Chapter Text
Dazai’s memory has grown hazier with time, and each year seems to lay a thicker film of muddy yellow over each snapshot in his head. Not many things were ever significant enough to make a brand strong enough to stick in his thoughts.
However, there are some exceptions. Oda, he thinks automatically. There’s always a bittersweet sort of agony that blossoms from his memories with him, but he refuses not to remember them. It almost seems sacrilegious to try and forget a man who forged god in hell. Hope in a place void of it. Mori, he admits reluctantly. His misery under the doctor’s “care” was a special sort of torture— one he has yet to successfully recreate since leaving. Probably much to the happiness of Oda (if he was still around to care about things like that.) And Chuuya. But not all of Chuuya— at least— not all the time. They spent too much time around each other, had one too many head injuries and shared concussions to memorize it all. But he remembered all the times he found himself being Chuuya’s personal nightmare remedy. Every moment of it seared into his mind to an almost embarrassing extent— definitely the type of thing he would rather suffer a long five hour long lecture from Kunikida than admit out loud.
The first time Dazai had realized it, he nearly broke his hand. Extreme reaction, maybe, but when all you’ve ever been is a weapon, anything less is dangerous in a way he’s not prepared for. Not being prepared never sat particularly well with him.
They had been partners together for a short while, just the start of their double black child-soldier career that would soon manage to strike fear into the heart of every gangster in Japan. He’s sure they would have lost some of their effect if people had found out what their interactions looked like outside of massacring people twice their senior. ( Maybe never more than that— people in this business lived hard and fast. )
Chuuya and him were sitting in the car for a stakeout to try and catch a scent on a powerful ally of the Port Mafia who was rumored to be pilfering money from their shared funds. A typical mission and horribly unexciting.
But Chuuya had been antsy the entire day; no matter how much Dazai pestered him about it, he refused to mutter a word about what had him so on edge, and it had him nearly ripping his own hair out. The problem with being so closely linked with someone else (even outside of the battle arena) is that emotions become contagious; they stick to you like oil on skin and are impossible to scrub off. So there he was– sitting in the passenger seat of the car and desperately trying to tune out Chuuya’s incessant, twitching restlessness along with feelings of oily emotions welling up under his skin. However, the only sign that he was affected at all by Chuuya’s demeanor was his own unconscious tapping of his fingers along the dashboard.
Morse code, maybe. Tapping something like Let Me Out on it.
Despite his partner’s shallow breaths and darting eyes, it only took ten more minutes of Dazai’s involuntary count of tap, tap, tap, tap before he lulled off into an awkward slump against the wheel. Chuuya took the driver seat out of some misplaced sense of superiority in age— two months could make a monster out of men, it seemed.
Even bent over the wheel, Dazai could still make out the dark, bruised eye bags marring his face and the pale tremor of his muscles. Like his body un-learned rest and was trying desperately in a violent way to cling to the idea of sleep. It didn’t surprise Dazai much that things had turned out this way.
He hadn’t been the same since the other Flag members' deaths, and grief and guilt clung to Chuuya like rot. Death was the type of thing that lived in him rather than on him— trying to rub it out would only rub it in.
So he hadn’t even tried to touch that landmine with a twelve foot pole. It was an open wound and the only place Dazai knew gentleness was in the last dregs of whiskey and crumpled bills.
However, he wasn’t left long to stew in that thought before a tremor turned into a shake, and a series of wounded noises started to flood from Chuuya’s mouth.
Hesitating for a few moments, Dazai reached forward with a firm hand to brush the locks away from his face, brushing against the skin of his cheek in a not-gentle way (but also not a not- not - gentle way.) Instincts, he will write it off as. We never stop trying to keep the danger off each other. Near-death transcends all the boundaries humanity tries to draw around them.
And that should’ve been the end of it, but he noticed the immediate stillness of Chuuya’s body and the way the whimpers started to quiet to more a phantom whisper than a cry. And he knew Chuuya was still asleep. Consider it an “acquired skill” after weeks of cohabitation with a murderous, god-infested roommate.
He kept his hand still there, weighing down on the wan skin lying underneath it. Within a few seconds, the quick breaths evened out into something deeper and less rattled, and the shake of his muscles relaxed into something less strained. Whatever darkness had washed over Chuuya’s unconscious mind had quieted from a storm into an easy rock, if his slackened expression was anything to go by.
That thought crashed into him hard enough to knock him off balance in a physical way.
His hand snapped back from its resting place against red hair and smacked against the window so hard a pop echoed through the space between them. Cradling the hand flopped into his own lap, he ground his teeth together to keep the scream trapped behind them. Pain radiated from his hand and up his arm in a way that muddled the mess of his mind into even more frayed edges, but even then his sole focus was on the boy in front of him. Still slumped against the steering wheel. Tried to (unsuccessfully) refocus on the pain as a distraction from thinking.
The movement wasn’t enough to wake Chuuya up— he did a little more than twitch at the sound. Dark eyelashes fluttered against hallowed skin in a way fairytales envied. In the haywire mess of half-finished thoughts, Dazai still found it in him to conclude, Chuuya would’ve made a better sleeping beauty.
Sitting in silence and counting the minutes until the end of this stakeout, willing the sun to free him from this shrinking space, Dazai was left to make his own conclusions. Tried desperately not to. The types of conclusions that came from these were the life-altering kind, and he wasn’t feeling particularly brave tonight.
Dazai’s own subconscious could probably have written a book called: What Does It Mean When Your Partner Might Think of You as a Safe Space Even in the Places You Can’t Reach?
However, Dazai’s conscious mind had no desire to find the answer to that question.
Chuuya woke up near sunrise, at least five hours later, and looked more well rested than he had in weeks. Even stretched out and yawned like he hadn’t been staving off rest for an unlivable amount of time just to keep from reliving the corrupted memory of friends bleeding out in his hands. Tried to wake off the haunting of his own mind.
Despite Chuuya’s innocent confusion at his behavior, Dazai avoided Chuuya for days after the stakeout, maybe also trying to wake off the question haunting him. What does it mean , echoed in his head more than he’d have liked to admit.
The uncertainty of it created a few sleepless nights of his own.
(They’ve always been in sync like that.)
—O—
The next time it happened, Dazai had started the night ready to kill everyone in a twenty mile radius, and then, of course, himself.
Constant apathy had made a puppet out of him when it came to any emotion other than the absence of it, so he found that he was now vulnerable to the beck and call of one particular feeling: irritation . For a person more stable than him, they might have been able to shrug off the itch of it with a sigh and move on with their lives, but he was not more stable. Never been much of a person either. At that moment, he was liable to fucking explode and take a block of people down with him.
The day had started— like most in the mafia— badly. Hadn’t slept right in almost a week because of his own demons in combination with the relentless nightly demons plaguing his unfortunately close-by partner, woke up to an “urgent meeting” notification by Mori, took down an oversized mafia rival in a little under six hours, got patched up by the psycho doctor, and then got back to the apartment only to find he was out of bandages. The blood that trickled onto the floor and stained the carpet was none of his business at that point. Neither was the blood crusted into his skin after he walked to the corner store to steal a few more bandages to wrap over the mess instead of cleaning up properly. In God’s hands, as they liked to put it.
Even after their combined exhausting day, Chuuya’s mind still found a way to have just enough energy to punish them both with his nightmares. The thrashing sounds in the other room had set his anxiety and heartbeat up despite knowing that it was just a dream, just a dream, just a dream– and Dazai couldn’t stop fiddling with the bandages that didn’t fit right somehow.
The noises, the itch, the sleepless nights. It was all catching up to him and building a ball of rage between his ribcage that he didn’t know how to settle.
Puppet on strings worked automatically– at the will of this feeling– to fix this, somehow. Feet pulled into the doorway of Chuuya’s room and next to the side of his bed, unthinking. Fix this .
Dazai reached forward slowly, sat down in front of the boy’s crumpled face (even in sleep, anguish was an inescapable thing), and pushed fingers through achingly soft hair. His own fingers trembled with the force of keeping them from going stiff– making sure they didn't lose the tenderness that had possessed them– and scratched his nails in slow circles against his scalp.
The reaction was less immediate this time than the first time. A result of letting the monster of memory dig its nails in too deep before pulling them out, no doubt.
After a minute of the repeated motions and twist of his hair, Chuuya’s face slowly started to ease out of something less grief-infested and into a much more content expression. The grunts of muffled shouts started to quiet, stilling the air and his body along with it. Dazai waited for a few more seconds, making sure that his breathing stayed steady, before letting his hand retreat away. Almost slower than when he initially approached. Something in the hesitant speed screamed reluctance , and that was enough to push him onto his feet and back towards the doorway. Spooked more by his mind voicing the thought than the truth behind it because being known– even by yourself (especially by yourself) – is terrifying.
He only gets one foot out the door before the shrill, rapid breaths start to fill the room and the shudder (that’s sure to turn into a thrash) begins again. Dazai lets out his own frustrated grunt while nearly stomping back to the bed and sitting down in front of it again. Yes, he was throwing a bit of a tantrum, but wouldn’t you after being kicked while you’re down for a week straight?
However, he didn’t get the chance to trail through the red locks when Dazai noticed Chuuya’s breathing was already easing up again. Shuddering, returning to stillness.
Weird , Dazai thought, but ultimately none of his business.
Standing up again, Dazai didn’t make it as far this time before the nightmare came back to Chuuya, and theory states: twice is a coincidence and three times is a pattern.
He returned again to the bedside, inching closer this time as if trying to toe an invisible boundary, finding a line he’s not sure exists yet. Within a foot of the bed, Chuuya starts to return to a more tranquil state, sinking back into the sheets with a deep breath out through parted lips.
Chuuya’s ability allowed him to manipulate and sense the gravity of all things close enough to touch, and it seemed his unconscious mind could sense Dazai’s pull and wanted to keep it in orbit. A sun scared of losing its moon to the black emptiness of negative space. Everytime he walked away, there was a distinctly Dazai-shaped hole in the air around him. It made him lose his footing, letting him fall back into the sharp clutch of his subconscious mind.
Leaving would probably be worse than if I hadn’t come at all.
If it was anyone else, Dazai probably would’ve felt a lot more rational about the whole thing, but right at that moment his brain short circuited beyond what he could handle on a normal day– much less like the exhausting hellscape that week had been. So in his mind’s muddled process of “reasoning,” he did what any insane person would do, and sat down next to the bed. Dazai stretched his legs out in front of him and crossed his arms over his chest with the newfound determination of a deranged man. Resolute in not moving until he was sure it had passed for good.
Dazai convinced himself it was a selfish endeavor. Just doing it so I can relax for longer than thirty seconds, he thought, I’ll leave before he gets up.
Bad plan.
All things considered, he hadn’t believed he would fall asleep too.
The even count of Chuuya’s breathing had sounded okay and calm for the first time in months, and it left his own body to ease out the tension stuck between his ribs at the looming anxiety and grief that managed to wrangle them together. His body automatically felt at peace knowing it’s partner was as well. Safety in numbers, maybe. His eyes drifted close and his heartbeat began to slow.
He jolted awake confused and sore. Dazai had fallen asleep with his head tilted uncomfortably down in an attempt to rest on his own shoulder, and the muscles of that area now felt like bruises down his skin. In a sleepy haze, his eyes migrated towards the digital clock sitting on the nightstand. Chuuya’s nightstand. The bright red flash of 4:16 taunted him, and his jaw clenched. He had somehow managed to pass out for two hours next to the bed, and although he wasn’t sure what woke him up in the first place, he was grateful for it.
First, he stood and straightened his neck back out with a resounding pop. Painful, but necessary. Next, he stretched his arms up over his head and let the edges of his shirt ride up with the motion, and then trudged his way back to his room— his own bed— as quietly as possible. It was easier to leave when he didn’t hear the telltale sound of a nightmare starting again. He only looked back briefly at the lump of covers and red tufts poking through the top before closing the door behind him.
The window in his was only able to show him the edges and flickering lights from the building next door, but his gaze was locked on the glass pane as he tried to let sleep take hold of him again. In the absence of thought, his fingers tapped rhythmically against his bed frame. Morse code again, probably.
Maybe this time it spelled something like: Quiet.
.. ... / - .... .. ... / .--. . .- -.-. . ..--..