded by mossy rocks and gently swaying greenery. The sound was so loud Dazai could barely hear himself think.
He peered down from his perch next to the river, running his thumb over one of the rough stones in his pockets. It would be very easy to slip and tumble over the side, but he wasn't sure if that would count.
Jumping was the best bet. As far as he understood, he needed to do it with intent.
It was far from the first time he'd considered such a thing. Strolling by the river and imagining his own watery demise was one of his favorite hobbies when he was away at school. Yet he never went through with it. Every time, his mind flashed to Chuuya—swimming gracefully underwater, or scowling back at him, or gazing beyond the garden with a longing that lodged itself deep in Dazai's heart. Every time, he thought of Chuuya—beautiful, maddening, trapped Chuuya—and kept himself firmly on land.
This time, he closed his eyes, pictured Chuuya, and stepped over the side.
Falling with the water was terrifying. Dazai thought maybe he'd feel at peace on his way down, but his body jolted alive with fear and flailed around for a non-existent handhold.
It's fine. It's fine. It's fine, he told himself, but the pain was fast approaching and then—
He hit the water and everything went dark.
𓆝 𓆟 𓆞𓆝 𓆟 𓆞𓆝 𓆟 𓆞
At seven years old, Dazai Osamu knew something was wrong with him. All his older siblings said so. The younger one would, too, once he was old enough to care or notice.
Dazai never quite understood what it was. He tried to be like them—mimicking facial expressions and saying the same boring phrases they did—but it didn't fix anything. They avoided and ignored him until the only people he could talk to were the staff.
That was, until Chuuya arrived.
It was a hot summer day, with sticky air and buzzing insects. Dazai was sitting on the edge of the back veranda, fiddling with a wooden puzzle toy that he had long since solved. He was considering venturing into the garden to look for cicadas when a burst of noise broke the peace.
Barked instructions, heavy footsteps, and grunts of exertion came from around the front, materializing as a group of men carrying a large wooden tub. Water sloshed over the sides with each step, but they took care with their load as they continued down the garden path, toward the koi pond.
Father must have bought new koi.
But just as Dazai was about to return to his boredom, a face popped up over the side of the tub.
A boy’s face.
He dropped the puzzle and scurried after them, trying to get a better look.
Between the workers, he caught glimpses of red-orange and cream, hair and fins, strange fingertips, and, oddest of all, a pair of large brown eyes that were far too expressive to be a fish’s. Then the men readjusted the tub and Dazai lost sight altogether.
So he took a shortcut across gravel and moss, trampling through part of the carefully tended swirls of the rock garden, and ended up at the edge of the pond just in time to see them set the tub down by the flat wooden bridge. Plopping his butt on a large rock, he dangled his feet over the water and watched.
Once again, a boy’s head emerged from the tub. This time, he was above the edge long enough for Dazai to get a good look—and realize he had no idea what he was looking at.
The boy had pale, human-like skin and a mop of copper hair dripping water down his face, but where his ears should have been were large white and red fins, striated like a koi’s. His dark red fingers, which tightly gripped the edge of the wooden tub, were clawed and webbed. As he turned to the side, light caught on a smattering of scales across his cheeks and forehead, making them glitter golden like the sun. His eyes were wide with fear and confusion.
Dazai had heard of koifolk before, but he'd never seen one outside of a book. This boy must've been a fairytale pulled from the page and forced to be real.
Joining the men by the bridge, Dazai's father exchanged a few words with them and gestured at the boy and the water. Then two of the men squatted next to the tub and tipped it over, spilling its contents into the pond. The boy—with what looked like the lower body of a large white, black, and red-orange koi—tumbled out and disappeared under the surface with a splash.
The boy stayed under for long enough that Dazai wondered if he could drown, or if he didn't need air at all. From his vantage point, he couldn't see underwater where the boy fell, but his father and the workers watched the pond, so maybe he was swimming around. Dazai wanted to look so very badly, but he didn't want to talk to the adults, so he waited impatiently on his rock.
Finally, his father gestured for the men to remove the tub and leave the garden. They walked back up the path without a glance at Dazai. When his father turned to go, Dazai piped up and asked, "What was that?"
"A new addition to our koi pond," his father said, as if the half-human-half-fish was nothing more than a pretty variety of koi. It was hardly an answer, but Dazai knew better than to ask more questions, so he stayed back as his father returned to the house.
At least this explained why a construction crew had spent several weeks expanding and deepening their koi pond earlier in the year. Practically the whole garden had been renovated to accommodate the change, but Dazai never knew why.
As soon as his father was out of sight, Dazai ran around the side of the pond to the bridge and peered into the water. The koi were milling about as usual, but in the slightly murky depths, the strange boy was tucked up against a rock. It was hard to see his face, so Dazai got on his knees and stuck his head underwater for a better look.
Unfortunately, it wasn't that much easier to see underwater. He held his breath long enough to wave at the boy, then pulled back out. As he wiped wet hair out of his eyes, he saw a flash of movement—and suddenly the boy-fish-creature was just under the surface, a few feet away, looking right at him.
Wary, the boy-fish waved one webbed hand just like Dazai had.
"Can you talk?!" Dazai asked, eager.
The boy-fish didn't say anything, just narrowed his eyes. Maybe his ear-fins didn't function like regular ears; maybe he couldn't even hear Dazai.
Dazai pointed to his mouth and spoke louder, but slower, "Can… you… talk?"
The boy-fish stared at him.
Dazai pouted. "Ugh! I guess you really are just a fish. Boring."
With a splash, the boy-fish surfaced, and snapped, "Maybe I don't wanna talk to a spoiled brat like you!" He glared at Dazai with an intensity to rival the sun.
"You can talk!" Dazai squealed in delight and scooted closer to the water's edge. Then he realized what the boy-fish had said. "I'm not a spoiled brat. You're a stupid fish!"
Oops he probably shouldn't have said that.
"You don't know anything," the boy-fish said and then he dipped his mouth underwater and bobbed back up to shoot a stream of water right at Dazai's face.
"Hey—!" Dazai quickly wiped his eyes, but when he opened them, the boy was gone. All Dazai could see was the flick of his tail as his swam deeper and away, to the opposite end of the pond. "I know plenty of things!" Dazai yelled after him.
However, it was true that he knew very little about half-human-half-fish people. So Dazai rose to his feet and headed back to the house, determined to learn anything he could about koifolk.
𓆝 𓆟 𓆞𓆝 𓆟 𓆞𓆝 𓆟 𓆞
Slowly, Dazai opened his eyes. He was inside a massive cave with no end in sight, just gray fading to pitch black where the meager light ended. It was quiet, but for the damp sound of water droplets hitting stone. Glancing back, he saw the cave's entrance, a beacon of sparkling sunlight filtered through rushing water, at the end of a long, jagged tunnel.
Something moved in the corner of his vision, but as soon as he turned to look, it was gone. Then, on his other side, and behind him, and below, until shadows were flickering all around him, sliding across the walls with the soft scratch of scales against rock. As the shadows encircled him, they turned solid and bound him in place. Indistinguishable dark gray shapes turned into white scales, revealing an enormous dragon coiled around him.
Two glowing blue eyes opened directly in front of Dazai and studied him curiously.
𓆝 𓆟 𓆞𓆝 𓆟 𓆞𓆝 𓆟 𓆞
"CHUUYA!”
Dazai nimbly jumped from rock to rock along the edge of the pond, keeping an eye on the water for its largest occupant. Chuuya wouldn’t hear him well from underwater, but Dazai still called his name as he approached the deep end. The regular koi were unbothered by his yelling and Dazai wondered, not for the first time, if they were as bored of this place as Chuuya was.
Finally, he spotted Chuuya swimming near the arched bridge, his long, calico tail waving lazily as he reached down for something in the sediment. Slowing, Dazai watched the sleek lines of Chuuya's body with interest.
These days, guests lingered by the pond longer than they used to. Dazai understood why. Chuuya had grown from a soft little guppy, past his awkward adolescence, into a lean, graceful figure who captivated women and men alike. When he sat on the pond's small island, or on the rocks along the edge, he looked like a seductive painting: bare chest and strong muscle glistening with water, his golden-orange scales glittering in the sun. They all wanted him, to keep and touch and look at.
Dazai hated seeing the guests lust after him. It itched under his skin and made him want to tear and rip and destroy—but he was just the same. He wanted to run his hands along Chuuya's stomach and feel that strange spot where skin and scales met.
When he was young, he touched Chuuya’s waist unashamedly, curious about how Chuuya was both fish and person. It was the first time he'd gotten in the water with Chuuya and he'd not given a thought to personal space as he grabbed at Chuuya. He'd received a smack in the head for that, but Chuuya had eventually let him skim his fingertips across his midriff and hips. It was smooth, despite the meeting of two different textures; squishy and warm to stiff and cold, somehow fitting together seamlessly.
Nowadays, Dazai often dreamt of his hands on Chuuya.
He shook the thoughts away and waved his hand underwater to catch Chuuya’s attention. When the ripple reached him, Chuuya looked over his shoulder. His expressed shifted to suspicion, but he surfaced anyway.
"What." Chuuya 'greeted' flatly.
"That's how you greet me? After all the months I've been away!" Dazai pouted, seating himself at the edge of the water. They hadn't talked since September, when Dazai's summer break ended. Dazai had come back for the New Year, but Chuuya spent that time in his winter torpor, almost entirely unresponsive at the bottom of the pond. Now that it was spring, Chuuya was back to the surface, livelier than he'd been in months, and much more fun to bother—which was exactly what Dazai was here to do.
Chuuya rolled his eyes, but swam closer. "Welcome back."
Amber eyes swept over Dazai, making him regret not changing out of his school uniform. He should've been less obvious about the fact that he came straight to the koi pond upon arriving home.
In the last year or two, there was a new sense of awkwardness between them when they reunited. While at school, Chuuya was a permanent resident in Dazai's head, and then suddenly the real Chuuya would be there, with no knowledge of the many fantasies Dazai had steeped himself in for months. Dazai became hyper aware of everything he said to Chuuya and easily distracted by thinking about the space between their bodies and where they might touch. He tried to be normal, he really did, but he couldn't ignore the now charged undertone of their interactions.
"Aren't you going to ask how my last term of high school was?" Dazai asked, sing-song.
"Ugh. No." Chuuya closed his eyes and turned over to float on his back. "It was so peaceful without you."
Dazai took a breath of the fresh, mountain air and yeah—this place was peaceful. As long as his family and their guests weren't hanging around, it was the most peaceful place in the whole world as far as he was concerned: the small babbling waterfalls, the occasional tonk from the bamboo deer-scare, the gentle breeze and the twittering of the bush warblers, the buds on the cherry trees, nearing their blossoms. It was gentle and calming; pleasant enough to temporarily banish the worst of Dazai's thoughts.
That is, except when he and Chuuya were bickering.
"I finally killed one of my classmates!" Dazai said, triumphantly.
"No, you didn't."
"I did, too!"
"You're full of shit."
"Oh, I just couldn't take it anymore! The way he chewed was enough to drive a man insane!" Dazai held the back of his hand against his forehead and closed his eyes for the drama.
Water splashed across his face.
He scrunched his nose and opened his eyes to see Chuuya laughing. Sunlight glinted off his wet scales, dappling his cheeks golden. Dazai wanted to touch. Dazai wanted to touch so bad.
Instead, he stuck his hand in the water and splashed Chuuya back.
"Careful," Chuuya jeered, "don't wanna ruin your precious uniform."
Dazai rolled his eyes and began unbuttoning his jacket, stripping down to just his bandages and underwear. "Who cares? It's spring break!"
"No! No—!" Chuuya swam closer and tried to push Dazai back from the water's edge. He didn't have much leverage, though, so Dazai wiggled around him.
"I'm coming in!" he said, then scooted off the rock and into the pond.
The water was uncomfortably cold as it enveloped him head to toe and the sudden quiet was disorienting, but he was used to ill-advised dips in the koi pond. He kept his eyes squeezed shut, having learned many years ago that it was best to avoid eye infections. Blindly reaching out in Chuuya's general direction, he grabbed at whatever he could.
"Hey—!" Chuuya snapped, his voice garbled from the water. "Get off!"
But Dazai kept a tight hold on his bicep. He pulled on Chuuya and kicked up to the surface. A breath, and his eyes opened.
Chuuya was glowering at him, ear fins flattened like an angry cat.
"Hi, Chuuya," Dazai grinned.
"Idiot!" In a flash, Chuuya put his hands on Dazai's head and dunked him back under. Dazai expected as much, so he shut his eyes and held his breath just in time. They wrestled in the water like they were still twelve years old. Dazai just hoped no one would come this far into the garden to see.
𓆝 𓆟 𓆞𓆝 𓆟 𓆞𓆝 𓆟 𓆞
What brings you here?
As soon as the cherry blossom trees bloomed, Dazai's parents returned to the country estate and sent word to select friends and business partners, inviting them to stay a week for hanami. It was a coveted event each year because unlike most other flower viewing spots in the area, the Dazai family house had an additional attraction: Chuuya.
He felt their eyes on him like a brand.
Swimming deeper, Chuuya ducked under a cluster of water lilies for at least the illusion of privacy, then turned back to look at the group clustered on the arched bridge. Eight adult humans, dressed in sexually dimorphic kimonos: men in dark tones, women in florals. The six that weren't Dazai's parents watched him with hungry eyes.
It was creepy. Didn't they have anything better to do than gawk at him?
The koi swam up to them, hoping for food. Chuuya wondered if the fish would be more bothered if they were the ones being stared at, but he doubted it. All they cared about was food and breeding season; sometimes Chuuya thought he'd prefer to be a koi, rather than whatever the hell he was.
He really hated this time of year.
Sure, the cherry blossoms were pretty, but were they really worth the extra attention? Not to mention, for the past few years, Chuuya had begun feeling weird every spring. It was hard not to notice the correlation with the koi. Once the water warmed up, the males chased the females around until they released their eggs, then the males fertilized them, and the pond became stinky and cloudy. It was a whole thing.
(He'd asked the gardener about it awhile back and didn't understand the resulting awkwardness until later, when mentioning it to Dazai.)
Chuuya, however, noticed that his own scales became more metallic, glittering gold in the sunlight. Then he started getting antsy whenever he'd see Dazai: there was a new urge to touch him and a desperation for his attention, which Chuuya despised.
Again, he'd asked the gardener. For a book, though. No need for another uncomfortable conversation. Thank fuck, because that would've been humiliating. Hey, what are these weird feelings? Oh, my body telling me to fuck him? Great.
As best he could, Chuuya ignored it, squashed it, and acted like normal. Except when he couldn't help himself. Like when he waved his tail at Dazai and slapped it against the water's surface, or when he swam sideways to show how it rippled prettily in the water, or when he sat in the sun to catch the light on his scales. The bastard didn't even seem to notice.
Yet Chuuya was supposed to make himself visible and entertaining for the family's guests. Nevermind that it felt wrong to show off for strangers. He didn't care about impressing them, and he certainly wasn't trying to woo any of them, but that didn't matter to Dazai's parents. What mattered to them was getting their money's worth out of Chuuya.
He was expensive. They liked to remind him of that, though never directly. It was something discussed near him, not with him.
So staying under the water lilies wasn't acceptable behavior. Steeling himself, Chuuya swam back into the open and did a slow lap of the pond, making sure to do a neat maneouver in front of the guests. He flipped upside down and flashed his tail above water, ignoring the twinge of discomfort that he was doing this for anyone but Dazai.
Chuuya really hated spring.
𓆝 𓆟 𓆞𓆝 𓆟 𓆞𓆝 𓆟 𓆞
I understand you can make bargains.
"He's turned out to be quite striking."
"Hm. He is nice to look at."
Dazai's grip tightened around his cup at the breezy remarks.
Seated in the garden's gazebo, he was having tea with his father and the visiting men. They had a perfect view of the pond's island from here, where Chuuya was arranging the area for his shakuhachi performance. He laid the bamboo flute next to the large rock, which was artfully placed under a large cherry tree.
Chuuya was never more beautiful than he was beneath the blossoms.
When they were young, Chuuya would eat them, just like the koi did. That first spring together, Dazai laughed as Chuuya popped one of the flowers into his mouth like it was a totally normal thing to do. Never one to take being laughed at, Chuuya had splashed him, thoroughly soaking his kimono. It was cold, but it never stopped Dazai from making fun of him.
"Have you ever caught him with one of the serving girls?" one of the men asked, smirking.
"I'm not sure what he could offer them," Dazai's father chuckled. "His kind doesn't have the right parts."
Indignance warred with a flush of interest. Dazai tried very hard to not think of Chuuya's parts.
"How do you know it's a boy, then?"
"The fins. They're pointier on the males. I wanted to get a female, but they're harder to come by." His father took a drag on his cigarette, then blew the smoke out and continued talking, "As soon as they're sexed, which happens at about five years old, the females are snapped up by whomever receives the news first. When I saw this one, I figured he was nearly as pretty as a girl."
"And if he's got the hole to match, does it really matter?"
The resulting laughter made Dazai's stomach turn, but he played along as if he was amused by the crude joke. He glanced back out to the water only to find Chuuya watching them. Dazai wondered how much he could hear. Just the laughter, or the rest of it, too?
"Will you be able to breed him?"
Dazai's hand slipped, causing tea to spill down the front of his kimono. Someone barked a laugh and slapped him on the back.
"Your boy here looks a little flustered! Maybe he wants a turn?" The man hooked a thumb out in gesture to Chuuya.
With effort, Dazai arranged his features into a skeptical expression. He waved a dismissive hand and said, "That's what the maids are for."
That earned him hearty agreement and turned the conversation away from Chuuya, to more typical vulgarities. Dazai tuned them out. His mind was racing, wondering when his father would force Chuuya to do acts more demeaning than merely putting on a show. Now that they were nearly eighteen, there wasn't anything to stop him.
Unless Dazai could whisk Chuuya away for good.
He glanced back to Chuuya, who seemed lost in thought, gazing toward the house. It was hard to read his expression, but it squeezed Dazai's shriveled little heart anyway. He saw his own longing in it: to take Chuuya somewhere, anywhere, else, to free him of his sodden cage, to show him the world outside of this garden.
When signaled, Chuuya began his performance. His bamboo flute filled the air with a mournful sound that didn't suit Chuuya as well as the shamisen he also played. With the stringed instrument, Chuuya was frenetic and angry, full of life and usually grinning. With the shakuhachi, he sounded like Dazai.
Chuuya wasn't supposed to sound like Dazai.
Still, while the sound was eerie, it was lovely, and Chuuya was absolutely ethereal among the delicate cherry blossoms. His skin and scales glistened where the sunlight filtered through the branches; his hair, actually dry for once, was brighter than usual and curled prettily around his neck; his eyes were closed in concentration as he let the music flow through him.
Dazai couldn't focus on anything else. He was captivated. Enraptured. Besotted.
Hopelessly, irrevocably besotted.