Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

"The thought of dying has never bothered me, but getting hurt, losing blood, becoming crippled and the like—no thanks."
— Osamu Dazai, No Longer Human

Dazai sat alone, his back hunched as though the weight of his own existence were pressing down on him. He had just turned eighteen, though it didn't feel like a milestone. Birthdays stopped mattering years ago — they were just reminders that time was still moving, dragging him with it like dead weight.

His thoughts crept in as they always did: slow, familiar, venomous. They weren’t loud anymore. They didn’t scream or claw at his mind like they used to. Now, they whispered — quiet, persistent, and terribly patient. He had learned to live with them like one might live with a chronic illness: not with acceptance, but with resignation. The darkness didn’t frighten him anymore. It was the only thing that stayed.

At times, it felt like the very air around him was turning heavy, thick with smoke and silence. He didn’t cry. He didn’t panic. He just sat, letting the numbness crawl over his skin like frostbite. His limbs felt distant, disconnected from thought. Moving required effort, more than he could summon. The chair beneath him felt like it had grown roots into the floor, tethering him in place.
He wasn’t even trying to sleep. Insomnia had long since stopped being a condition — it was simply part of him now. Sleep was a luxury for people with peace of mind. All he had was the quiet hum of the night, the occasional creak of the floorboards, and the thoughts that never left.

He ran a hand over his face, dragging his fingers through his hair as if it might ground him somehow. It didn’t.

Then came footsteps — slow, deliberate, almost mocking in their rhythm.

Dazai didn’t look up at first. He already knew who it was.

The man who approached was tall and slender, his presence somehow always too loud even in silence. His smile was stretched unnaturally, a sharpness in it that always put Dazai on edge.
"It seems like Chuuya Nakahara has run off again. Drinking, probably," the man said, not so much suggesting as commanding. "Would you mind, Dazai?"
Dazai gave a slow, mechanical nod. His voice came out like sandpaper. “You want me to look for him?”

“Please.”

Dazai hesitated. His mouth moved before his thoughts caught up. "Boss, I don't… I don’t feel quite like it tonight."
He swallowed hard, not out of fear, but because speaking at all took more strength than he had. His discomfort showed — in the way his hands twitched, in the vacant shimmer behind his eyes.

The man only smiled, the curve of his lips more cruel than amused. Without warning, he grabbed Dazai’s arm and yanked him upright. "It’s not that much of an inconvenience. You weren’t planning on sleeping, were you? You’d just sit here all night like usual."

Dazai didn’t answer. He didn’t need to. He brushed past him and walked on, each step hollow. The silence between them was louder than words.
Outside, the rain came down hard, soaking into his bandages and hair in seconds. He didn’t flinch. The cold didn’t register anymore. His hands disappeared into his pockets, and he walked forward like a ghost drifting through a world he couldn’t feel.

His eyes closed as he moved, relying on muscle memory more than sight. He didn’t need to think — he already knew where Chuuya would be. The same place. The same scene. The same ending. Over and over again, as if time itself refused to move forward.

It was maddening. A loop without escape. A cycle so tight it felt like a noose.

By the time he reached him, Chuuya was already collapsed against a wall, a bottle of wine dangling from his fingers. He looked half-conscious — drenched, disheveled, barely upright.
Still, even in that state, Chuuya had the energy to be furious. Dazai didn't flinch as the insults began — he’d heard them all before.

Useless.

Disgusting.

Die already.

Dazai stood still, his expression unreadable. He had no reason to defend himself — he didn’t believe he deserved any better.

Chuuya shouted, slurred, shattered the bottle, and finally, hit him.

Dazai barely reacted. He fell, more out of momentum than shock, holding his face with a hand but not even blinking in surprise.
"Just die!" Chuuya sobbed, falling to his knees. "It’s your fault! All of it!”

Dazai looked up at him, eyes empty. Not confused. Just tired.

He let him weep until he could no longer sit upright, until the anger had drained into sorrow and silence. Only then did Dazai stand, slowly, and reach down.
Without a word, he slung Chuuya’s arm over his shoulder.

They walked together in silence.

If only they would talk.

If only they knew how.

They returned to the Port Mafia headquarters, the world outside still soaked and shivering beneath the steady fall of rain. Everything was unnaturally quiet — no footsteps, no voices, only the occasional echo of water sliding off the eaves. It was a kind of silence that made it feel like the building itself had given up on speaking.

Midnight had passed, and the air had grown colder, heavier. Dazai could feel it pressing against his skin, sinking into the bandages that clung wetly to him. Chuuya was slumped against him, heavier with each step — not because of his weight, but because of the surrender in his limbs. The smaller man wasn’t walking anymore. He was being carried, barely conscious, his breath thick and uneven as it ghosted against Dazai’s collarbone.

By the time they reached Chuuya’s room, Dazai’s arms were burning. He pushed open the door with a shoulder and laid him down gently, making sure to position him on his side — instinct more than care. Vomiting in your sleep was a common way to die when you drank too much. Dazai didn’t know if he wanted Chuuya to die or not. But he didn’t want it to be by accident.
Chuuya groaned faintly, a low noise from the back of his throat.

Dazai hovered for a moment, watching him shift above the covers. His breath reeked of alcohol and regret. His hair stuck to his face in damp curls. He looked like a ghost pretending to be human.

Dazai crouched beside the bed, eyes heavy, legs trembling.

“It’s the same every night, isn’t it?” he whispered. “You drink. You collapse. I find you. I carry you home. We say nothing.”

He stared at the floor, where a faint muddy trail marked their footprints. “Is this our version of comfort?”

He slid down to sit beside the bed, spine hitting the wall with a soft thud. His legs gave out completely.

His chest rose and fell in uneven bursts. There was something inside of him clawing to get out — a panic or grief or maybe just exhaustion pretending to be pain. His hands trembled in his lap.
“I’m tired,” he said aloud, voice breaking. “I don’t know what of, exactly. Just... tired of being awake.”

The room felt like it was shrinking. His body didn’t quite feel like his. His arms ached as if he’d been carrying more than Chuuya. As if he’d been carrying himself, barely, for years.
His breath hitched. He clutched his chest suddenly — not dramatically, just instinctively, like someone trying to stop something from escaping. His lungs didn’t feel right. It was like breathing through fog, thick and soupy, choking on something invisible. He leaned forward, pressing his forehead to his knees, eyes clenched shut.

“Stop,” he whispered. “Stop it.”

He wasn’t sure what he was asking to stop. The feeling? The thoughts? The pain that sat under his ribs like coiled wire?
The silence answered him.

A rustle from the bed. A soft murmur. “Dazai...”

His name was said like a sigh. Dazai’s head snapped up, eyes wide. “Chuuya?” He wasn’t even sure if he had even made a sound.. After all, the other boy didn’t respond.
Chuuya must have spoken in his sleep. Or maybe from a place deeper than sleep — a place of memory, or mourning.

Dazai pulled himself to his feet slowly, each movement stiff and sluggish. He felt heavier than Chuuya had. As if something inside him had turned to stone.
He didn’t remember walking to his room. One minute he was standing in Chuuya’s doorway. The next, he was on the floor of his own space, pulling open drawers with hands that didn’t feel like they belonged to him.

There they were.

The pills.

Little white circles of silence.

He didn’t even hesitate.

The cup sat there, already filled. A heavy, sharp scent lingered in the air — unmistakable, acrid, biting. Bleach. He had poured it earlier, maybe hours ago. Maybe minutes. He couldn’t remember. He hadn’t planned this moment, but he also hadn’t stopped it.

It wasn’t a mistake. It wasn’t confusion.

He knew what it was.

He wanted it to hurt.

He sat cross-legged on the floor like a child at school, one hand cradling the glass like it was medicine, the other dipping into the open bottle of pills beside him.
He popped them into his mouth, dry and bitter. Swallowed.

Then more.

And more.

The taste coated his tongue like chalk. Still, he forced them down, one by one, like a ritual. Each gulp was mechanical. Unfeeling.
He raised the glass.

For a second, he hesitated — not from fear, but from the sheer weight of exhaustion pressing down on his limbs.
Then he drank.

The bleach burned instantly, it felt as if it were tearing through his throat like fire. His body convulsed. He doubled over, coughing, retching. Foam gathered at the corners of his lips. His stomach heaved, violently rejecting the poison — but he tried again, lifting the cup to his lips with trembling hands.

More burning. More coughing. His chest was raw. His vision swam. His hand clenched the floor, nails scratching the cold tile, the glass slipped from his other and shattered. The sound was deafening in the silence. A sharp, final punctuation.

His hands hit the floor, bracing him. He coughed, then choked, gasping for air like it was poison. His vision blurred. His arms trembled. His bandages unraveled slightly, slipping down to reveal his perfectly ok eye.

That’s when he saw him.

Mori stood in the doorway, expression unreadable, watching.

Dazai lifted his head slowly. His whole body screamed to collapse again. “Mori...” he croaked, voice hoarse and raw. “Let me go.”
The man sighed. Not in disappointment — in boredom.

“This again?” he muttered. “You never succeed. You know that, don’t you?”
Dazai closed his eyes.
“Please...” he whispered. “Please let me sleep.”

Mori’s footsteps echoed through the doorway, unhurried and unimpressed. He looked down at Dazai with the kind of detached curiosity one might give a broken watch — faintly interested, mostly indifferent.

The taller man crouched slightly, his silhouette framed in cold moonlight.

“You threw up the tablets, didn’t you?” he asked, not unkindly, not kindly either — just stating a fact. His voice was flat, clinical.
Dazai didn’t answer. His throat was raw, and his mouth tasted like metal and bleach. He barely noticed the blood that had dried along his bottom lip or the shards of glass glinting by his fingertips.

Without another word, Mori reached down and grabbed him by the arm, hauling him up with little grace. Dazai’s legs buckled immediately, and he was forced to lean heavily on his superior. The grip on his arm wasn’t gentle. It wasn’t cruel, either. Just... efficient.

They walked in silence, or rather, Dazai was dragged. His limbs lagged behind his body, and the world tilted unpleasantly. Every nerve in his chest screamed when he breathed, his muscles burning beneath cold, wet clothes. The acrid scent of bleach still clung to him like guilt.

Mori led him to the washroom and unceremoniously doused him with cold water, washing away the evidence of his failure. The shock sent Dazai into another coughing fit. His knees hit the tile, and he stayed there, heaving. A cloth was pressed to his mouth, wiping away the residue of the bleach, and then his lips, and then his chin. He didn’t resist. He didn’t move.
He just lay back, breathing harder now, his chest rising and falling with mechanical rhythm.

Still no tears. Just trembling.

He covered his eyes with his arm and grit his teeth. Everything ached. Not just his body — that would have been manageable. His thoughts ached. His soul — if he even had one left — felt splintered.

“Your mouth will blister,” Mori remarked, checking the reddened skin beneath Dazai’s lips. “You’re lucky it didn’t go further down. You might even keep your voice.”
Dazai didn’t respond. He didn’t care.

Eventually, Mori made him stand again, guiding him like one might guide a sick dog. He deposited him in his bed, brought a glass of water, and placed it on the table. He left the room without looking back.

They didn’t need to like each other. They didn’t even pretend to.
But Mori always showed up for the aftermath.
When Dazai closed his eyes, it was not from peace. It was just... necessity. His body gave in, and the night was swallowed whole.

The next morning brought no peace, just routine. People shuffled through the halls of the Port Mafia base as if nothing had happened. As if no one had choked on bleach the night before. As if someone hadn’t whispered “please let me sleep” through cracked lips.

Dazai drifted into the kitchen on unsteady feet, still wrapped in the scent of antiseptic and burnt skin. His mouth felt like sandpaper. His stomach rejected the idea of food, but he craved water — not because it would help, but because it might briefly replace the taste of failure on his tongue.
He paused in the doorway.

Chuuya was there.
Curled over the table like a discarded marionette, his head resting on his forearm. One arm dangled limply at his side. His shoulders rose and fell slowly, breathing labored. An empty bottle of liquor stood sentry by his elbow, almost drained.

“You’re supposed to be in bed,” Dazai said, voice hoarse. No reply. He didn’t expect one.

Still, something in him stirred — a pulse of concern, quickly masked as irritation. He turned toward the cabinets, rummaged through them until he found fresh bandages. With slow precision, he unwrapped the old cloth from his eye — even though there was no new injury — and replaced it. The ritual brought him a strange, familiar comfort.
Cover it up. Always cover it up.

When he turned back, his gaze snagged on something small and sharp glinting on the countertop.
A knife.

Used.

The metal shimmered faintly in the morning light. And just beside it, a thin smear of red.
He blinked. His mind was still fogged from the night before, but something instinctive flared in his gut.
Red.

Not wine.

Too thick.

His heart started to beat faster. Not in panic, but in dread — a slow, sinking weight pulling him to the floor.
He looked at Chuuya again. The boy hadn’t moved. His face was half-hidden in the crook of his arm. He looked asleep, but something was off. The color in his skin. The tension in his posture. The stillness that went just a little too far.

Dazai stepped forward cautiously, his eyes trailing downward — to the floor beneath Chuuya’s chair.
There, glistening in the dim light, was a small puddle of thick, red liquid.
Dazai’s breath caught.

No.

It wasn’t wine.

It was pooling too slowly. It had weight. It clung to the tile.
“Chuuya,” he whispered, frozen.

The drip was rhythmic — one drop at a time, falling from the edge of Chuuya’s elbow to the floor. Tap. Tap. Tap. In perfect time with the ticking of the wall clock.
The scent hit him next. Iron. Raw and coppery. Undeniable.
Blood.

Realization hit like a bullet.

He surged forward, knocking the chair over as he reached for Chuuya. The body slumped sideways with a ragdoll motion. Dazai caught him just in time, cradling the smaller man’s torso against his chest.

“Chuuya!”

His voice cracked with panic — a sound he hadn’t made in years. He pushed up the sleeve of Chuuya’s jacket, revealing the wrist. Deep gashes. Fresh. Still bleeding.
“Oh god, no—”

Dazai moved quickly now, his hands no longer sluggish, his thoughts sharp with adrenaline. He pressed his palm against the worst of the cuts, using the pressure to slow the bleeding. With his other hand, he tore one of his bandages free and wadded it over the wound.

Chuuya was pale. Unmoving.

But his pulse — faint, barely there — still beat beneath Dazai’s fingertips.
A breath.

A whisper of life.

“Stay with me,” he muttered, voice shaking. “Stay the hell with me.”

For once, there was no sarcasm in his voice. No bitterness. Just fear. Just pleading.

Because the truth was, in all the numbness that coated his days like dust, in all the static that had filled his chest for years...
This — this moment of sheer panic — was the first real thing he had felt in a long time.

Chapter Text

"Boss!" he shouted, his voice raw with urgency.

Blood was everywhere, soaking their clothes, their skin, binding them in a horrific intimacy. The metallic scent choked the air, making his stomach churn. How had he missed this? How had he been blind to Chuuya’s despair, to the silent suffering hidden behind harsh words and furious eyes?

Chuuya stirred faintly, eyes fluttering, face twisted in pain.

"Stay still," Dazai pleaded softly, almost begging, as Chuuya weakly tried to pull away. "You've lost too much blood."

Heavy footsteps announced Mori’s arrival, his presence a cold shadow against their fragile chaos. Without sympathy or warmth, Mori knelt and mechanically began stitching and bandaging Chuuya’s torn flesh, every action clinical and detached. His silence screamed indifference, amplifying Dazai’s helplessness.

Chuuya clutched at Dazai’s clothes weakly, eyes glazed but still filled with rage and desperation. "Let me go," he whispered brokenly, repeating it as though each plea might grant him the peace he craved.

Later, in the sterile, bleak quiet of the Mafia's infirmary which also happened to be Mori's office, Dazai watched Chuuya’s pale form slip between consciousness and oblivion. Hooked to machines, veins filled with borrowed blood, Chuuya murmured incoherently, lost to sedation. Dazai sat in distant vigil, feeling useless, hating the ache in his chest, wishing he felt nothing again.

"Why us, Chuuya?" he whispered bitterly into the empty air. "Why are we cursed to feel like this?" He didn't expect a response, and didn't receive one. "Will this ever end—the emptiness, the pain, the desperate wish for death? Do you feel it too?"

His voice lowered to a barely audible murmur. "Maybe we should end it together, make sure we never wake up again. I wouldn’t mind your face being the last I see. But you hate me, don’t you? Even though we're trapped together in this miserable existence."

Silence hung oppressively, broken only by Chuuya’s labored breathing. Eventually, compelled by a strange tenderness, Dazai replaced the saturated bandages with careful hands. Chuuya’s eyes opened briefly, confusion clouding their depths.

"Are you alright?" Dazai asked softly, hope and fear mingling in his tone.

"Shut up," Chuuya snapped, voice weak and strained, turning away sharply.

Dazai sighed quietly. "Rest," he whispered, resigned and defeated. "You weren't supposed to die. Boss's orders."
"Who saved me?" Chuuya’s voice shook with anger and despair.

Dazai didn’t answer, his silence heavy. "I’m sorry," he finally whispered, guilt weighing his words. "It's my job to keep you alive—even if neither of us wants that."
Chuuya turned bitterly away, slipping again into uneasy sleep, drowning in alcohol’s false peace.

When consciousness found Chuuya again, he awoke in unfamiliar comfort, softness foreign and unsettling. Dazai lay beside him, peacefully asleep and vulnerably human, bare-chested and serene. Chuuya’s breath shuddered, fingers twitching towards Dazai’s face, pausing just before contact, shame and desire colliding painfully within him.

"Why him?" he thought bitterly. "He’d despise me." Tears fell silently, self-loathing twisting sharply in his chest.

"Dazai… I'm falling for you," he breathed faintly, despairingly, before darkness took him again.

Every day within the Mafia was shadowed by death, yet Chuuya found life unbearably harder. Nights brought relentless torment, nightmares tearing him apart until alcohol offered fleeting oblivion. He woke in emptiness, longing for the presence that had vanished.

Outside, he lit a cigarette, desperate to erase Dazai’s haunting image. Anger and sorrow overwhelmed him, pulling him to the ground, sobbing quietly, drowning in anguish.

Suddenly, a shadow loomed. Chuuya jolted upright, defensive, but relaxed upon recognizing Dazai. "Idiot!" Chuuya shouted, pushing him away. "Don't sneak up on me!"
"What's wrong?" Dazai asked, cautiously reaching out before pulling back, uncertainty evident. "Talk to me."

"Leave me alone!" Chuuya screamed, hitting him again. "It's your fault I want to die!"

Dazai didn’t resist, absorbing each blow quietly. "What did I do?" he finally asked, voice empty yet deeply wounded.

Chuuya froze, horror-stricken and vulnerable. Covering his mouth, eyes wide and wet, he admitted quietly, almost inaudibly, "I… I want you."
Dazai stared blankly, a shadow passing behind his eyes, confusion twisted with something darker—pain, perhaps fear. "Want?" he whispered hoarsely, voice trembling with uncertainty. "Want me to do what, exactly?"

He wasn’t mocking — he didn’t have the strength. His voice was flat, husked, carried not by curiosity but by obligation. His body was here, vaguely, but his mind was adrift — stranded in the gap between the alley wall and the taste of bleach still festering in his mouth.

“Hold me,” Chuuya said — barely audible. But then the word collapsed in his throat, and something darker rose in its place. “No. I’m disgusting. You’re disgusted by me. I know you are.”

He couldn’t stop the panic now. His breaths came in short, sharp gasps. “I’m broken. You did this to me. You made me this.”

Dazai didn’t flinch, didn’t interrupt. He was staring through Chuuya again. That same thousand-yard quiet.

“I need a drink—” Chuuya tried to push away, but Dazai’s hand caught his wrist. Not forceful. Just final.

“Wait.”

The word was soft, like it didn’t want to be heard.

Chuuya froze — and then struggled harder.

“Let go of me,” he said. No longer quiet. “Let go.”

Dazai’s grip remained. Still not cruel. Still not gentle.

When Chuuya shouted — “LET GO OF ME!” — there was a beat of stillness that followed like an aftershock. A silence that bruised.

“Do you love me?” Dazai asked, not because he needed an answer. He didn’t expect one.

Chuuya laughed. It wasn’t a sound of amusement. It was cracked, hollow — something wounded trying to mimic joy.

“Love you?” His fists clenched against Dazai’s chest. “I want you. And I hate myself for it. I want you to ruin me. Worse than you already have. I want—”

He broke off, breath shaking, forehead pressed to Dazai’s collarbone like he was trying to vanish into it.

Before he could retreat further, Dazai moved.

One step forward.

One hand on Chuuya’s hip.

One final breath before his body pressed against Chuuya’s — cold wall at his back, something colder at his front.

There was no kiss. No words.

Just breath.

Just friction.

Just permission, unspoken and unsteady.

Chuuya’s arms came up, slow, like drowning limbs, not pulling Dazai closer but keeping him from drifting away entirely. His body trembled — not from fear, not from resistance. From knowing what he was doing. And doing it anyway.

Dazai’s mouth hovered at Chuuya’s throat, warm and dry.

When his fingers pulled Chuuya’s belt loose, he paused.

Not for confirmation.

Just exhaustion.

Chuuya didn’t stop him.

He didn’t say yes.

But he didn’t say no.

And that, somehow, was enough.

It was clumsy.

Silent.

Not frantic — numb.

Each motion slow, deliberate, like a ritual neither of them believed in anymore.

Chuuya’s breath caught on every shift of Dazai’s hips, his cheek pressed against stone, forehead thudding dully with each push forward. He didn’t cry — not yet. He didn’t moan. Didn’t speak.

He endured.

That’s what it felt like.

Enduring.

Dazai’s hand gripped his hip. Harder than he meant to. His other arm trembled beside Chuuya’s head, fingers clawing against the wall like he was trying to hold himself together.

Inside him, the world was still spinning. The bleach was still clawing at his throat. His stomach turned. His vision blurred. But his body kept moving — mechanical, instinctive, resigned.

He buried his face in Chuuya’s shoulder as he came. Silent. Shaking.

There was no satisfaction.

Only stillness.

And after, the unbearable awareness of their breathing — two broken rhythms scraping against silence.

Dazai pulled out slowly, his hands already falling away before he could register the loss. He adjusted his coat. Didn’t meet Chuuya’s eyes.

Chuuya sank to the ground like something folding in on itself. Elbows to knees. Forehead to tile.

“I asked for it,” he said, not looking up. “So don’t you dare pity me.”

Dazai didn’t answer.

He turned.

And walked away.

Chapter Text

The night wasn’t heavy with weather. It was heavy with memory.
The Port Mafia's halls seemed to hold their breath, like ancient lungs trained to silence when shame seeped through the walls. The architecture hadn’t changed in decades—stone, old wood, humidity soaked into bone—but something in the air tonight had shifted. Not temperature. Something worse.

The city didn’t sleep — it murmured. Wind whispered against the Port Mafia’s blackened windows like a voice half-remembered. The rain had stopped, but the air still tasted of metal and aftermath.

Chuuya lay motionless on the futon, staring at the ceiling with eyes that hadn't blinked in hours. He didn’t move. Couldn’t. Not because he was in pain, though he was, but because stillness was the only thing that made the night survivable.

He had stopped dreaming when he was sixteen. Since then, only void. He couldn’t even remember the last time sleep had held him gently. When he closed his eyes, there was no color, no memory. Just black — heavy, suffocating, like being buried alive in his own skull.

There were moments he envied nightmares.

Tonight, like every night, he drank himself into nothing. But the alcohol didn’t bring him any sleep. It just blurred the edges of the silence. He wanted to dream. Even the sick kind, the ones with blood and fire and Dazai’s eyes looking away. Anything but this dead static.

He sat on the edge of his bed, still dressed. The lights were off. The bottle lay on its side near his boot, half-spilled. Not even worth finishing.
Outside, the city sighed.

Inside—he remembered the way Dazai’s hands had felt: clinical. Cold. They hadn't been hands; they’d been tools. Surgical. Unfeeling.
And Chuuya had begged for them.

“Make me forget,” he’d whispered, his face buried in the space where Dazai’s shoulder met his neck.
And Dazai hadn’t replied.

Just... performed.

He’d moved like a man checking off a list. Chuuya might as well have been furniture.
Now, his skin itched. Like Dazai had left fingerprints under it.
He stared at the ceiling, waiting for it to fall.

A sound broke the silence.

Low. Wet. Wrong.

Gagging.

Chuuya was on his feet before thought caught up. His body moved like it had been trained for this kind of panic. The kind you don’t learn—you inherit.
Barefoot, silent, he crossed the hall. The floors whispered under him. The darkness didn’t care to hide anything tonight.
Dazai’s door was ajar.

Of course it was.

The room reeked faintly of bleach. Not fresh. Not sharp. The kind of stench that had settled in, taken root in the paint, in the sheets. Dazai was on the floor—half-curled, convulsing, a basin beside him filled with bile and something darker that shimmered red at the edges.
“Jesus, Dazai…”

Chuuya froze in the doorway. No breath. No thoughts. Just rage simmering under shock.
Dazai blinked at him. One eye crusted half-shut. His voice rasped: “You again.”

“You’re still trying to die,” Chuuya muttered. “So yeah. Me again.”
He dropped to his knees beside him, the floor hard and cold beneath bone.

Dazai looked like a corpse the fire forgot to finish. Sweat slicked his neck, a fever-gloss gleamed across his collarbone. His mouth was cracked dry. His breathing—a labored rhythm, like his lungs forgot how to work properly.

“I can still taste it,” he said, breathing shallowly. “acidic.”

Chuuya didn’t flinch. “You drink bleach again?”

A faint smile. “No, I think it's the residue ”

“Stupid question, but—you okay?” He asked it out of habit, already regretting it. Before Dazai could respond, he corrected himself. “Never mind. That’s like asking a blind guy if he finally sees.”
Dazai’s laugh was a rattle. A dying sound.

They sat there. Not speaking. Not touching. Not alive, not really. Just... orbiting each other. Like gravity pulling wreckage toward wreckage.
“You don’t even remember it, do you?”

Dazai didn’t move, swallowed as if he knew what was coming, he knew Chuuya was being quiet and somewhat friendly, which surprisingly wasn't common, at least not for Dazai.
“The alley,” Chuuya clarified. “Earlier. Not last week. Not months ago. Earlier tonight.”

Dazai shifted. Barely. Like a man readjusting weight that had always been there.

“I remember,” he said, voice raw..it was almost a whisper, you could hear the words scratching against the back of his throat. “I just didn’t know if you wanted me to.”
Chuuya scoffed. “You think it’s about what I want?” He looked like a spring that was about to recoil, eyes suddenly blown wide, face twisting as if He was trying his best to stay calm, which didn't take long.. after a few tense seconds, he stood, abrupt, like his own skin was suddenly too small.

He paced tight lines across the room, hands running through his hair as if trying to ground himself.

“You think this is about want?” he repeated.

He turned. His fists clenched. “I begged you, Dazai. I fucking begged. And you let me.”

Dazai didn’t move. Chuuya’s fingers curled. His voice sharpened.

“You didn’t even look at me,” he snapped. “Didn’t touch me like a person. You just... went through the motions. Like I wasn’t there.”
“I was trying not to feel anything.”

“Yeah? Well, mission fucking accomplished.”

Dazai breathed out slowly. “You asked me to—”

“No.. Dazai. I begged you,” Chuuya corrected, spitting the word. “And you let me. Because it was easier than saying no.”
“I thought maybe,” Chuuya continued, not even giving Dazai time to respond. “if I gave you what I had left... you’d give me something. A look. A word. Anything that felt real.” His voice cracked, and he hated himself for it, his face sunk slightly eyes glossy.

“But you didn’t. You just stared at the wall. Behind me…was that sexier or something?? Did that make the job easier?”

The silence was a third person now. It watched them both.

“I thought if I gave you what I had left, maybe you’d give something back. A word. A touch. A breath. A fucking heartbeat.” Chuuya repeated as if he thought he worded it better. “But…..” he breathed out as if it took all the air out of his lungs.

Still nothing.

“I’m sorry,” Dazai said, reflexively. Hollow.

“Don’t,” Chuuya snapped. “Don’t you dare apologize when you don’t even know what for.”
The silence bloated. Heavy. Wet with all the things left unsaid, Dazai knew better than to argue back when Chuuya was like this, but this time around it wasnt that Dazai didn't know what to say but because his body was physically too weak to formulate the right words.

“I’m going to the roof,” Chuuya muttered.

“Don’t follow me.”

The rooftop welcomed him like an old enemy. Cold wind knifed across his cheeks. The city spread below, indifferent and vast.

He lit a cigarette.

His fingers trembled.

He pretended they didn’t.

First drag—scorched lungs.

Second—emptier than the first.

Behind the vents, half-hidden, was the bottle of wine. Cheap. Sharp. His standby apology to himself.

He uncorked it, took a mouthful.

Swallowed a gulp, then a second..third and by the time it got to the forth…it began to taste bitter as if predigested… as he was swallowing that last gulp. He stared at the skyline. Unmoving. Chest tight.

Then something twisted in him — a slow, sick burn, rising from the place where Dazai had touched him and left nothing behind, it was the only touch that felt real– a gentle squeeze of his hip before things got blurry.

It made his breath hitch and caused him to choke on the wine, he spat out the remnants and turned and hurled the bottle hard across the roof.
It shattered on impact — a violent, final sound, glass shrieking as it burst against concrete. Red splattered. A stain. A wound.
The door creaked open behind him.

Chuuya didn’t turn. “I said don’t follow me.”

No answer.

He spun. “Say something! Say you regret it. Say you don’t. Fucking lie if you have to!” it was a loud snap– a voice. A borderline scream.. Especially at midnight.
Still, Dazai stood silent. Fragile. A paper man soaked to the bone.

“You don’t get it,” Chuuya said, voice raw. “You never did! Never will!”
Dazai stood, fragile for him, a deer in the headlights.

“I can’t keep showing up for you. I can’t keep pretending half of you is enough.”

Chuuya ran behind the vents and grabbed the second bottle. He didn't even think, he hurled it straight at him
It missed Dazai by inches.

Glass exploded near his feet. Thin red lines bloomed along his shins as the bottle bled by his bare feet.
Dazai didn’t flinch.

His eyes were oceans drained dry. Empty.

“I’m screaming,” Chuuya yelled “Why can’t you hear me?”
Wind pulled at his coat, his eyes narrowing full of anguish and lonlienss.
Then—he broke.

The sob hit from nowhere.
Guttural.
Ugly.

A noise that didn’t belong in any language. It sounded strangled as if all the air was sucked from within his lungs. He hit the concrete hard.
Knees scraped. Palms down. Shaking.

Sheer pain was written all over his body, as if he was being burnt alive.. He felt everything..the silence as rejection, the emptiness as loss.. He was already grieving a man who wasn't yet dead.
“I don’t want to be here either,” he gasped. “Do you get that? We are the same.. Equal aren't we?” He gestured wildly at Dazai before looking up and gesturing around himself and the skyline.

“This life—I didn’t fucking ask for it. I hate waking up. I hate pretending. I hate this need that’s eating me alive. The need for permission to be alive?? For someone to tell me I am human. Do you know how that feels? Are we the same?” He was vibrating now. Like a structure mid-collapse.
“I’m tired,” he choked. “So fucking tired. Dazai. Of myself…of others”
Still, Dazai didn’t speak.

Until he did.

“I… can’t talk right,” he rasped. “But you need to shut up. And listen.” It was clear from the way he spoke that he was upset, if he even knew what that felt like anymore.
Chuuya froze.

“I’m not ignoring you. I just don’t have the words when I’m like this. I feel hollow.. empty”
He stepped forward.

Blood left red kisses on the concrete behind him as he walked on the shards of glass like they weren't even hurting.
“I didn’t forget the alley. It wasn’t nothing. I just… I didn’t know how to do it right.”
A pause. Heavy.

“I don’t want to lose you.”

It landed like frostbite.

“But I was never taught how not to hurt the people I need.” he coughed accidentally spitting blood he wiped at his mouth. It felt as if his own skin was sandpaper ripping the blistered and scraped skin where his lips should have been.

“Next time,” he said, “don’t beg me.” It was one simple request.
Chuuya looked up. Eyes red, rimmed and wet.

“If you ever want me like that again…” Dazai said, you could see how much it was hurting to speak by the way he was holding himself and how his eyes winced with every word. “Say it like you believe I could want you back.” The wind roared.

Along the way it seemed as if Dazai’s words were met with miscommunication and somehow riled Chuuya up more. Dazai could see it in the way Chuuya’s body tensed, it was as if any answer Dazai gave would have been wrong.

Chuuya screamed. “WHY CAN’T YOU STAY?!” He walked forward quickly, grabbed Dazai’s coat, and shook him.
“Why do you always leave your body when I need you to be in it?!”

Dazai’s mind went hazy, with wonder, confusion and fever. His lips moved. “I don’t... feel...”

Then he dropped.

Right into Chuuya’s arms.

Heavy.
Heat-soaked.
Barely breathing.

“Dazai—?”
No answer.

Only breath. Shallow. Labored.
Chuuya gritted his teeth. “You asshole. You absolute asshole.”

He hauled him up, limbs trembling. Dragged him inside.

The hallway bit with winter’s teeth. Chuuya’s arms burned. Dazai hung limp.

By the time he kicked open the door to Dazai’s room, he was dizzy.

He dropped him to the bed. The sheets were soaked in fever sweat. He checked Dazai’s forehead. Burned under his palm. “You’re not dying of an infection,” Chuuya muttered. “Not after all this.”

He found a cloth and walked over to the bathroom, he was sure he was being followed on the way back, Chuuya was slightly grateful knowing it was most likely Mori.
He had wet the cloth, crouched down beside Dazai and wiped down his face.
Angry. Precise. The way you clean a weapon. “You don’t even see me,” he said, still annoyed at dazai’s lack of care for him despite clearly being unwell.
Dazai stirred. “You’re always so loud when I don’t need it,” he rasped, groaning with sickness. “And quiet when I do.”

“What?”

“I do hear you when you scream.” the brunette complained, sickley.
Chuuya’s throat clenched. “Then why don’t you ever answer?”
A pause.

“Because if I answer,” Dazai murmured, “you’ll know I care.”

Chuuya stared.

“You’ll know I remember. Everything”

He wanted to hit him. Scream. Break something.
Instead, he sat. Back against the wall.

“I want to hate you,” Chuuya whispered. “I try. God, I try.”
A silence.

“But I can’t fucking leave.”

Dazai turned his head, slow.

“Then don’t. You can stay… no one is telling you otherwise..”

Chuuya didn't want to take those words to heart, because finally he felt like he was given permission to be around Dazai without feeling as though he was a bother.
Just as Chuuya was leaning his head against the bedframe and seeming as if he had been allowed to relax for a moment.

The door to Dazai’s room had creaked open and there stood Mori, it seemed as if he had been following Chuuya around when the smaller male went to dampen the cloth and suspected it was because Dazai was suffering from a fever.

Chapter Text

The fever had sunk into Dazai’s skin like rot into old wood — not screaming, not flaring, just settled. Lingering. Clinging. The kind of heat that makes air thick and bodies slick, that causes wounds to glisten even when they’ve stopped bleeding. His limbs lay arranged like forgotten flowers in a sickroom vase — hollow-boned, petal-skinned, stitched together by sheer force of refusal.

His throat was a garden of ruins. The bleach had burned not just through tissue, but through voice, through sound itself. Every swallow was a punishment. Every breath, a slow submission. The sheets beneath him were damp with fever-sweat, stained in shapes that looked almost like wings — if angels bled through linen.

And then came Mori.

With silence that wasn’t silence — it was a verdict. An entrance like an incision.

The door creaked once.

And the air turned clinical.

He didn’t speak right away. Just moved — gloves already on, eyes assessing. No softness in the gaze. Just a medical sort of disinterest, like looking at a body and calculating which parts could be salvaged, which could not.

“You’ve become... impressively pathetic,” Mori murmured, almost fondly.

Dazai didn’t reply. His head turned, slow as moss growing toward light, and he blinked once.

“Still not dead,” Mori added as he began preparing the IV. “A miracle. Or a mistake.”

The needle slid in with the quiet elegance of a violin’s first note — sharp, thin, inevitable. A clear stream of antibiotics began its slow invasion of his bloodstream. Dazai didn’t flinch, but a faint tremor passed through his hand — unnoticed or ignored.

Mori lifted his chin with two fingers, tilted his face like a puppet he might disassemble.

“Open,” he said. A command. Not a request.

Dazai obeyed. Barely.

The mouth was a battlefield. Raw tissue, blistered gums, the taste of ash and steel. Mori’s cloth dipped in saltwater pressed against split lips, and Dazai gasped — a sound like glass cracking under snow.

It burned.

Of course it burned.

Salt always finds the wounds.

And still, Dazai didn’t flinch. Not even when the cloth touched the deeper damage, the soft vault of his palate and the ruined edge of his tongue. He swallowed the sting like it was communion.

“Remarkable,” Mori said, dabbing at the froth of blood pooling beneath his lower lip. “You never even try to look alive. But your body’s too stubborn to die properly.”

He stood back, eyeing him like a cadaver resisting its autopsy.

“You’ll need fluids. Nutrition. Your organs are beginning to dry out like parchment.”

Dazai's gaze drifted to the ceiling.

“You’re proposing a feeding tube.”

“I’m not proposing,” Mori said flatly. “I’m preparing you. There’s a difference.”

He handed over two tablets — painkillers, pale and precise — and watched Dazai struggle to lift his hand.

“If the pain worsens, come see me. If it doesn’t — it means your nerves are giving up. Which may be useful in the long run.”

The curtain of clinical tone never lifted.

He left without a backward glance, the door hissing shut like a sealed grave.

Chuuya sat at the foot of the bed, legs drawn up, arms slung over his knees. He’d been there for what felt like hours — watching Dazai sleep, or something like it. Watching the faint rise and fall of ribs so sharp they could’ve cut skin from the inside out. He didn’t speak. He didn’t smoke. He just waited — because waiting felt like control.

His eyes flicked around the room.

The walls were yellowed with time. The corners wore dust like bruises. It smelled like old sweat, antiseptic, and something sweeter — decay, maybe. Memory.

And then his eyes fell on it.

The second drawer.

Not locked. Not hidden.

Just... open. Slightly.

Just enough to tempt.

He leaned forward slowly, fingertips brushing the wood like skin.

And then he pulled.

The drawer yawned open with the ease of something that had been opened a hundred times before — revealing chaos. Crumpled papers. Torn envelopes. Folded notes yellowing at the edges. Photos. So many photos.

Chuuya froze.

Then reached in.

The first letter was written in Dazai’s unmistakable scrawl — looping, erratic, beautiful in a way that hinted at instability.

“I want to split him open and keep him alive long enough to watch what leaks. To see if pain makes him more honest.”

His throat tightened.

The next page was worse.

“I think about it when he sleeps. Cutting him. Hollowing him. Touching him until he screams. Not for help — just for something. Anything.”

Photos.

His body. Drunk. Disheveled. Shirt askew. Throat bared.

One of them — taken from above — showed him curled on the rug in Dazai’s room, one hand loosely clutching a bottle, his mouth parted in some absent breath. Another showed him sprawled half-naked on the bed, limbs slack, a bruise already forming on his hip.

He dropped it.

The paper fluttered like falling ash.

He grabbed another page. A different kind of letter.

A suicide note.

“If I can’t possess him, maybe I can haunt him. Maybe my death can live beneath his fingernails, like the taste of me he’ll never wash off.”

More photos. Diagrams. Sketches. Scenes.

One had a crude illustration of Chuuya gagged, bound. Another showed Dazai in the corner, watching. Smiling.

The bile rose so fast it burned.

He threw the drawer open entirely, papers spilling like viscera across the floor.

“WHAT THE FUCK IS THIS?!”

His scream shattered the quiet.

Dazai stirred.

Barely.

Didn’t rise. Didn’t speak.

Chuuya stood.

Marched forward.

His hands trembled, but his voice was steel.

“You sick fucking parasite,” he whispered. “You watched me sleep. You touched me. You wrote this filth like it was poetry.”

He clambered onto the bed — over the thin, fevered body — and straddled his hips with violent intent. His hands found Dazai’s throat like they belonged there.

“You wanted to hurt me. To ruin me. To fuck me while I couldn’t fight back.”

He squeezed.

Dazai didn’t resist.

His face didn’t change.

Still.

Blank.

Empty.

Chuuya screamed — not words anymore, just raw sound, feral and hollow, clawing through the room like a wounded animal. Grief made flesh. A rupture of the self. His fists came down in savage rhythm — onto the mattress, into Dazai’s unmoving chest. A child’s tantrum become ritual violence.

“You said nothing. You did nothing. I begged you,” he gasped. “I said I loved you... or... at least I tried to show you.”

His fists struck again, dull thuds on ribs he once memorized with reverent fingers.

“And all the while,” he spat, voice splintering, “you were cataloguing me. Like a scientist with a corpse. Like I was a specimen. Like I was just some… experiment.”

Then—

He stopped.

The silence, sudden and obscene, pressed into his skull like a vice.

Something shifted.

Something moved.

His eyes dropped, and the world tilted with them.

Beneath the blanket, Dazai’s cock was hard. Obscenely so. Rising. Pulsing. Responsive.

Chuuya reeled back like the breath had been punched from his lungs. The air was suddenly thick with rot. His body jerked backward as though repelled, a sound halfway between a sob and a scream wrenching from his throat.

“You’re… hard,” he whispered. His voice was broken glass — cracked, bleeding. “You’re hard while I’m screaming at you. Strangling you. Wishing you dead?!”

Dazai didn't blink. Didn't speak.

“You’re seriously hard? Almost about to burst?!”

Still nothing. Just the stillness. That silence that had always been his greatest cruelty.

The horror didn’t come all at once. It bloomed — cold and exquisite — like a corpse flower unfolding in his gut.

“You… wanted this.” Chuuya laughed through his nose...

And then — quieter, smaller, like a child muttering through a nightmare:

“Why didn’t you stop me? Stop me from begging... You… slept with me? I allowed you to.”

Silence.

“Why didn’t you just ask? You knew I would’ve…”

The stillness was worse than a scream. Worse than any lie he could’ve told.

“Why didn’t you just say you wanted to fuck me — wanted me — when I was awake?”

His hands curled into fists. He wanted to strike again. Wanted to break Dazai’s face, that perfect, unreadable mask.

“I would’ve let you.”

A breath shuddered from him, ripped from someplace deeper than lungs. Something animal. Something ancestral — it was almost as if he was trying to delete everything he had just read. As if that was an option.

“But now I can’t unsee this. I can’t unread what you wrote.”

He stared down at the corpse-like body beneath him, the blisters by his beautiful lips, the face he saw when he needed to survive… He hesitated for a moment, swallowing down bile.

“I can’t lie in your bed and pretend you didn’t fantasize about taking me apart. Dismembering me. Raping me… You wouldn’t do that, would you?”

His voice faltered. Finally,

And then — the softest thing. Like the last ash floating down after the fire has gone out: “Why does your face look like that?”

Dazai had not blinked this whole time. It felt as if he had forgotten to move as if he was already dead.

But then his lips moved.

A whisper. More breath than voice.

“Because I don’t feel shame. You forget… everytime”

And that — that — was the thing that shattered Chuuya. Not the silence. Not the lie. Not even the grotesque betrayal of the body beneath him.

But the truth.

Because Chuuya knew that Dazai didn’t feel shame. He never had.

And that was the difference between them.

Because Chuuya did .

And now, he would carry Dazai’s absence of shame like a tumor inside his chest — growing, strangling, calcifying into the thing that would eventually kill whatever part of him had once believed they could be anything at all.

Dazai wasn’t well enough to argue, actually.. The words he spoke made Chuuya feel as though the whole room was suddenly in slow motion; as if he was being pulled back. “...I forget? Everytime?” he repeated as if those words made sense.

He crawled off the bed, his eyes wide with wildness… he suddenly began to tremble, but it wasn't as if he was scared, in fact it was as if he knew.

Had he always known how sick Dazai was?

The room had stopped feeling like a room.

Chuuya stood in it — beside the ruin of a man he once thought he could fix — but his body felt miles away, as though someone else had taken up residence inside his skin. The walls closed in without moving. The silence howled louder than any scream could. His fingertips still tingled from the pressure he'd put around Dazai's throat.

He didn’t remember backing away from the bed. But he was standing now. Somehow. At the far end of the room, barely breathing. Watching Dazai’s chest rise with a mechanical rhythm. Up. Down. Barely. As if kept alive by muscle memory alone.

"...I forget? Every time?"

He whispered it aloud, not to Dazai, not even to himself — but to something hovering just beyond comprehension. He felt like he’d walked in on a secret he wasn’t supposed to know. A cycle, ancient and raw, that Dazai had danced through a thousand times and never told him about .

The worst part wasn’t the sickness. Or the drawer. Or even the erection that still throbbed beneath fevered sheets.

It was that distant, glassy look in Dazai’s eyes.

He wasn’t really here.

He never had been.

Chuuya's knees buckled, and he caught the dresser for balance. His palm smeared against old wood, damp with sweat not his own. The scent of bleach. Paper. Blood. Shame. All the ghosts pressed into the air like dried flowers.

His boots scraped the floor as he moved — slowly, with the drag of something half-dead — toward the door.

He didn’t look back.

Not once.

The hallway outside the infirmary felt longer than it should’ve. The lights buzzed overhead like flies trapped in a jar, and the shadows under each door stretched too far, too thin, like they were trying to reach him. 

He didn’t run.

He wanted to.

But he didn’t.

By the time he stepped outside, the city had turned to sleet. Cold that didn’t sting — it soaked . Slithered beneath collar and cuff, pooled in his boots, weighted every movement like guilt. He walked without thinking. One foot. Then the other. The world unfurled around him like a dream he’d forgotten how to wake from.

He ended up at the old bar three blocks from the harbor — the one they used to hide in after bloodier missions, after Dazai had done something clever and Chuuya had done something violent. 

It smelled the same.

Burned citrus. Cheap soap. Loneliness.

They didn’t ask what he wanted.

Just poured.

Hours passed, or maybe days.

Time wasn’t real here.

He drank until his hands stopped shaking. Until the heat in his chest was no longer rage but something emptier — the hollow echo after a scream. He stared at his reflection in the whiskey glass and didn’t recognize it. Eyes too dark. Mouth too pale.

Was he sick? Had he drunk too much already? 

He left without paying.

No one stopped him.

The alley outside was lit by the kind of orange light that made everything look haunted. Chuuya leaned against the brick wall, breath misting in the air like a dying engine, and lit a cigarette with fingers that didn’t quite feel like his own.

Everything seemed as if it was moving, as if he was on a rollercoaster and this was all just a daydream, a flashback? Something seemed weirdly familiar about this street and the way it was lit.

And then—

A laugh.

Light. Familiar.

“Still got that dumb fucking pout.”

He turned too fast — the world swayed — but there he was.

Albatross?

Leaning against a rusted fire escape like he belonged there. Braid damp with the mist, jacket half unzipped, eyes hidden behind smudged glasses. He looked... exactly the same.

Too much the same.

Chuuya’s mouth parted. No words came, he just stared.

“You always sulk better than anyone,” Albatross said, that crooked grin tugging the corners of his mouth. “Thought I’d drop in.. how ya doin kid?”

Chuuya couldn’t speak. Couldn’t move. His legs had gone to stone.

“You’re not—” he finally managed. “You’re not here. ”

Albatross tilted his head. “So what if I’m not? Don’t Ghosts show up when they are needed. Either that or visiting someone that hasn't got long..”

“You’re dead.” The words cracked on his tongue. “You— I held your fucking ribs in… you were… in half. You…. thought you saved Doc”

A pause.

A softer voice.

“I know.”

Chuuya’s voice caught in his throat, his eyes becoming blurry as he tried to hide his pain, he felt the world swaying and his knees buckled again, this time his  knees hit pavement. Rain soaked through the knees of his pants. “Why now?” he asked, quieter. “Why tonight?”

Albatross shrugged, pulling something from his pocket — a crushed, faded cigarette. He didn’t light it. Just let it hang between his teeth like an old habit.

“Wanted to see if you were using my Motorcycle yet..how's that going?” 

Chuuya just stared up to the male, maybe he was translucent he couldn't tell, he wanted his body to stay alert and awake, if Albatross was there he would have noticed the lack of response.. So he decided to add.

“...it's because you’re starting to sound like him.”

That did it.

Chuuya’s head snapped up. “ Fuck you. ” his sadness turned into anger like usual. 

“No, really,” Albatross said, that grin now barely a ghost itself. “The way you stared at him. Like he owed you something more than what he is. You knew better.”

“He knew better,” Chuuya hissed. “He knew I loved him. He could’ve— I would’ve—”

“But he’s Dazai,” Albatross interrupted, gentle now. “He doesn’t need your permission to destroy himself. He just needs you nearby to prove he still can.”

Chuuya’s hands shook. Did albatross know about how fucked up Dazai was? Is that why Dazai didn't like The Flags? Did they know?

“Why didn’t you tell me?” he whispered. “When you were alive…That it was all gonna fall apart like this. That he did that to me?.. That his mind was that twisted..?”

Albatross smiled.

And for the first time — it looked sad.

“I didn’t know.”

Silence followed, wet and heavy. Chuuya lowered his head, chest hitching with breaths that hurt too much to finish. it seemed like Albatross was about to vanish.. 

“Don’t go,” he said. “Please… just… not yet.”

Albatross smiled, his eyes looked glossy despite being able to see straight through them now, he reached out his hand to Chuuya’s and he opened it.. Naturally. 

But when he looked up the alley was empty.

Rain. Neon. A single cigarette butt crushed under his boot.

That was all.

He became quite dizzy after that.. Remembered stumbling but that was all.

He woke up hours later in a doorway two blocks away. Rain had stopped. His coat was stiff with dried water and bile. His mouth tasted sour as if he had thrown up recently.

His head was pounding, the light of day was too bright, but he looked down.

In his fist — clenched tight, as if he’d fought to keep it — was a scrap of something .

A strip of worn cloth.

Faded yellow and frayed at the edge.

It smelled like oil. Like gunpowder. Like the old garage they used to race motorcycles out of before they were old enough to die properly.

Albatross’s bandana.

It shouldn’t have been real.

But it was…

He felt as if he was losing his mind, a tear rolling down his cheek as he felt the ache of grief deep within his chest.

Chapter Text

Dazai had slept, or so he assumed.. He blinked, noticing the difference in his room.. He could smell it himself now, he wasn't sure if that meant he was getting better.

It had that hospital scent turned hostile — filtered through rot, something sharp and half-digested clinging to the walls like mold. The mattress sagged beneath a weight it was never meant to hold this long. The air was humid, sour with breath not meant for living.

Thin gray light slit through the blinds like a scalpel. Just before dawn — that vile, in-between hour when the living hesitate and the dead reconsider. The walls didn’t speak, but they listened. And the stillness wasn’t silence. It was restraint.

Dazai lay sprawled in bed. Barely stitched together. A body that hadn’t decided if it wanted to keep being one.

The IV bag beside him had long since collapsed. The tube dangled from its pole like a vein drained dry. But the catheter remained — still embedded in the back of his hand , taped down, bruised and swollen. The flesh around it was blotched yellow and red, puffy where infection whispered. The gauze was soft with moisture, clinging like a parasite.

A needle hole that waited. For fluid. For poison. For orders.

His mouth hung open slightly, a dry split cleaving the lower lip. Breathing was effort. A wheeze dragged through his throat like cloth over broken glass. His chest rose — once. Twice. The third time, it stalled, as if considering whether it was worth the energy.

Then the door opened.

Ogai Mori entered like a blade slipping into flesh — quietly, with purpose. Gloves already on. Eyes cold. The scent of antiseptic followed him like a curse. He didn’t pause to speak softly. He didn’t look for signs of life.

He didn’t need to.

“I think you’ve rested long enough.”

Dazai didn’t move, didn't even attempt to sit.

“You’ve had twelve hours,” Mori continued, fingers brushing the empty bag. “That’s indulgent. Most men don’t get twelve seconds in my care without bleeding out more than I had put in.”

Still, Dazai didn’t speak. Just breathed — shallow, thin. Alive only in the most technical sense.

Mori reached down.

With the sharp indifference of a mortician, he ripped the IV tubing loose , tearing the tape from Dazai’s wrist. The catheter remained — tethered into his flesh , pulsing faintly. Blood welled up, dark and slow, tracing a line down his knuckles.

Dazai flinched. His body gave a little jolt. But no sound. It wasn't as if he was scared of his own blood, he wasn't even scared of mori.

Mori didn’t glance down. He smoothed his coat sleeves. Taking off his latex gloves.. 

 “Chuuya’s gone again. I suggest you know what that means…I expect you to find him. The sooner the better.

Dazai’s lips parted, barely. Dry skin cracked, flaking.

“I can’t—stand,” he whispered. The voice didn’t sound human. It sounded like wind in a bone-dry throat, the sensation of talking caused him to want to cough.

“Then crawl.” Mori was already turning. Already halfway gone. “No one’s paying for your dignity, Osamu. Just your function.”

The door clicked shut like a final incision.

Silence returned. Not peace — just absence.

Dazai lay there.

He didn’t move for a long time.

Then, one leg dragged itself over the edge of the bed. The other followed, twitching with misfired nerves. His heel struck the tile, slipped in a slick of sweat. His elbow hit the wall. A wet thud. He left a bloody smear where his palm caught himself , split skin peeling like old paper around his lips.

He stood.

Somehow.

Bones trembling. Breath catching. He swayed like a drunk in a storm — a marionette with half its strings rotted through.

His eyes were open. But wrong. Unfocused. Fevered. As if he was staring at something behind the walls. Something only he could see.

His mouth worked without sound. A word he didn’t say. Maybe a name. Maybe an apology.

Still —

He walked.

Because he was told to.

The alley reeked of something left behind — wet brick, piss, iron. The streetlight above sputtered like it was choking on its own electricity, bleeding orange across the pavement. Shadows dragged long and misshapen, stretching like corpses refusing to lie still.

Chuuya’s boots scraped pavement as he dragged himself down the curb, every step a battle against the weight in his limbs. His headache pulsed behind his eyes like something alive and angry, chewing through the walls of his skull. The air was damp. His mouth tasted like spoiled wine and vomit. His stomach turned every few seconds — not from drink, but from something deeper, more corrosive.

Everything was off. Loud. Tilted.

The street swam a little when he looked up.

That’s when he saw him.

Not clearly. At first, Dazai was a silhouette half-eaten by shadow — swaying slightly, a smear of black against brick. Then light caught his face.

No, not his face. What was left of it.

“...Fuck.”

Chuuya’s body moved before his thoughts did, stumbling forward with clumsy, swaying steps. “You’re out of your fucking mind,” he said, voice raw.

Dazai didn’t answer. He leaned against the wall like his spine had snapped somewhere in the middle and hadn’t realized yet. One leg was trembling uncontrollably, spasming at random intervals. His face was grey. Not pale — grey . His lips were blood-slicked and cracked. One eye crusted shut. The other... vacant.

His breath made a sound like something trying to escape a throat already half-sealed shut.

Chuuya staggered closer, the reek hitting him all at once — bleach, bile, blood, fever . The kind of heat that clings to you after someone’s died in a room and no one opened the window.

“Why the fuck did you come?” Chuuya demanded.

No answer.

Only a faint wheeze. A shift in Dazai’s jaw that might’ve been recognition. Or seizure.

“You’re seriously fucking dying and you’re out here because Mori told you to find me? You’re not even—” He swallowed, bile crawling up his throat. “You’re not here , Dazai. You’re not fucking here.”

Dazai swayed slightly.

“You should be in a coma,” Chuuya said, voice rising, fingers curling. “You should be on life support, not out here stumbling around like a goddamn revenant!”

Still nothing.

Chuuya couldn't tell if he was seeing things, still he shuddered as he took a breath.. Just the sound of wet breath and fevered stillness. Was all he was getting from Dazai.

Chuuya stepped in. Closer. His eyes stung.

“You’re... sick,” he hissed, his eyes staring at Dazai.. It wasn't as if he was saying this for the first time.

He didn’t mean fever. He didn’t mean fragile. He meant sick in the marrow. A sickness you weren’t supposed to recover from.. The type of sickness that could get you locked up for your whole life because you became obsessed.. Deranged and sociopathic.

“You’re sick , Dazai. You’re sick in the head . I can’t unread what you wrote—what you did —you should be fucking put down for it! You are fucking insane and you do nothing but disgust me.”

And Dazai —— eyes glassy, body sagging forward like a man already halfway dead —said:

“...I know.”

Just that. Quiet. Unflinching. Like he wasn’t even there to hear himself say it.

Chuuya froze. For a moment, he forgot how to breathe.

“You—what?”

Dazai’s eyes rolled sluggishly toward him, unfocused. “I know,” he repeated, softer this time. Ruined vocal cords shredding the syllables into whispers. “I know what I did, Can’t you see. That's why I… ” he stopped speaking as if the fever was making him more honest and less argumentative.. It wasn’t remorse. It wasn't a defeat. It was a fact.

Plain. Inevitable. Accepted.

And that — that was the part that broke something inside Chuuya.

He staggered back half a step, then forward again; His whole body swayed with sudden nausea causing his knees to give out, hitting pavement hard.. The sound echoed. He didn’t care.

“You’re not even trying to defend yourself,” he said. His voice cracked. He hated when Dazai just agreed with him.  “You’re not even fighting me. What the fuck is wrong with you? Osamu?”

Dazai’s weight slumped forward. He didn’t catch himself. Didn’t speak. He fell to his knees with the weight of his body.

“You don't want me to hit you?” Chuuya spat trying to get angry or at least frustrated. “Do you want me to kill you? You want me to do the work for you , is that it?!”

Still nothing.

Just that trembling body, that heat pouring off him like rot, that damn catheter still taped into his hand , twitching with every half-beat of his heart.

The tears came before Chuuya could stop them, he crawled forward… his arm threading under Dazai’s arms as if to help him straighten up properly, He shoved his face into Dazai’s shoulder like it might hold him up. Like it might anchor him before he fell all the way in. 

It could have been a hug.. To passerbyers.

It was as if these two men didn't need anyone else, their twisted and sick minds worked together and supported each other in this hallowed and grotesque world.. Each of them held the strings for the other and manipulated one another when they needed it the most. 

“you…know…I saw him,” the ginger haired male whispered.

“Who..?” the brunette croaked, sounding as if he had phlegm choking him halfway down his throat.

The other’s voice cracked open like an old wound. “I saw Albatross.”

That made Dazai’s eyes twitch. Just once, a subconscious reaction.

“I don’t know if it was real. If he was really there… I don’t know if I’m breaking even more than I realised. But he was there, Dazai. He was there .” Chuuya choked. The air around them didn’t move.

Dazai made a quiet noise of attention… as if he was really interested in what Chuuya was saying. In reality he was grateful to feel the gentle squeeze of another person's arms around his body.. He could feel every tremble and breath in chuuya’s small frame..even the sound of his heart thumping against his.. He looked down, trying to keep his thoughts quiet.

 “He..said I was starting to sound like you. Like you . And I hated how much that made sense.”

His hands clenched into fists, gripping the fabric of Dazai’s coat, pulling him closer, like maybe if he could just hold him tight enough, it would fix something.. Or everything.

“I miss them,” he whispered, his voice rattling as the flow of tears began.. 

“I miss The Flags. I miss them so fucking much it feels like I can’t breathe sometimes.” Chuuya buried his face into Dazai’s shoulder even more, his hug borderlining too tight

“I can't.. Really remember what they look like or sounds like…..Albatross, Doc, Iceman, Lippmann, PianoMan… their names feel foreign to me..like as if maybe I am going crazy. Am I talking to ghosts? I should drink more so I don’t scream their names.. And sound insane.” 

His voice was eerily calm as he continued, talking about them as if maybe they appeared to him during a vivid nightmare. As if he was second guessing his own reality.

“They left me. They always leave.” Chuuya whispered, his tears soaking into Dazai’s black trenchcoat.

“It’ll be you next, you cant cope with me and you leave every fucking time, even when you're still standing in front of me. It's like you're never fully present, never fully listening.”

His breath hitched, guttural.. Shaking now as he squeezed dazai so hard it would have crushed any normal person.

“ Everyone always fucking leaves me! ”

He pulled back just far enough to stare at Dazai, both of his eyes looked at the way the other male looked.. Despite being so unwell he still looked weirdly secure and anchoring.

“I don’t want to do this anymore,” he whispered. “I don’t want to wake up. I don’t want to fight. I don’t want to be here if it’s just me.”

The words lingered.

Ugly.

True.

A confession without a plan.

And then — softly, like gravel shifting under water — Dazai cleared his throat.

His body moved slowly, like it was trying to remember how. His eyes didn’t brighten. His shoulders didn’t lift. But something inside him twitched.

“I understand,” he rasped. 

Chuuya blinked, stunned into silence.

Dazai’s gaze drifted skyward, unfocused. The orange lamplight painted him in shades of wax and corpse-grey.

“I still see Odasaku sometimes,” he whispered. “In hallways. In my sleep. On rooftops. He speaks to me too.. I see him when I… consider another method of suicide.. When I’m slipping”

He didn’t smile. He didn’t cry. Just remembered. Blankly. Softly. Horribly.

“I think he’s waiting for me. But I never catch up. Mori always finds me..”

Chuuya couldn’t look away.

Dazai’s eyes didn’t meet his.

“They all die,” he said. “Every person I’ve ever cared about gets an easy escape. Yet.. I find myself struggling to go”

And he didn’t say the rest. He didn’t need to.

But I’m still here.

Still here.

Still walking.

Still breaking everything he touches.

Still surviving what he wasn’t built to endure.

Chuuya sat frozen. Knees in the dirt. One hand is still tangled in Dazai’s coat.

The silence between them stretched too long.

Too raw.

Then Dazai moved.

Tried to stand.

Failed.

Tried again.

His legs buckled — not like they were weak, but like they had forgotten how to exist beneath him. His knees hit the ground with a wet sound that wasn’t bone or skin, but something internal — something failing. Chuuya jerked forward instinctively, arms out, but Dazai pushed him away with a trembling twitch of his hand.

“I’m fine,” Dazai rasped. The words scraped out of him like rusted nails being dragged through a throat gone raw.

“You’re not,” Chuuya snapped, standing fast. “You’re fucking not. Your nose is bleeding and your skin’s the color of death. You look like you were pulled out of a mass grave.”

Dazai didn’t argue. Didn’t look at him. He just turned, slowly — and started walking.

Not with purpose. Not with destination. Just forward.

One dragging step after another, his body swaying like a marionette with severed strings. His boots scraped the concrete like they were too heavy for his bones.

“Where the hell are you going?” Chuuya called, still rooted to the spot.

No answer.

Just the sound of boots on cracked asphalt. The low wheeze of ruined breath.

Chuuya hesitated. His jaw clenched. Then got up and he followed.

Because he always followed. No matter how much he hated it. Hated him .

The walk was long — longer than it should’ve been. Through alleys that stank of salt and piss, past broken fences and shivering streetlights. The early morning hung low, ash-colored, leaking cold. The kind of cold that clung to marrow.

Dazai stumbled twice.

The second time, he hit the wall with a groan he didn’t even finish. He dragged himself off it without comment, sweat soaking the collar of his shirt. His fever clung to him like smoke, skin shimmering faintly even in the dead light. He wasn’t just sick — he was failing . Body first. Mind second.

He shouldn’t have been walking.

He shouldn’t have even left bed.

And Chuuya knew it.

Knew it with every aching step as he watched Dazai unravel one movement at a time.

Finally, they reached it.

The docks.

Desolate. Silent. Choked in mist.

And tucked between two rust-throttled stacks of cargo: a single shipping container. Crooked door. Half-collapsed roof. Number 17 barely clinging to the paint.

Dazai walked down, slipping on the sand, and Chuuya could see his hands trembling violently. As he stepped inside or should I say slumped.

Chuuya followed.

The air inside was dead. Metallic. Not just cold — hollow . A mattress lay on the floor like an afterthought. The blanket twisted and stained. No sheets. No comforts. A cracked mug. A bent coat hanger. One photo on the wall — faces carved out like wounds.

Nothing else.

No drawings.

No journals.

No plans.

Just… resignation.

Dazai dropped onto the mattress like his strings had been cut. He didn’t brace himself. Didn’t aim. Just fell. Sprawled sideways, shivering, mouth parted, eyes half-lidded.

Chuuya hovered in the doorway, he was surprised. He had many questions but he didnt feel like asking them all right now. “This is it?” he asked quietly. “This is what you came back to? Its no so special”

Dazai didn’t lift his head.

“When Mori thinks I’ll try again,” he mumbled, voice half-melted by fever, “he keeps me in the infirmary. Easier to manage. Easier to clean.” His head thunked softly against the wall, taking shallow breaths as if he couldn't breathe right anymore.

“But this… this is mine. This is where I go when I want to stop being seen.”

He turned his face slightly, cheek pressed to the mattress like he was trying to melt into it. His hair clung to his forehead, soaked in sweat. His breath wheezed, shallow and high.

“I really shouldn’t have left bed,” he added, his teeth chattering as his lips turned a bluish colour.. He was very cold.

It wasn’t an admission.

It was a death sentence he hadn’t expected to read aloud.

“I can’t feel my hands,” he whispered. “I haven't even pissed since I drank the bleach... But I had a thought… if it was going to happen, it should happen here . Where it’s quiet. Where I don’t have to apologize… I just.. Have to… close my eyes and-”

He coughed, a ragged sound that wet the air. His ribs shuddered under the fabric of his shirt, it hurt as he whimpered as he clutched to his chest.

Chuuya stepped in and shut the door behind him. The container screamed as the hinges moved. Metal echoed metal. He stood there for a moment — just breathing. Just trying not to feel the cold guilt in his chest.

Then he walked over, crouched next to the mattress, knees cracking.

“You really think this is it,” he said. Not asking.

Dazai gave the barest nod. Or maybe it was just the twitch of a body too far gone.

“I wish I could’ve gone out gentler,” he whispered. “Not like this. Not wet with fever and regret. Not stinking of bleach and failure.”

He looked scared.

Truly.

Eyes not glassy with apathy, but raw with the realization that he might not wake up. Not from some noble final act — but from something stupid. Something simple. Something real .

Chuuya sat down onto the dirty mattress and slowly rested against the wall, letting his knees pull up to his chest.

“I’m not letting you die here,” he said, voice flat. Dazai’s eyes barely moved. But they heard him.

“You shouldn’t have walked this far. You shouldn’t have even got out of bed. You’re too fucking sick. But you did it anyway, like the suicidal bastard you are, and now you’re half-dead on a piss-stained mattress in a tin coffin—”

He broke off. Closed his eyes. Pressed fingers into his temple. “My head’s still pounding,” he muttered. “I hate that I’m here. I hate that I followed you.”

A beat of silence.

Then— he glanced back down to Osamu, his legs brought up to his chest laying in a fetal position. 

“Hey now…If you come back with me,” Chuuya added, quieter now, “I’ll steal some more antibiotics from the infirmary. Maybe something for the fever. Something to take the edge off before your fucking heart gives out.” he said it in an attempt to change the gloomy atmosphere.

No answer.

Just Dazai’s chest, rising.

Falling.

Barely.

Chuuya let his head fall back against the metal wall. “I’ll stay for a few hours,” he murmured. “Just to make sure you don’t slip when I blink.”

The container groaned with wind.

Dazai didn’t move again.

But he didn’t stop breathing.

And Chuuya didn’t leave.

Chapter Text

The air inside the shipping container had thickened again — not just in temperature or scent, but in texture, in mood, in the way grief seeps into the corners of a room and makes everything feel heavier.

It wasn’t just the fever radiating from Dazai's unmoving body, or the sour tang of sweat soaked into stained bedding. It was the presence of silence . Not absence — not peace — but something more suffocating. The silence that lingers when everything that can be said has already been buried.

Chuuya sat with his back pressed to the corrugated metal wall, knees pulled tight to his chest, chin resting on the ridges of his folded arms. The rust from the container's interior had left stains on his sleeves, faint orange smears that caught the dawn light like blood remembered.

Dazai was nearby. Still. Quiet. Draped in a blanket that had clung to his clammy skin like a death shroud. The mattress beneath him sagged under weight no longer resisted, and every breath — if it could be called that — was shallow enough to be mistaken for stillness.

Chuuya had checked, again and again. Pressed two fingers against Dazai’s neck with the precision of a surgeon and the desperation of a child.

Still alive.

Barely.

That should’ve kept him awake.

Should’ve. But didn’t.

Exhaustion crawled beneath his skin like black mold, and sleep crept in with it — not like a gentle sedative, but like something predatory. Something with teeth.

It came not with kindness, but with claws.

It began like all ghosts do — as memory.

Warm light.

Muted music.

The fragile lull of glassware clinking and inside jokes that never needed explaining.

The Flags’ bar was dim and golden, stained with the echo of a hundred nights like this — long shadows across scratched tabletops, cigarette smoke coiling in slow spirals toward the ceiling like incense in a temple of sinners. The air was thick with stale citrus peel, sandalwood cologne, and old ambition.

Lippmann sat cross-legged in a booth, voice quicksilver with gossip, his hands always moving — gesturing, laughing, teasing. Doc scribbled quietly in the margin of a dog-eared medical file, making notes that only he would ever understand. His glass sat untouched, a halo of condensation slowly soaking into a coaster warped with age.

Piano Man — always at the bar, always humming. His lighter snapped open, shut, open again — keeping time with the hum of fluorescent bulbs and the beating of hearts too fast, too young.

Iceman leaned against the wall like an afterthought, filing his nails with a blade that glinted like something prophetic.

And then — Albatross.

Late, as usual. Boots dripping with dock-water. That grin splitting his face like he’d stolen it from someone too alive to deserve it. He always entered like a storm dressed in leather and laughter.

Chuuya remembered this moment — remembered them . Not as friends. No, that word was too soft, too civilian. They were sharper than that. Closer than that. The Flags weren’t a bond. They were a formation — a front line against loneliness, a barricade built of sweat, jokes, secrets, and blood.

They were a rebellion.

And like all rebellions, they were doomed.

The door opened again.

But this time — there was no voice, no laugh, no footstep light enough to belong to a friend.

There was just pressure.

Not the kind that could be seen, but the kind that existed in the marrow of things. A shift. A weight. Like the bar itself — the entire building, the air in their lungs — had inhaled too deeply and forgotten how to exhale. Like the world had paused on the edge of its own breath.

It didn’t feel like a person entering.

It felt like gravity breaking.

As though some divine fulcrum had been knocked loose, and now every surface leaned in strange directions — light bending, sound folding back into itself like paper catching flame.

Time didn’t stop.

It recoiled.

Then —
a sound.

Not a crash. Not a bang.
A crack .

Sharp. Wet. Intimate .

Like the snapping of a neck wrapped in silk.
Like a violin string breaking beneath the weight of a hand that forgot it was playing music.

Piano Man folded mid-laugh.

One vertebra at a time, spine compacting like a tower in freefall. His lungs collapsed inwards. His ribs crunched like glass wrapped in cloth. He hit the floor without resistance — without even understanding that he was falling.

His lighter spun once on the bar.
Clicked open.
Flame still dancing.

Like the moment itself had been preserved in amber.

Click.

Still open.

Still burning.

Doc reacted before thought had time to form.

That was always his instinct — not to attack, not to retreat, but to preserve. To fix.

His hand darted forward, reaching for Piano Man’s falling form, as if the sheer will of contact could undo what had already snapped.

And that — that was what damned him.

Gravity warped again.

Not in a way that made sense. Not up or down or sideways. It twisted — curling in on itself like a fist clenched around the very idea of mercy.

Doc's body peeled open.

That’s the only way to describe it.

The skin along his chest split from the pressure inside, ribcage tearing free like petals ripped from a flower that had never bloomed properly. His lower half remained for a heartbeat longer — a grotesque imitation of balance — and then was gone.

Evaporated into red mist.

Blood didn’t spill.
It hovered .

Suspended. Hanging like smoke.
Then, in one gentle moment — it fell.
Rain in a room without sky.

“DOC!”

Albatross didn’t stop screaming.

He didn’t even realize it at first — the raw animal howl tearing up his throat until it scraped his vocal cords into shreds. It wasn’t a name anymore. Not really. Just a sound. A denial trying to rewrite the world by force.

His arms had locked around what remained of Doc’s upper torso, blood-soaked and twitching with the last dying sparks of nerve endings. One shoulder blown apart. The neck at the wrong angle. One eye glazed, the other still blinking — like it was trying to process why the rest of him hadn’t followed.

“Hold on,” Albatross breathed — panicked, pleading. “You’re okay. You’re gonna be okay. We’ll call someone. We’ll—fuck, Doc, stay with me! ”

His fingers trembled, pressing down on flesh that had already begun to slacken. His knees slipped in blood, boots losing grip, the whole floor tilting as if the room was following the bodies into collapse.

He clutched tighter.

Held on harder.

As if physical proximity could undo death.

“Don’t look at me like that,” he whispered, the words catching mid-choke. “Don’t look like you already know. You don’t get to— you don’t fucking get to go first! ”

He shook him once — too hard, too desperate.

Doc’s head lolled sideways, teeth gritted in a grimace that had once been a smile.

No answer.

No sound.

Just a single, involuntary twitch of the fingers curling around Albatross’s sleeve. Then stillness.A long, aching stillness. It broke something in him. Clean through the center.

Not a sob. Not even a sound.

Just a gasp.

A full-bodied, breathless collapse inward, like something vital had turned to dust inside his ribs and would never grow back.

The bar should have been loud.

Should have been screaming.

But there was nothing.

Only blood cooling on the floor.

Only the fizz of electricity above.

Only the low groan of structural beams finally beginning to understand the weight of grief.

Lippmann’s body twitched in the corner — neck shattered, mouth still opening and closing like a puppet with no voice. Iceman’s knife had landed upright beside him, the tip buried in a floorboard. He never got the chance to use it. And Piano Man—
He looked small now.
Too small.

Like all the power, all the charisma, all the slow-burning heat of his presence had leaked out of him and into the wood beneath his cooling corpse.

No more humming.

No more rhythm.

Just slack hands and a broken spine.

And Chuuya—

Still motionless.

Still standing.

His eyes were wide — not in fear, but in disbelief. Like he couldn’t reconcile the warmth of that dream with the carnage now pooled around his ankles.

He wanted to speak.

Wanted to scream.

Wanted to move .

But the sound never came.

He watched Albatross drop forward, blood slicking both arms, hair stuck to his forehead, shoulders heaving in sobs that made no noise. The way grief hollowed a man out — made him smaller, somehow — more fragile than a child.

Albatross rocked slowly over Doc’s remains, whispering words that weren’t meant for anyone else. Quiet things. Broken things. Promises made too late.

“I was supposed to protect you,” he murmured. “I was supposed to be faster. I saw it coming—I should’ve— I should’ve— ”

He dug his forehead into what was left of Doc’s shoulder and let himself crack. Let himself rot. Let the world unmake him.

And above them all—

The air still bent sideways. The gravity still pressed inward like a fist. And the man who’d done this — the gravity-bending ghost of vengeance — hadn’t even spoken.

Paul Verlaine didn’t need to speak. The destruction was his dialect. And now, his message was clear. The Flags were gone .

Albatross looked up, his eyes vulnerable and frightened, his mouth moving with no words, Chuuya felt as if his soul was being pulled back and forced out of its shell.

The lips of his friend moved in slow motion as his eyes widened.. 

“Help me!” 

There was a flash of red.. As if Albatrosses neck back had been snapped… but Chuuya wasn't so sure.

The dream fractured.

Like glass breaking beneath water.

It didn’t end — it dissolved , melting at the edges, red bleeding into black, the sound of rain without sky falling over memory until all that remained was the heat of the blood and the terrible silence left behind.

He woke with a sound caught somewhere between a gasp and a drowning — not quite breath, not quite scream. It scraped raw up his throat like it had claws. His lungs bucked, seized, searching for air like a body surfacing from something black and bottomless.

For a moment, the world spun sideways. The lines of the container tilted around him — metal walls flexing in his vision, ceiling dipping low like it might fold inward.

His chest heaved.

It felt like he was still under it — still beneath the weight of blood, smoke, and bone. Like he’d dragged the corpses of the Flags out of the dream and stacked them under his ribs, heavy and wet and still whispering.

He blinked, slow and aching.

And that’s when he realized —

He wasn’t sitting anymore.

Somehow, in sleep, he’d shifted. Slipped.

Onto the mattress.

Beside him.

His body was half-curled into Dazai’s like he’d fallen into orbit. Legs tangled beneath the blanket, forehead pressed against the ridge where the collar met clavicle. His breath hitched as it caught — not on memory, not on fear, but on something quieter. Something he didn’t have a name for.

His hand was still fisted tight in the fabric of Dazai’s coat.

Gripping like it mattered.

Gripping like it had saved him .

He didn’t know when he’d reached out. Only that he had. That even unconscious, part of him had known he’d needed something to hold. His fingers loosened slowly — hesitant, as if letting go might undo whatever thread of breath Dazai had left in him.

“...Hey,” Chuuya murmured. His voice cracked. Fragile. Threadbare. The syllables scraped out of his throat like they’d been left in the cold too long.

“Are you still alive?” He meant it as a joke. He wanted it to be a joke. But it wasn’t.

Not with the way his voice caught at the end. Not with the way his mouth trembled just after. Not with the cold press of fear against the back of his teeth — fear so old it had forgotten how to scream.

He shifted — slow, careful, reverent. Knuckles brushed against Dazai’s arm first — sweat-slick, thin beneath the fabric. Then his chest — too still, too quiet.

Then—

There.

A twitch. A flutter.

Not enough to reassure him.

But enough not to mourn.

He pressed the back of his hand to Dazai’s neck, just beneath the jaw. The skin burned — that same sick, unnatural heat, like fire wrapped in frostbite.

“Goddamn it,” he breathed, the curse hollowed by something softer, more intimate. “You sleep quieter than the dead.”

His own body trembled. Only then did he notice how tightly curled he’d been — knees tucked, spine locked, muscles coiled like he’d been waiting for something to fall. Like grief had curled him into its lap and told him to stay there.

He wiped his face with one rough pass of his sleeve. The dampness was there. Salt. Heat.

Tears he didn’t remember shedding.

Tears not born of grief.

But of relief .

The kind you don’t earn. The kind you steal. The kind no one gets in the Mafia. “I dreamed of them again,” he whispered. His voice had shrunk — smaller now, young in a way it hadn’t been in years. Like the walls were listening, and he didn’t want to wake them.

“The Flags. All of them. I saw them die all over again.”

There was no answer. Not even a twitch this time.

But Chuuya kept speaking, because silence was worse. Silence was surrender. And he had nothing left to surrender .

“I miss them,” he confessed, eyes fixed somewhere past the ceiling. Somewhere far. “I never told them that. Not once. I was too busy trying to impress them. Trying to prove I wasn’t just Mori’s mutt with a pretty face and a short leash.”

His mouth twisted. “I thought if I barked loud enough, they’d stop hearing the chain.” He bit his lip. Hard. Enough to draw blood.

“Their faces…” He swallowed. “I’m losing them. Bit by bit. Like the dream’s getting moldy.” He glanced down at Dazai’s hand — pale, skeletal, the fingers curled faintly like they’d forgotten what they were for.

It trembled without moving.

He reached for it.

Not to hold.

Not yet.

Just to touch.

Just to check.

Still warm.

Still tethered to the world.

Still Dazai.

Still him .

Chuuya exhaled, the sound catching halfway. He shifted closer, tucking himself in with the instinct of someone used to sleeping beside absence. His forehead came to rest against the slope of Dazai’s shoulder — not softly, not dramatically — but simply . Like it was the only place left to go.

One arm draped itself across Dazai’s chest, loose and unthinking.

Not possession.

Not protection.

Just presence.

Just survival .

Because this wasn’t about love. This wasn’t about want. This was about refusal .

Refusal to leave. Refusal to lose. Refusal to forget the only man who’d ever been able to match him blow for blow, silence for silence. The air inside the container didn’t soften. The metal walls didn’t bend to cradle them.

Dazai didn’t wake.

But Chuuya stayed.

Stayed because leaving felt like death.

Because silence with Dazai was better than noise with anyone else.

Because for the first time in weeks — maybe months — he was more afraid of sleeping alone than waking up next to the man who’d torn him apart and still called it poetry.

And somehow, without understanding why, that felt like a beginning.

It was the chill that made him move again.

Not cold, exactly — but the sharp sting of temperature contrast, the way heat clings to a dying body long after the room has gone silent. Dazai was too warm. Not comfort-warm. Infection-warm . That fever-hum, high and electric under skin gone too pale to host it.

Chuuya shifted upright with a wince. His back cracked where the metal had pressed too long against his spine. His throat burned from the dream. From the salt. From all the things he’d swallowed down instead of screaming.

Dazai didn’t stir. Still half-curled, mouth parted slightly. Skin damp, lashes clumped from sweat. He looked like something unfinished — or something ruined in the middle of creation. Like God got halfway through building him and left the rest to rot.

The catheter still hung from his hand. Still taped in place.

Chuuya stared at it for a long moment, lips thin. The answer was obvious. It had always been obvious.

“You need medicine,” he said aloud — softly, like voicing it made it truer. “Real medicine. Not just this... mattress grave and a fever dream for company.”

No reply.

Not even a twitch this time.

Chuuya leaned over, brushing the back of his fingers along Dazai’s cheekbone. The heat nearly scalded.

“If you stay here,” he murmured, “you’re not gonna make it.” His own words clanged in his skull like a death toll. “You’re not gonna make it.”

The truth of it tasted like bile. But Dazai didn’t move.

Didn’t want to move. Chuuya could see that in the set of his jaw, in the way his limbs had settled into something resigned , not resting. That stilled Chuuya’s breath for a second. He swallowed thickly, glancing around the rust-bitten walls.

This wasn’t just some hiding place.

This was the place.

The end-of-the-road room. The coffin you build with your own hands. The room you go to disappear, not to recover.

Chuuya stood — too fast, too abrupt. His head swam, but he steadied himself. Focused.

“You’re not dying here, y’hear me?” he said, louder now. “I’m not letting you rot in this box like a fucking experiment gone bad.”

Still no answer.

But his fingers moved. Just slightly. As if caught in the current of Chuuya’s voice. It was enough.

“Okay,” Chuuya muttered, more to himself now, pacing back a step. “Okay, okay... think, Chuuya. Think.” He could take Dazai back to the infirmary — back to the sterile nightmare Mori called medical care. But the thought made something crawl under his ribs. The last time Mori got his hands on Dazai, the man left with more scars than he’d walked in with.

Dazai wouldn’t want that. He’d rather die in this box.

So.

A compromise.

A risk.

Chuuya’s hands curled into fists.

“…Fuck it.”

He exhaled slowly, and then crouched beside him again, this time gentler — more deliberate. His hand hovered above Dazai’s shoulder, then rested there with cautious pressure.

“Listen to me, ‘samu,” he murmured, lips near his ear now. “I’m gonna take you back.”

No reaction.

“I’m not dragging your half-dead ass to Mori. I’m not turning you over to whatever sawbones he keeps on standby. But you’re getting help.”

Dazai breathed — shallow, wet. Something between a wheeze and a whimper.

Chuuya braced himself.

“…You’ll stay with me.”

That did it.

A flicker.

Dazai’s brow furrowed, just slightly. One eye cracked — bloodshot, unfocused. But alive.

“I said,” Chuuya continued, quieter now, “you’ll stay in my room. Just ‘til you’re strong enough to stand without coughing blood.” There was something horrible in Dazai’s expression then. Not fear. Not anger.

Something closer to surprise. Like he hadn’t expected kindness again. Like he didn’t know what to do with it. Chuuya looked away quickly, a muscle twitching in his jaw.

“I’ll get antibiotics. Fluids. Something for the fever.” His tone sharpened, like he needed to push past the soft parts. “And maybe something for the fucking parasite living in your skull.”

Dazai made a noise — not a laugh, but the ghost of one. Like the breathless wheeze of an old cassette tape trying to play a forgotten joke.

“I’m serious,” Chuuya muttered, rising to his feet again. “You don’t get to tap out yet. Not when I’m still trying to piece myself together from what you wrote.”

He didn’t mean to say that. It slipped out — venom and vulnerability all at once.

The sketches. The letters. The journal entries.

The broken inside of Dazai painted across paper like an autopsy done in ink. Chuuya had read them. Had seen what Dazai really thought — what he remembered. What he still feared .

He hadn’t been able to look at Dazai the same way since.

And yet — here he was.

Dragging him back from the edge again.

“Don’t make me regret this,” Chuuya said, more to himself than the man at his feet.

Then, softer: “…Don’t make me scared to sleep beside you again.”

He didn’t wait for permission. Didn’t need it. With rough, practiced movements, he pulled the blanket tight around Dazai’s body, slid one arm under his knees, the other around his shoulders. The man was all heat and bone and quiet. Far too quiet. Dazai didn’t resist. Didn’t help, either. He just let himself be carried.

But Chuuya walked.

And before he even realized.. They were in the mafia.

The door clicked shut behind him with a sound that felt louder than it should’ve.

Chuuya exhaled, low and sharp, and let his back press to the wall of his room. His arms were aching. His boots were caked in rust. Dazai was still in his arms — lighter than he should be. Too light. Like his weight had been bleeding out by degrees.

The room was dark. Not dramatically. Just... lived-in dark. The kind of dark that knew what insomnia tasted like. Curtains half-drawn. A desk cluttered with old cigarettes and unopened letters. A bottle of something sharp, untouched since the last mission that ended with someone’s ribs cracked the wrong way.

He crossed the room and eased Dazai down onto the mattress — not gently, but carefully. Like placing something fragile that had once been dangerous.

For a second, he just stood there.

Watching.

Dazai’s chest rose. Fell. Barely.

The blanket stuck to him. His skin gleamed with fever-sweat. The line of the catheter still traced his hand — taped down, bruised beneath.

Still in place.

Chuuya licked his lips. Swore under his breath.

“I’ll be back,” he muttered, already turning toward the door. “Don’t make me regret that.”

The hall outside was cold — not from temperature, but from lighting. That white fluorescence Mori favored, the kind that felt more surgical than civil.

Chuuya kept his steps light.

He knew the way. Past the armory. Left at the storerooms. The infirmary was on sublevel two — behind a locked steel door, and, technically, always manned.

Except Mori’s confidence made people lazy.

He slipped through the security door with a code he wasn’t supposed to have — borrowed from a night he’d seen Mori patching up one of Elise’s tantrums.

Inside, it smelled like bleach and something worse.

Desperation, maybe.

Death with a dress shirt on.

He moved quickly, pulling open drawers with gloved fingers, keeping to shadows. A full tray of IV fluids. Broad-spectrum antibiotics — cephalosporins, levofloxacin. Antipyretics. Gauze. Alcohol swabs. A thermometer.

He hesitated at the drawer labeled “BLOOD BANK.”

Dazai’s blood type floated behind his teeth.

AB.

Universal recipient. Of course you are, Chuuya thought bitterly. Fucking parasite.

There was a bag already on the side, newly removed from the fridge as if waiting to warm to room temperature.

Moved.

He was gone before the on-shift medic finished his coffee break down the hall.

Back in his room, Dazai hadn’t moved. Chuuya laid everything out like a soldier setting traps — methodical, almost angry with precision.

He didn’t talk. Didn’t mutter threats. Just cleaned Dazai’s arm, tapped the IV line to flush it, and hooked up the fluids. He could see the shiver ripple under Dazai’s skin the moment the saline started. His fingers twitched — faint. Automatic.

Chuuya’s breath caught in his throat. “Don’t twitch like that unless you mean it,” he muttered. “I don’t need ghost stories in my bed.”

No answer.

Not even the wheeze this time. The blood came next. It took longer. Chuuya had to elevate the bag, hang it from the broken coat rack. Watched the red drip in — slow and syrupy — like the room itself had started bleeding.

His hands trembled once. Only once. He scrubbed them down after. Sat on the edge of the bed, shoulders slouched. The room felt smaller now. Too quiet. The kind of quiet that followed explosions.

Dazai made a sound — something between a sigh and a rasp. His head turned on the pillow.

Chuuya stiffened.

Waited. “...Still warm,” Dazai croaked, Chuuya knew he was on about the blood, it was in a place already waiting as if Mori had already had it all planned out for Chuuya.

It wasn’t a question. Chuuya turned to look at him. The fever had sunk deeper into the bones of his face, but his eyes were cracked open now — barely. Slits of shadow and knowing.

“Barely,” Chuuya said.

A pause.

“Did you steal it?” Dazai asked. His voice was rough, wet. Like gravel soaked in wine.

“Yeah,” Chuuya replied. A longer pause. Dazai blinked slowly. “Good boy.”

Chuuya didn’t smile.

Didn’t answer.

He stood. Turned his back. Started organizing the supplies again, wiping down the needle tray with clinical swipes, like he hadn’t just been called obedient by the man who once tried to destroy him to feel something.

Behind him, Dazai’s breath caught — and then quieted. Not unconscious again, but... dimmer .

Chuuya didn’t turn. Instead, he muttered: “You can stay until you’re strong enough to leave.”

Another pause. “After that... we’ll see.”

Chapter Text

The room was still. Still like grief.

Still like the breath before a trigger pull.

Chuuya stood in the doorway, sleeves rolled up to the elbows, red-rimmed eyes sunk in their sockets like bruises that had forgotten how to fade. His boots were off. His knuckles were split. His mouth, pressed into a thin, tired line.

Dazai lay motionless in bed — Chuuya’s bed — which felt like blasphemy and intimacy tangled into one. That fact alone made something under Chuuya’s ribs twitch, like a laugh that turned into a scream halfway up and got caught behind his teeth.

He hadn’t planned for this.

He hadn’t meant for it.

But it was done. And now, it was war by other means.

Dazai looked like a corpse that hadn’t made peace with it.

A patient on death row, tangled in a nest of tubing and wires, the metallic scent of IV drip threading the air like thin chains. His lips were parted, dry and split, ointment crusting at the corners like pus turned ceremonial. The shallow rise and fall of his chest sounded more like plumbing than breath — a broken faucet left to cough itself dry.

And he stank. God, he stank.

Like decay and memories that rotted where they stood. Sweat soaked deep into the threads of his shirt, fermented like old wine gone cruel. Dead skin curled off his limbs like snow. His breath carried bile and iron and the unmistakable scent of something that had given up.

Chuuya cracked the window. Just a sliver. Enough for the wind to hiss inside like disapproval.

He fetched the basin himself — two doors down, rusted faucet, lukewarm water — and filled it halfway. Antiseptic. Soap. Swirled until the surface frothed like a wound that wouldn't close. No gloves. Let the chemicals bite into his hands. Let the sting replace something else.

The sponge was coarse. The kind meant for cleaning surgical trays or scrubbing rot off steel. But it worked. Water sloshed as he wrung it out, then, slowly — methodically — he started.

Jawline. Neck. Under the chin. Dazai didn’t flinch. Not a twitch.

Chuuya cleaned him like a corpse. Not out of disrespect. But out of reverence. Out of the bone-deep understanding that nobody else would.

He peeled the bandages back. Stripped the shirt off gently, like he was unwrapping something sacred and ruined. Skin revealed in patches — pale, nearly translucent. Bruises bloomed like old violets. The scars were newer. Some are angry. Some are already ghosting into pink.

The hands came next. Crusted knuckles. Nails packed with filth. He brushed them — hard. Deliberate. Until blood threatened to rise beneath the skin like truth under denial. Dazai flinched once — a microtremor, just enough to remind Chuuya that he was still a body, not just an object.

Chest. Stomach. Downward.

No modesty. No meaning. Just necessity. Just survival disguised as care.

Then the legs. Ankles. Feet.

The feet were warzones — blackened soles, cracked pads, glass embedded like punishment. Chuuya held one heel in his hand and grimaced, picking out shards like relics from some forgotten battlefield.

“You fucking animal,” he muttered, not angry. Just… tired. “Barefoot like some lunatic cult prophet. You smell like a prophecy gone wrong.”

He soaked them longer. Let the filth loosen. Rubbed between the toes like it might undo something older than dirt. Dried them with a towel that used to be white. Folded the corners over each foot like offerings.

He found the feeding tube last. Slid the sterile packaging open like opening a blade. Tilted Dazai’s chin. Lubed the line. Threaded it into his nostril pushing it down the throat. His body twitched, gag reflex fluttering, but not enough to protest.

“Keep breathing, swallow it down if you can ‘kay”  Chuuya muttered, tucking the line behind one ear. “There we go”

He dressed him in silence — an old shirt, soft from time, lounge pants, socks that didn’t match. Dazai moved like a marionette caught between scenes. Chuuya handled him with the care of a technician resetting broken circuitry.

Then the sheets.

Cleaned his own room. Then Dazai’s. Hauled the linens into the hall. Replaced them with a kind of brutal efficiency. Folded the blanket over Dazai’s frame. Rehooked the IV lines — blood, saline, antibiotics. Click-push-hiss. Repeat. A rhythm that had become his new god.

He did it all without thinking. Like prayer. Like penance.

Then the laundry.

Basket full. Towels, clothes, evidence. He carried it like a body. Down the hallway. Into the laundrette. Machines are already buzzing. Lights are too white, too cruel. He stuffed the load in. Too much soap. Didn’t care.

Caught his reflection in the dryer door. Didn’t look long. Just enough to confirm he still existed. Then turned away.

Microwave dinged. Food — hot, heavy, real. He brought it back, sat on the desk. Soup. Rice. A protein bar. Something green. Ate it like a punishment. Chewed each bite like it owed him something. Swallowed. Forced it down.

He needed to function.

Shower. Finally,

Clothes stripped slowly. Bandages unwrapped. Cuts still raw. One too red. One weeping. Let the water do the rest. Steam filled the stall like a confessional. He let it scold him. Let it scrape off layers that wouldn’t heal.

Hair soaked. Conditioner — indulgence. A ritual. Something he could control.

Teeth brushed. Gums bled. He didn’t flinch.

He stood there long after the water ran clear. Long after his skin turned pink. Just breathing. Just existing.

Then bandages. Clean. Neat. Hands steadier than they had any right to be.

He looked in the mirror. Really looked. Didn’t recognize himself.

Didn’t look away, not until he walked back out.

He passed them on the way back.
Two shadows at the hallway’s mouth — pale, silent, too angular to be called children anymore.

The Akutagawa siblings.

Ryunosuke stood like a warning sign — all wiry tension and poorly buried fight, his eyes gleaming sharp beneath the weight of too much history and not enough sleep. Chin lifted, jaw clenched. He looked like he might bare his teeth at any second.

Behind him, Gin. Smaller. Still. Silent in that practiced way — like she was born to be unseen. Her bangs veiled half her face, but her eyes were steady. Watching. Absorbing.

Chuuya didn’t stop. Didn’t flinch. Just dipped his chin once — low and firm — the nod of a soldier acknowledging another.

Ryunosuke didn’t return it. But he didn’t snarl either.

Five minutes later, Chuuya returned the same path, two sealed containers balanced in one hand. Still warm. Rice. Chicken. Soft-boiled eggs. Something green. Maybe seaweed. Maybe not.

No words. No knock.

Just offering.

Gin took the food. Their fingers didn’t touch. Ryunosuke’s stare didn’t budge.

Chuuya held his gaze.

Just long enough to say everything silence could carry.
Then he turned and left.

Back in his room, the air hadn’t moved.
Dazai was still in the bed — half-draped, half-wasted — like a relic too sacred to touch but too stubborn to die.

Chuuya closed the door behind him with a soft click.
Crossed the room. Dropped into the chair beside the bed like the gravity in him had finally given out.

And for the first time in what felt like a decade —
He exhaled.

A real breath. A breath not tied to obligation.
Not laced with adrenaline or rot. Just breathe.

He didn’t move for a long time.

Didn’t think. Didn’t count seconds. Didn’t brace for impact.

Just sat. One hand hanging between his knees. The other curled on the edge of the chair. His back hunched. Eyes half-lidded. Body folding into itself like something used too hard and too long.

The machines whispered their language. Click. Push. Hiss. Repeat.
Feeding tube shifting faintly. IV bag settling. Breath rattling softly from Dazai’s open mouth.

He looked less dead than before.

But only barely.

Blanket rising slowly. Breath by breath.
Hair slick against his forehead. Lips parted, still cracked, still healing. Chest lifting like it wasn’t convinced it was supposed to.

It wasn’t rest.
It wasn’t peace.

It was a stalemate carved out of fever and inertia.

Chuuya leaned back, let his skull press against the wall behind him. His eyelids fluttered. Didn’t close.

He didn’t sleep.

He just… paused.

Let his body sit where it landed. One leg curled beneath him. One hand, unintentionally, falling close to Dazai’s — not touching. Not quite. Just near enough to feel the heat of the fever still licking off his skin.

Time did what time does — passed unnoticed.
Until—

A sound.
Not loud.
Not dramatic.

Just a cough.

Wet. Deep. The kind of cough that doesn’t ask permission.

Chuuya’s body snapped upright like he’d been wired to it.

Dazai’s face twitched — forehead creasing, brows drawing inward like a memory he didn’t want had just brushed too close to waking.

Another breath. Another cough — sharper now.

Chuuya leaned in, one hand steadying the tube, the other ghosting along Dazai’s cheek.

“‘Samu,” he breathed, the nickname scraped raw against his tongue. “Easy. You’re okay. Don’t move. Just—just breathe, alright?”

A flutter behind Dazai’s lashes.

Then—

Eyes.

Not open. But not closed, either. Twitching. Trying. The faintest slit of brown behind fever-hazed lids. No focus. No recognition. But still — movement.

Still something.

Chuuya held his breath.

“Come on,” he muttered. “Don’t you fucking dare drift now.”

And slowly — like the world pulling itself upright after a bomb — Dazai’s eyes opened.

Just a crack.
But enough.

Red-rimmed. Dull. Glassy.
He looked not at Chuuya, but near him. Through him.

Then blinked. Slow. Dragging.

His lips shifted — not speech, but the idea of it.

A crack. A croak.
Then, like a dying punchline:

“...You changed the sheets.”

Chuuya made a sound — something between a laugh and a sob and a snarl. His hand curled into the blanket.

“You’re delirious,” he whispered, voice fraying at the edges. “That’s your first fucking comment?”

Dazai didn’t answer.
Didn’t smile.

But his eyes closed again — a different kind of closure this time. Not death. Not surrender.

Just sleep.

Real sleep.

The kind that waits on the other side of pain.
The kind that only visits when someone else is watching the door.

Chuuya stayed there.

Silent.

Exhausted.

And for once — just once —
He let himself believe that maybe, just maybe, this wasn’t the end.

It didn’t last.

That silence. That moment. That breath held too long and never quite released.

Maybe twenty minutes passed. Maybe less. Just long enough for Chuuya’s muscles to forget the shape of tension. Long enough for his eyes to blur at the corners. Long enough for his chest to loosen — not fully — but just enough to pretend.

He had started to drift.

Not into sleep — that was a luxury — but into something weightless. A state without memory. Half-conscious. Half-suspended. Like hovering over a grave and refusing to look down.

And then—

Dazai spoke.

Not a word, at first.
Just a fracture. A crack in the silence like a floorboard snapping under old weight.

“...Oda?”

Soft. Frayed. Torn from somewhere deeper than the lungs.

Chuuya’s eyes opened. Slowly. Like something heavy had just dropped inside his chest. He didn’t move. He let the name hang in the room like smoke from a house that had already burned down.

Oda.

The name didn’t just carry history — it carried judgment. Regret. Blood. Silence soaked in failure. A weight Chuuya had never dared touch. And now it was bleeding into the room, into the bed, into Dazai’s fever-wrecked whisper.

Dazai’s lips moved again, voice hoarse and shaking — cracking around every vowel like the truth itself couldn’t come out clean. “I knew you'd come,” he rasped. “I—I thought I was too late. I didn’t mean to—”

Chuuya sat up. The chair creaked under him, loud in the stillness.

His mouth opened — words catching in his throat, stuck between fury and fear. “Dazai,” he said, slow. Controlled. “It’s me.”

But Dazai wasn’t there.

Not really.

His eyes were wide now. Glassy. Fixed on something only he could see — something behind the present. His fingers twisted in the blanket, gripping it like a lifeline, or maybe a body that had already gone cold.

“I didn’t mean for them to die,” Dazai said. “I told them not to go, I told them it was— I tried—”

His voice broke like something physical — a splintered sound.

Chuuya’s hand twitched toward him. “Osamu.”

Still nothing.

Still Oda .

“I didn’t know they’d use it,” Dazai gasped, throat spasming. “I thought I was just talking. Just venting. I didn’t know they’d track it. I didn’t know they were listening—”

Chuuya froze. Cold swept through his spine, dragging pins behind it.

He knew this.
He had always known this.

Not confirmed, never confessed. But he had suspected.

Some slip of tongue. Some stories passed through the wrong channel. The Flags hideout location turned into a killbox.

And Dazai — Dazai the prodigy, the strategist, the double-edged mind — had been sloppy. Or careless. Or stupid. And The Flags paid the price.

His voice dropped to a whisper. Broken. Begging.

“Oda, please—tell them. I didn’t mean it. I didn’t think it would matter. I never meant—”

“Stop,” Chuuya said, voice cutting like wire.

But Dazai didn’t.

He was crying now. Dry, choked sobs. Fever-glazed, sunken into memory. His body arched slightly off the bed like his guilt was trying to claw its way out.

“Please—just tell them. Tell them I didn’t mean to sell them out.”

Chuuya stood so fast the chair slammed against the wall.

His breathing wasn’t normal. Too shallow. Too loud.

He stared at Dazai — that face he’d memorized in rage and mercy. His mouth is still moving. That hand still curled in the blanket like he could hold onto something that wasn’t already gone.

Chuuya stepped back.

Once.

Twice.

He didn’t yell.

Didn’t throw anything.

Didn’t demand an explanation.

Because what was there to explain?

He already knew. Didn't he? And now it was confirmed in the worst way possible — whispered like a confession to someone else’s ghost.

It wasn’t jealousy.
It was worse.

It was being left behind by a past that still haunted the man he nearly bled himself dry to keep alive.

So Chuuya walked.

Didn’t slam the door. Didn’t close it at all. Just let it hang there, half-open, like a wound left untreated.

The hallway passed in a blur — pale tile and rusted shadows. Every light flickering like it, too, wanted to pretend it hadn’t heard.

Chuuya didn’t stop until he hit the garage.

The bike was still there.

Albatross’s old beast — untouched, unspoken, preserved like an artifact from a time before betrayal. The tarp hung heavy over it. Dust lay thick. Cobwebs stretched across the handles like fingers refusing to let go.

He ripped the cover off.

Let it fall to the floor like old skin.

The machine underneath gleamed. Not because it was clean — but because it was waiting.

Waiting for someone to remember who the fuck they were.

He grabbed a rag. His knuckles were shaking, but he scrubbed anyway — down the tank, across the wheels, into the gears. Grease under his nails. Rain whispering on the roof above.

He didn’t speak.

Didn’t curse.

Didn’t cry.

Just cleaned.

Just moved .

Because if he stopped, he might remember the look on Dazai’s face — not the dying part, but the haunted part. The part that begged forgiveness from a man long buried, while Chuuya — still here — stood forgotten in the shadow of someone purer.

Eventually, he rolled the bike out.

Didn’t check the tires again. Didn’t hesitate.

Rain hit him as soon as the doors opened. Cold and insistent.

Helmet on the handle. He didn’t touch it.

The engine snarled to life like it’d never stopped breathing.

And Chuuya peeled out of the compound like a bullet looking for something to break.

The rain was needle-sharp now — sleeting sideways, cold as old sins. It bit into his face as he gunned the throttle, teeth clenched tight, fingers white-knuckled around the grips.

The wheels screamed as they tore into the street, water kicking up in fans behind him. Chuuya leaned forward into the speed like he was chasing something — or outrunning something else.

Yokohama blurred.

Grey buildings. Slanted rooftops. People beneath umbrellas that blurred into shadows. The world looked washed-out, surreal. Like someone had drained the city of color just to see what Chuuya would do with the grey.

He weaved through traffic like it wasn’t real — like each car was just another hallucination he could outpace. The tires hissed over painted lanes. Horns blared behind him. One driver cursed out the window. Chuuya didn’t hear it. Or didn’t care.

He veered into the oncoming lane.

The bike jumped the divider. Rain hit harder. A truck honked — deafening — skidding barely a meter to the side.

Chuuya didn’t flinch.

His eyes were glassy, mouth pressed tight, rain dripping from his collar and soaking through every layer of his clothes. The cold didn’t reach him.

Only the speed did.

Only the ache.

He tore through intersections like red lights were just suggestions. Cut a corner so hard the back tire skidded out and nearly clipped a parked car. No brakes. No signal.

Just forward.

Always forward.

The familiar streets began to shift — away from the business sector, away from the harbor. Into older neighborhoods. Into places with memories.

He passed shuttered windows, worn fences, cracked sidewalks where he’d once walked drunk with Albatross on one side and Doc on the other. Ghosts of laughter spilled behind his wheels.

Then — he saw it.

Old World.

The building stood like a wound in the rain — bricks darkened by water, roof slouched like a body that had taken one too many hits. The front window was still boarded. The door hung crooked on its hinge. The old sign remained:

Oʟᴅ Wᴏʀʟᴅ, faded letters half-swallowed by ivy and time.

No lights. No music.

Just a corpse of what used to be home.

Chuuya didn’t slow.

Didn’t stop.

But his eyes snapped to it. Locked on. For one second, the weight of everything threatened to tear the handlebars from his hands. Something sharp and wet clawed at his throat — not rain.

Not quite grief.

Just the unbearable ache of absence.

The Flags had built something there. Something real, even if it bled. And now it was just a ruin with a name.

He swallowed hard.

Gunned the throttle again.

The bike roared down the next hill, past the last line of houses before the world started to empty out.

He knew where he was going.

He always knew.

The cemetery sat just off the edge of the city, tucked behind a hill that turned into a wooded grove when the trees decided to care. The gate was rusted open. The roads leading in were cracked. No one ever came here but him.

He pulled the bike onto the gravel path and killed the engine. The silence hit hard.

Just the rain now.

And the low crunch of his boots on stone and moss.

He walked between the rows, eyes scanning instinctively. The world was fogged with mist, the air thick with wet leaves and the bitter scent of pine.

Then—

There.

Five stones. Cleaned regularly. Maintained. Reverent.

Albatross. Doc. PianoMan. Lippman. Iceman

No flowers today.

No incense.

Just rain.

Just Chuuya.

He stood there, letting it all soak through. Coat, skin, bones. He didn’t move. Didn’t kneel.

His jaw flexed once.

Then again.

“Fucking bastard,” he whispered — not to them. To himself. To Dazai. To the world.

To all of it.

He crouched slowly, resting his fingers against the cold stone of Albatross’s grave. The carved name blurred under the drizzle. So did Chuuya’s vision.

He didn’t cry.

But something in him cracked.

“I should’ve known,” he muttered, voice hoarse. “Should’ve known he’d fuck it all up.”

Silence.

Just the tap of rain on stone. Just the wind moving through the trees like it was trying to comfort the dead.

“I kept him alive,” Chuuya said, quieter now. “Even after this. Even after you. What the hell does that make me?”

No one answered. Not the stones. Not the sky.

But in that silence, something inside Chuuya settled.

Not peace.

But clarity.

Dazai wasn’t the only one haunted by ghosts.

And maybe, just maybe, it was time he stopped carrying them alone.

Chapter Text

Chuuya stumbled into a half-lit pub reeking of spilled beer, sour citrus, and smoke so old it had become part of the wallpaper. He paused just inside the threshold, blinking as his eyes adjusted. The place hadn't changed—still the same warped bar counter, the same uneven stools, the same bartender who didn't ask questions. The same corner booth with a broken overhead bulb.

He made his way toward it, shoes scuffing against sticky tile, and dropped into the cracked vinyl seat like something collapsing. For a long moment, he didn’t move. He just sat, staring at the empty space across from him.

He didn’t want to get blackout drunk. He told himself that. Whispered it like a mantra. But the truth slithered beneath the surface: he wanted to hurt. Not forget—never forget—but feel. Feel something sharp. Something close to control. Something that didn’t blur at the edges.

The drink arrived. He hadn’t ordered. The bartender just knew.

Whiskey. No ice. No water. The burn was immediate, scorching a line down his throat. He welcomed it. Craved it. Needed it like a wound needs salt.

Two years. That’s how long it had been since the Flags. Since he’d had anything like a family. Since anyone had looked at him like he was more than a weapon or a mess or a fuck-up waiting to happen. The grief was old now. Rotten. It had turned into something else—bitterness, maybe. Or hunger. Something that gnawed at his ribs when the world was too quiet.

He thought of Dazai. He always did.

It made him sick. It made him shake.

He thought about that night a year ago—the night Oda died. The first time Dazai put a gun to his own chin and dared Chuuya to flinch. The way his eyes looked then—terrified, raw, begging. Like a wounded animal. Chuuya hadn’t been able to breathe. Not because he was afraid Dazai would pull the trigger, but because he knew what it meant if he didn’t.

He’d looked at Chuuya like he was a lifeline.

That had been the last time.

Now, Dazai looked at him like he was a wall. Like something in the way. Or worse—like he wasn’t there at all.

He drained the glass. Ordered another. Didn’t taste it. Didn’t care.

He thought about the sounds behind closed doors. Moans. Whispers. Dazai saying someone else’s name. Never his. Sometimes it had been Oda’s before his death, of course. Sometimes no name at all. Chuuya had stood outside those doors, listening. Waiting. Hoping. Wanting to be needed.

He hated himself for it. For how long he stood there. For how often he came back. How Oda had left Dazai's room way too often after those moments happened... He couldn't help but wonder how old they must have been? Sixteen... seventeen? Oda was an adult... The thought turned Chuuya's stomach.

The pub blurred. Sound dimmed. The world narrowed to the burn in his throat and the hollow echo inside his chest. He stared down at his glass and saw his reflection twist. His face distorted. Mouth slack. Eyes too wide.

He was grieving someone still alive.

He was grieving the idea that Dazai might have never belonged to him.

The walk back to the Port Mafia base was slow. The rain had stopped, but his coat was damp, clinging to his shoulders like guilt. Everything around him seemed unreal—like the world had been pushed slightly out of focus. Streetlamps buzzed louder than usual. Each footstep echoed longer than it should.

A memory slammed into him: Dazai on the roof of the old hotel, laughing, hair sticking to his face in the rain, saying, “You’re the only thing that ever drags me back.” He looked so different then—young and healthy. His smile even looked more realistic.

Was that real? Had he ever actually said that? Or was it something Chuuya wanted to believe so badly he’d etched it into his own memory?

He didn’t notice the cold. Didn’t notice the streets. Didn’t notice anything until he was standing outside his bedroom door, key in hand, fingers numb.

The door wasn’t locked.

Inside, the air was thick. The smell hit him first—antiseptic... but weirdly like Dazai now, the way he used to smell. Dazai lay sprawled across the bed, limbs tangled in sheets, bandages slipping. His face was pale. Lips dry. Breath shallow.

Chuuya stepped inside like he was walking into a memory. Or a dream. Or something worse.

“Still breathing, huh?” he muttered. His voice didn’t sound like his own. Didn’t feel like his.

Dazai didn’t respond. He looked asleep. Or maybe he was finally resting.

That should’ve been the end of it. He should’ve turned around. Left. Shut the door. Washed his hands of this forever.

But he didn’t.

He crossed the room and grabbed Dazai by the shoulders, dragging him upright. His body was limp, weightless. His head lolled forward. He didn’t fight. He groaned like someone waking up when they are unwell.

Chuuya forced his legs over the edge of the bed. Spread them with a knee. Stared at his face.

Still no reaction. Or maybe there was but it was too little for Chuuya to have noticed.

“I said sit up,” Chuuya snapped. His voice cracked. His hands were trembling. His face was already wet, though he hadn’t felt the tears fall. Dazai's eyes twitched slightly, they were opening but Chuuya didn't see that because he had dropped to his knees already.

He didn’t know why. Or maybe he did. He just didn’t want to admit it.

He wanted to see what would happen. He wanted to know if he could make Dazai feel. Make him react. Make him see him again—even if it was with disgust or horror. Even if it broke something neither of them could fix.

His hands moved. The waistband came down.

He leaned forward.

He stuck his tongue out. The taste was salty, soapy, and sickly. He gagged. Recoiled. Then went back.

He moved with purpose. With venom. Hand and mouth, alternating. Faster. Rougher. Like a dare. Like a punishment. Like a question he didn’t want answered.

Still—no sound.

"I bet he touched you like this," he hissed. Spit glistened on his chin. "Oda did, didn’t he? Bet he made you feel safe. Bet he said your name like it meant something."

Nothing.

"Was he gentle? Did he ask? Or did he just wait until you forgot how to say no?"

He scraped gently with teeth. Dazai flinched, his eyes fluttering open slightly.

Chuuya didn’t stop. Didn’t even blink. "Fucking say something," he choked. "Scream. Hit me. Look at me."

He was crying now. Full-body shakes. But he didn’t stop.

Not until—

Fingers in his hair. Light. Gentle.

Then: “...Chuuya.”

Was it consent? He pulled Chuuya closer. One word. A breath. It shattered him, but even still, his tongue ran along the underside right up to the tip like worship. He dove back down, taking as much in as he could.

Then—

A push to his forehead. Weak. Too late.

Heat sprayed. Salty and thick. It immediately caused Chuuya to gag and begin choking. He pulled away, coughing, spitting, trembling. His stomach flipped. He couldn’t breathe.

He didn’t look up. He couldn’t. He didn’t want to see if Dazai was awake. Or if he’d been awake the whole time.

He thought he heard a noise—a breath, maybe. Or a whisper. His name, again, barely audible. He couldn’t be sure. It didn’t matter. "I'm sorry.. I shouldn't have-" his voice was cut off as his body jerked, gagging aggressively again.

He ran. The hallway was too bright. The bathroom is too clean. Too white. Too sterile. Like a hospital. Like a morgue.

He tore off his shirt, dropped to the floor, retched bile into the sink.

Then—

The shower. Water scalding. Still clothed from the waist down.

His hand moved before he even had a chance to think for a minute... Hard. Fast. Desperate. Mechanical. Automatic. As if he could scrape the guilt out through his skin.

He gasped so loud it echoed, his eyes closing with the sensation ripping through him. He came with a sound that wasn’t pleasant. More like pain. Grief. Rage. A noise that didn’t sound entirely human.

Collapsed against the tile, jerking with aftershocks and shame. Sobbing. He stayed there. The water beating down on him was like punishment. Like confession. Like blood.

He curled into himself.

“Why did I do that?” he whispered. “What the fuck is wrong with me?”

He pressed his forehead to the drain. He heaved again. Bile spilled out of him and washed down the pipes. He could still taste him.

Was he jealous of someone who isn't alive anymore? Even if it was, jealousy wasn’t an excuse.

He'd crossed a line he couldn’t uncross.

“Was it because he didn’t say no?” The question made him sick. He could’ve stopped. He should’ve stopped. But he hadn’t, and now he didn’t know what that made him.

He looked at his reflection in the mirror and barely recognized the thing staring back—red-eyed, mouth slack, trembling like a kicked dog. His knuckles itched to smash the glass. Break something. Maybe himself.

He wrapped his arms around his legs and shook. “Shit, shit, shit... If I could take it back...”

No answer.

The water scalded his skin red. But it didn’t clean him.

Nothing could.

He stayed on the floor until the water turned cold.

It didn’t bother him.

Maybe he deserved that too—the numbness, the ache. The cold slithered beneath his clothes and settled into his bones. He didn’t shiver. Not yet. His body was too exhausted to react. Only when the steam thinned and the mirror stopped fogging did he start to feel again. The chill touched his skin like guilt, and that’s when the shaking returned. Small at first. Then worse.

He stood up on legs that didn’t want to hold him. The world swayed. His ribs ached. His stomach curled. He clutched the sink with both hands, looking at himself again.

Still the same face.

Still not human.

He needed to stop looking. But he couldn’t. He needed to know what a monster looked like. The red veins in his eyes. The crusted bile on his chin. The bruises on his knees from kneeling too long on tile.

He staggered back into the hall, one hand against the wall, the other dragging down his soaked shirt. He didn’t feel like he was wearing clothes anymore. Just shame, stitched together. Fabric couldn’t hide the rot underneath.

The hallway felt longer than usual. Empty, like it stretched between years and lifetimes instead of rooms. He passed portraits of men who built the Port Mafia—dressed in clean suits, eyes like daggers. They watched him pass like he’d failed some test.

He reached an empty room. Didn’t turn the light on. He wasn't sure whose room this was.

Didn’t need to.

The air was stale, as if it had been holding its breath, waiting for him to come back and finish whatever he started. The scissors were still in the drawer.

He opened it without thinking. Without ceremony.

The metal glinted in the dim light.

He didn’t hesitate.

He didn’t think about where he should cut, or what the textbooks say. He just wanted the pain. Real pain. Not the kind that sat behind the eyes and whispered when you were trying to sleep. He gripped the handle. Tight. So tight his knuckles turned white.

And then—

He slashed across his upper thigh.

The pain exploded, wild and bright.

Blood welled up immediately, hot and fast. He hissed through his teeth. Dropped to the floor again, pressing his palm to the gash, trying to stem the flood—but part of him didn’t want to.

Let it bleed.

Let it all pour out.

Maybe then, something inside him would stop hurting.

The tiles grew slick beneath him. His vision blurred again, not from tears this time, but blood loss.

But it still wasn’t enough.

So he did it again. Another slash. Higher this time. Toward the groin. The scissors cut deeper. His body spasmed.

And then he heard it.

Clack. Clack. Clack.

A sound at the far end of the hall.

He froze.

The sound was familiar.

Wheels.

Metal.

A drip pole.

His heart twisted with sudden, inexplicable hope.

He pushed himself upright, swaying. Blood soaked through the waistband of his pants, through the seams of his thighs, leaving a trail.

The silhouette appeared in the doorway. He squinted through the blur. He saw it.

Tall.

Slender.

A coat swaying slightly as it stepped forward.

He whispered, barely audible, “...Doc?”

No answer.

The figure moved closer.

No drip bag. No pale skin. No smell of antiseptic or tired kindness.

Black gloves.

Not love.

It wasn’t the doctor.

It was Mori.

Of course it was.

The illusion shattered so violently he swayed and almost collapsed. His legs buckled. He dropped the scissors with a clatter. They skidded across the tile like a knife sliding from a butcher's block.

His body tried to pull away, but the blood made everything slick. Slow.

“Dazai?… no… it is you, Doc?…” he murmured again, even though he knew. The words slipped from him like water through cracked hands.

“Please… I didn’t mean to… I didn’t mean to—”

His voice broke.

He reached out.

A final plea.

A last delusion.

Mori didn’t speak.

Didn’t offer comfort.

Didn’t even blink.

He just raised one boot—and kicked Chuuya hard across the face.

The crack of bone against tile echoed like a gunshot. His cheek split open. The world twisted. Lights burst in his vision like fireworks made of knives.

He went limp.

Mori’s face loomed above him—expressionless. Not angry. Not disappointed. Just void.

“You always make such a mess,” Mori said, like he was commenting on a broken vase. His voice had no edges. No humanity.

And then everything turned black.

Chapter Text

When Chuuya finally awoke he wasn't sure how much time had passed, it felt cold. Has it always been this cold? He tried to get up but everything seemed as if he was drunk or high, everything feeling as if it was tilting or spinning at the same time.

His foot gave out and he slipped, only then did he realise that he felt bare, naked. It was dark, too dark? Had he gone blind or something?

No, he knew exactly where he was. Isolation. He always got treated like this, his gashes stapled shut and then stripped. He never got special treatment. Though he wasn't sure if Dazai did either.

He didn't want sympathy, not when it wasn't deserved. He wronged Dazai, he attacked him and took something when he wasn't in a state to consent, Chuuya knew what... He knew it as soon as it was over.

Chuuya sank to the floor, back scraping against cold concrete, shivers climbing up his spine. His breaths were shallow, catching painfully in his chest, as guilt clawed upward, choking out every coherent thought.

His skin felt numb beneath his fingertips, his body almost disconnected from reality. The stark absence of clothing wasn't merely physical—it was a symbolic gesture, Mori's methodical way of stripping him down to nothing, reminding him of exactly who held power.

His thoughts drifted to Dazai again, unbidden, unavoidable. The last thing Chuuya remembered clearly was Dazai's quiet whisper, the faint touch in his hair—so gentle, it hurt. Had that touch been forgiveness, or confusion?

Chuuya choked on something between a sob and a laugh, the sound scraping painfully in his throat. What kind of monster did it make him, wishing for forgiveness from someone he'd wronged so deeply? The darkness pressed in around him, heavy and oppressive, thick enough to suffocate.

Footsteps echoed down the hall, rhythmic and unhurried. He knew that pace. That cold, clinical stride belonged unmistakably to Mori. Chuuya braced himself, palms flat against the icy floor, trying to suppress the tremors.

A sliver of light slashed across his vision as the door swung open. Mori stood silhouetted against the harsh fluorescent glare of the corridor, face shadowed, expression unreadable. He studied Chuuya silently, clinical eyes dissecting the shivering figure before him.

"You're awake," Mori said quietly, his voice void of warmth. He stepped inside, leaving the door ajar. "You've caused quite the problem, Chuuya-kun."

"Sorry," Chuuya rasped bitterly, not meaning a syllable.

Mori crouched down beside him, reaching out with gloved fingers to tilt Chuuya's face upward. "Apologies won't fix this. You're smarter than that."

Chuuya jerked his face away, jaw clenching. "What do you want?"

"You crossed a line," Mori's voice softened dangerously, velvet masking steel. "And now you need to learn exactly how costly your mistakes are."

Chuuya didn't respond, his breath hitching unevenly. Mori leaned closer, his whisper dangerously intimate, unbearably cold. "You'll remain here until I'm satisfied you've learned your lesson. Until I believe you've truly grasped the severity of your transgression."

Chuuya swallowed thickly, dread pooling in his stomach like black tar. "And Dazai?"

"Dazai is alive," Mori replied coolly, standing slowly, his silhouette towering imposingly. "Though, I wouldn't expect him to ever look at you the same way again."

The words sank deep, carving wounds far deeper than the scissors had managed. Mori turned, leaving the door cracked slightly. A mocking mercy, as if to remind Chuuya how close freedom was, yet how utterly unreachable.

As the footsteps receded, Chuuya slumped against the wall, the chill seeping into bones already brittle with shame. He curled into himself, alone, cold, and afraid—not just of Mori, but of himself.

He'd survived beatings, torture, and betrayal. But this—the realization of the monster he'd become—was far crueler, more insidious. A punishment he didn't know how to survive.

It had always been like this, every self harm and suicide attempt had been so agreesive that the darkness and isolation became unnerving safe. 

Chuuya wanted to cry.. He really did but was he really the victim in all of this?? 

The first light Chuuya saw after days—maybe weeks—was clinical, sterile, and blindingly bright. He blinked, eyes watering, pupils shrinking painfully as the isolation door swung fully open.

"Get up," a voice commanded sharply from somewhere above him, unfeeling and detached. Not Mori—some anonymous subordinate.

Chuuya tried, limbs trembling, muscles barely remembering how to move. Hands grabbed his arms roughly, pulling him upright. Pain jolted through his stapled shut gashes on his thighs, pins-and-needles waking violently beneath cold skin.

He was hauled to the showers without dignity, naked, stumbling, bare feet dragging across icy tiles. A distant part of his brain whispered that he'd been drugged—he had to have been, he realized, as the world still swayed sickeningly beneath his feet.

The showers felt foreign—white tile stained slightly rust-red in the corners, fluorescent bulbs flickering as they reluctantly came to life. Hot water hissed sharply against his skin, stinging, cleansing, dragging streaks of dirt and filth off his body and down the drain.

It felt as if he had just been here, moments ago.. But he was here again? He leaned into the wall, gasping, steadying himself. Slowly, painfully, consciousness seeped back in sharper clarity. His fingers ghosted along the staples in his thighs—crude and metallic. But the wounds beneath had healed, flesh knitted back together cleanly. 

Weeks, he realized with a sickening jolt. He must've been in isolation for weeks.

Yet—he didn't recall eating, drinking. Nothing beyond vague shadows and half-formed memories. But his body wasn't gaunt, and wasn't skeletal. Mori had ensured he stayed alive. That knowledge felt worse, somehow. Like he'd been preserved deliberately, kept breathing just to suffer more.

Why did he never get a room beside Mori’s office?, A bed to lay in and some clothes? His mind tensed with pure confusion. 

The sound of steady footsteps interrupted his thoughts, clinical and unhurried. Mori's voice cut smoothly through the steam.

"Sit."

Chuuya's back stiffened reflexively. Slowly, warily, he turned his head. Mori stood at the edge of the showers, expression unreadable, a stool gripped in one gloved hand, a crisp white cloth held gently in the other.

"I don't want—" Chuuya started, voice cracking hoarsely.

"Sit down," Mori repeated evenly, eyes cold and patient.

Defeated, Chuuya sank onto the stool, water cascading over his bare shoulders, head bowed under the relentless spray. Mori knelt gracefully, his coat neatly folded at his knees, careless of the water soaking the fabric.

"Your wounds healed nicely," Mori murmured clinically, fingers ghosting along Chuuya's inner thigh, inspecting his handiwork like a craftsman appraising pottery. "You've always healed quickly. It’s a useful trait of yours."

Chuuya didn't reply. Couldn't. His fists clenched at his sides, knuckles white against pale skin. Mori tilted Chuuya's chin upward, fingers firm yet gentle, meeting his gaze steadily.

"You were given adequate nutrition and hydration intravenously," he explained calmly, as if discussing a trivial medical fact. "And sedatives, of course. To keep you manageable. But that being said I'm surprised no one took you for regular washes.. You are covered in your own bodily fluids. Fault on my part. Won't happen next time."

Chuuya's jaw tightened, a sour taste rising in his throat. "You drugged me?" he spat, voice trembling with quiet rage.

"Necessary precautions," Mori replied softly, unfazed. "Hold still."

He folded the cloth methodically, pressing it firmly against Chuuya's lips. "Bite down. It will hurt."

Chuuya hesitated only a second before reluctantly biting into the fabric, heart pounding. His fingers tightened on the stool edge as Mori's fingertips settled firmly on the first staple.

"Ready?"

He barely had time to nod before Mori swiftly pulled, ripping the staple out with cold efficiency. Pain flared white-hot, a muffled scream biting into the cloth. His vision blurred, stars exploding behind his eyelids as Mori moved steadily to the next staple.

Each removal was quick, brutal, methodical. Mori didn't hesitate, didn't flinch, his gloves growing steadily redder as droplets of blood mingled with shower water, swirling down the drain.

Chuuya shook violently, muscles trembling uncontrollably as the final staple tore free, metallic taste bitterly mixing with the wet fabric he bit down on. Mori calmly took the cloth away, folding it neatly, as Chuuya gasped ragged breaths.

"Better," Mori said gently, running clinical fingers lightly over the fresh wounds. "Clean. Healed. Perhaps you'll remember to avoid these kinds of accidents in the future."

The words, a carefully sharpened threat, sliced deeper than metal ever could.

Chuuya didn't meet Mori's gaze, shuddering softly, humiliation and rage churning sickeningly beneath his skin.

Mori stood gracefully, stepping back, eyes unreadable beneath damp strands of hair. "Finish your shower, Chuuya-kun," he murmured softly. "Once you're clean, come find me. There's work to be done."

With a clipped step, Mori turned on his heel, footsteps fading slowly until only the hiss of water remained, mocking and hollow.

Chuuya bowed his head forward into his hands, the spray pounding relentlessly over hunched shoulders, washing away blood and dignity alike, leaving nothing behind but bitter clarity:

He belonged to the mafia.
Always had.
Always would.

He never fully minded, not really. As long as he had a roof over his head and food to eat he'd be forever grateful… or so he thought. 

After Chuuya finished showering, dressing, and stepping out into the hallway, the silence of the Mafia base was disorienting. No whispers, no sideways glances, no murmured gossip. It's unnatural. As he moved forward, it dawned upon him sharply—no one has said a word about Dazai.

It was as though the man never existed.

There was a creeping anxiety gnawing at him. Surely, if Dazai were awake, conscious, and aware, Chuuya’s transgression would have become common gossip—or at least a whispered secret, passing judgment behind closed doors. But there’s nothing, not a word, as if Dazai's name has been purposefully erased from existence.

Unable to contain his dread, Chuuya found himself standing outside Dazai’s old room. The door was slightly ajar, strangely quiet, unsettlingly inviting. A sense of nausea curled iin Chuuya’s stomach, but he stepped forward anyway, nudging it open.

The room is empty.

Stripped completely bare. No IV poles, no tangled bedsheets, no lingering scent of antiseptic or medication. Nothing. Just cold floors and walls that seem darker, more imposing in their vacancy.

A quiet cough startled him from behind. He turned, body taut, fists clenched—only to find Kouyou standing in the hallway, regarding him silently, expression unreadable.

"They took everything," she says finally, voice gentle yet distant. "Everything that belonged to him. Mori-san’s orders."

Chuuya swallows thickly, dread dripping like ice-water down his spine. "Where is he?"

She glances away briefly, her features softening into something akin to sympathy. "No one's allowed to say."

Chuuya felt his throat tighten painfully, dread amplifying to something worse—fear, guilt, panic twisting his gut. "Is he... alive?"

She studied his face, the way it paled she sighed heavily as she thought about her answer, even if she had a soft spot for Chuuya she would be breaking mori’s order.  She took in his expression, perhaps judging whether he deserved an answer. After a prolonged pause, she sighs softly, almost resignedly. "I don't know. No one does."

A leaden silence hangs between them, heavier and colder than isolation ever was.

"But Mori-san made it clear," she added quietly, her voice low and careful, "the subject is strictly forbidden. You'd do well not to ask."

She turns, heels clicking softly on the corridor tiles as she leaves Chuuya alone in the hall, facing an empty room, haunted by a man who may no longer exist.

The knowledge slamed into Chuuya's chest like a fist. Mori had isolated him, drugged him, silenced him—but what had he done to Dazai?

Chuuya stood in the empty silence of Dazai’s stripped room, the echo of Kouyou’s footsteps fading down the hall. His breath shuddered in his chest as panic began to spiral within him. How long had he truly been locked away in isolation? Days had merged into weeks in a fog of sedatives and sterile darkness, stripping him of all clarity.

Think, Chuuya. Think. He pressed shaking fingertips to his temples, desperately piecing together fragments of memory. Before isolation, he had brought Dazai from the shipping container back to his own room—Dazai had been weak, fevered, barely clinging to life. The memory twisted painfully.

But how long ago had that been? Two weeks? Three? Longer? He tried counting back, trying to find some anchor point of certainty. The staples Mori had ripped out in the shower—those wounds had already nearly healed, leaving pink, puckered lines.

It had to have been at least a few weeks, maybe even close to a month. Long enough for Dazai’s room to be erased, for silence to fill the corridors where rumors normally traveled at lightning speed.

Chuuya’s pulse quickened as another thought pierced his mind: The shipping container. It was the one place Dazai always retreated to—the hiding place, the place of quiet ending, where Mori's eyes rarely found him. Was that where he'd gone now—to escape, to hide…or perhaps something darker? Had Dazai regained consciousness enough to understand the terrible thing Chuuya had done to him, only to run and vanish into solitude? Or worse yet—had he gone there to die?

Chuuya’s hands clenched into fists, fingernails biting sharply into his palms. A sick, hollow ache filled his chest at the thought of Dazai alone in that rusted container, skin pale and trembling, haunted by betrayal and violation.

Had Mori told him? Had he manipulated him, twisted the truth to deepen his suffering? Did he know about Chuuya's isolation and self-inflicted wounds? Was Dazai told Chuuya had died?

His eyes stung, shame and desperation knotting in his gut. Just as he turned to leave, to run to the container and check for himself, something small caught his eye, wedged between the striped mattress and the bed frame.

A slip of paper.

Chuuya knelt hastily, fingers trembling as he pulled it free. It was folded hastily, the handwriting unmistakable—Dazai’s scrawl, jagged and weak.

"He’s in Isolation again. He says it’s for my own good. Chuyya would hurt me again??not sure what that means... he would’ve died otherwise—that my pain keeps him alive. Is this mercy or torture? Sometimes he smiles when he says these things. Sometimes I think he’s trying to break me. I don’t even know what’s true anymore. Mori says Chuuya hates me now, and I don’t know if it’s another lie…or just reality. Maybe I deserve it."

Chuuya’s breath caught sharply, chest constricting as dread pooled in his stomach. He had hoped Mori at least provided Dazai some basic kindness. But this note—this small, fragile confession—proved otherwise. Mori had twisted the knife deeper, intentionally blurring lines between pain and care.

Dazai always had a way of deteriorating when it came to writing, confusing narratives and not making much sense were just a few warning signs.

"Fucking bastard," Chuuya whispered hoarsely, fingers trembling violently. Guilt clawed higher, suffocating, strangling him. He glanced around desperately, searching for something else, anything at all.

On the desk, shoved back against the wall, lay a small cloth bag. He moved swiftly, tugging it open— figs. Fresh, plump figs, with a small note hastily scrawled:

“Figs for Ryunosuke. He's been a good kid these past few days”

Fresh figs—fruit that would rot within a week outside refrigeration. That meant the figs had been left recently. It was a clue. A trail left behind intentionally.

Without hesitating, he grabbed the bag and sprinted out, weaving through corridors with a frantic urgency.

When he reached the room shared by the Akutagawa siblings, he knocked urgently, heart racing.

"Come in," Gin's quiet voice murmured faintly from inside.

Chuuya opened the door slowly, and the breath left his lungs sharply, horror twisting his gut. Ryunosuke was standing by the corner, shoulders hunched forward painfully. His shirt hung open, revealing vivid bruises, lacerations, ribs protruding too sharply beneath pallid skin.

Chuuya sat as the siblings ate, unease still gripping his chest. The quiet, desperate hunger etched across their faces spoke of prolonged neglect, yet the bruises and wounds scattered across Akutagawa’s body spoke louder—of deliberate cruelty.

“Ryunosuke..” Chuuya started softly, carefully choosing his words, "Who did this to you?"

Akutagawa hesitated, coughing violently into his hand again, pale lips flecked with fresh blood. His eyes flickered down, shame and hesitation coloring his gaze. Finally, with painful reluctance, he answered:

“Dazai-san…has resumed my training.”

Chuuya’s breath froze in his chest. A cold, sickening realization twisted in his gut as memories flooded him sharply—stories Dazai had told him about how Mori had 'trained' him, the brutal conditioning designed to carve loyalty and obedience through pain, through desperation.

It wasn't a shock that Dazai was passing down those methods.

“I see,” Chuuya said quietly, swallowing hard. Akutagawa lowered his head again, as if expecting punishment. Chuuya’s fingers curled tightly into fists, nails biting deep into his palms. “I’m sorry.”

Akutagawa looked startled for just a moment, his dull gaze briefly flickering upward. Gin sat rigidly beside him, her eyes wary but steady as she watched Chuuya.

“You don’t…owe apologies,” Akutagawa murmured hesitantly, averting his gaze once more. "This is simply…the path of strength. I must endure."

Chuuya’s stomach churned bitterly. Such an awful phrase—one Mori had surely whispered into Dazai’s ear since childhood.

Chuuya closed his eyes briefly, fighting nausea. When he opened them again, he exhaled deeply, shifting the conversation away from the painful topic. "The letter…did Dazai say anything else?”

Akutagawa glanced at Gin, who nodded quietly before turning toward the small, cluttered desk in the corner. After fumbling briefly through scattered, crumpled sheets of paper, she handed them over—multiple notes, small scraps, as if left hastily or unconsciously scattered by Dazai himself. They could have been weekly notes? They didn't seem like they had been written in one sitting. 

Chuuya slowly sorted through them, heart pounding heavily:

“The mattress isn’t soft anymore. But then again, it never was. Maybe I imagined comfort to begin with.”

He flipped to another, more fragmented, hastily scrawled:

“Isolation is a kindness in disguise. You forget what it’s like to hurt other people when you’re alone. I keep forgetting things, lately. Faces. Words. Meanings.”

Was he also in isolation for a short period?? Chuuya thought as His fingers trembled as he read another:

“Albatross’ motorcycle looks dirty. You hate when it gets dirty. Clean it up, Chuuya—it might lead you somewhere. Or nowhere. Either way, just ride far enough to leave memories behind.”

Chuuya stared blankly at the notes, dread pooling coldly within him. The scattered sentences—dark, disconnected—read like thinly veiled cries for help. He recognized the chaotic pattern, the spiraling despair that overtook Dazai when darkness lingered too long inside his head.

Chuuya stood abruptly, the chair scraping back sharply across the floor. He turned toward the door, heart hammering painfully. “Stay here,” he instructed firmly, casting the siblings one last concerned glance. “Eat and rest. I’ll return.”

He didn’t wait for their replies before sprinting down the corridor, heartbeat thundering in his ears.

Minutes later, he stood in the dim garage, eyes fixed on Albatross’ motorcycle. The old tarp had been hastily draped back over it, cobwebs and dirt accumulating heavily in his absence. He dragged it off quickly, dust billowing sharply in the dim light.

Beneath the grime, a scrap of paper fluttered to the ground.

Heart racing, Chuuya bent down, carefully picking it up. His fingers shook violently as he unfolded it, recognizing Dazai’s unmistakable handwriting:

“If you found this, then I was right—you’re still predictable. Still stubborn. Still you. I can’t remember if that's good or bad anymore.”

Chuuya’s throat closed painfully, eyes burning as he read on:

“They say you hurt me. Not sure what exactly happened..  Mori smiles when he tells me that, so it must be true. Maybe I deserved it—I hurt everyone, don’t I? But you should know, Chuuya, I’m not angry at you. I just feel numb now. Like the quiet before a trigger pull. Sometimes I wonder how cold the water in the harbor is. Does it still hurt? Or does it just feel like sleeping now?”

Chuuya sank weakly onto the cold concrete, the paper trembling violently between shaking fingers. The words blurred sharply through tears, dread choking thick in his chest. Does dazai think I am dead? Chuuya thought again. 

“Dazai, you idiot,” Chuuya rasped painfully, heart shattering piece by piece. “You goddamn suicidal idiot.”

He shoved the letter hastily into his pocket, desperation coiling tighter. He’d recognized the dark hint immediately— the harbor. Dazai had threatened it before—water deep enough to sink quietly into oblivion. Chuuya’s breaths shuddered harshly.

But beneath the letter lay something else—a key, small and metallic, gleaming faintly in the dim light, and another note hastily scribbled:

“Shipping container.”

Chuuya stood sharply, gripping the motorcycle handles tight enough to leave bruises, his determination solidifying. He rolled the motorcycle outside, revving the engine until it roared to life beneath him. Cold wind lashed sharply against his face as he tore through Yokohama’s shadowed streets.

He didn't slow, didn’t hesitate. Fear sharpened into purpose. He had no idea what awaited him at the container—hope, despair, answers, or simply more questions—but whatever it was, he wouldn't turn back now.

He’d spent weeks drowning in his own guilt. Now, finally, he had the chance to breathe again—to reach Dazai before despair stole him forever.

As the dark harbor came into view, shipping containers rising like metal gravestones beneath the pale moonlight, Chuuya gripped the handlebars tighter, determination burning fiercely within him.

Whatever darkness Mori had woven into their lives, whatever cruelty passed down through generations—he’d break that cycle tonight, no matter the cost.

For Dazai.

For himself.

For everyone Mori’s cruelty had ever touched.

Chuuya’s heartbeat pounded against his ribcage, the motorcycle's roar fading behind him, leaving silence to reclaim the night. The cold iron handle of the shipping container door pressed sharply against his palm, skin crawling with a bitter mixture of hope and dread.

He hesitated, swallowing down bile and regret, as if it could cleanse the taste of betrayal and guilt from his tongue. He turned the key slowly, metal scraping roughly against metal, the door opening with a hollow creek.

Moonlight spilled across the darkened interior, illuminating a figure sitting casually atop stacked crates, legs dangling loosely, slender fingers lazily flipping through yellowed pages of a worn book.

“Dazai...?” Chuuya’s voice broke halfway through the name, disbelief and relief intertwined painfully in the single syllable.

Dazai didn’t look up immediately. Instead, his head remained bent, dark hair masking his expression. He simply turned another page with meticulous indifference, voice hollow and dry when he finally responded.

“Surprised, Chuuya? Did you come here expecting a corpse, or maybe just an apology?”

Chuuya froze in place, every muscle rigid, unable to discern relief from anger, tenderness from dread. He moved forward slowly, as though approaching a skittish animal that might lash out unpredictably.

“You’re alive,” he said softly, almost desperately. "I—I thought... I thought you—"

“What?” Dazai interrupted, finally lifting his head. The sight sent a chill down Chuuya's spine. A black mask hid half his face, the other half disturbingly pale beneath moonlight. Only one tired, detached eye gazed back at Chuuya, coldly curious. “You thought I’d drown myself again? You thought I’d died quietly and given you peace at last?”

Chuuya recoiled inwardly at the bitterness in Dazai's tone, yet something else drew him forward, something raw and pleading. “Mori... no one would tell me where you were. Your room—everything stripped bare. I found your notes—”

“Ah, my notes,” Dazai drawled, voice syrupy with mockery. He closed the book carefully, setting it down beside him. “Such lovely bedtime stories, aren’t they? Did you enjoy the desperation? The confusion? The mania? Mori always said I have a talent for tragedy.”

Chuuya flinched visibly. “You were suffering. He isolated you, drugged you, manipulated—”

Dazai laughed softly, a hollow sound stripped of mirth. He leaned forward slightly, the dim lighting catching the jagged edges of scars beneath the edges of his mask, a permanent reminder of the night bleach and pills nearly claimed him.

“And how does it feel, Chuuya? To know Mori does to me exactly what I do to you. Manipulation, psychological torture, confusion—I learned from the best, didn't I?”

Chuuya's fingers curled into tight fists at his sides, shame and anger coiling hotly in his gut. "Stop it, Dazai. I know I hurt you. I know—I know I deserve whatever anger you have. But don’t—don’t pretend you aren’t hurting too."

"Hurting?" Dazai echoed, voice flat, unfeeling. He slipped off the crate and approached Chuuya, movements languid and controlled, almost predatorily calm. “Do I look hurt to you? Do I sound as weak as you remember?”

Chuuya shuddered as Dazai stepped closer, close enough for Chuuya to feel the heat radiating from his thin frame, the unnerving lack of warmth in his eye.

“You kept me waiting here, Chuuya,” Dazai whispered sharply. "Every day, I wondered how you'd react when you finally saw me again. Would you pity me? Would you hate me? Or—would you break, just like always?"

"Don't do this," Chuuya whispered, voice hoarse with grief. “Don’t make it a game. I’ve already broken enough.”

“You’re the one who came searching,” Dazai murmured gently, mocking care softening his voice as he tilted his head. "Or have you forgotten already? How many times will you find me again, hoping I've changed, when you already know exactly what I am?"

He leaned forward, face inches from Chuuya's, a mask shadowing his expression even further. "So yes, I'm alive. And no—I don't forgive you. Nor do I condemn you. Because forgiveness, Chuuya, is for those who believe they're human enough to deserve it."

Chuuya swallowed the pain, the twisted truth in Dazai's words. “Then why leave the notes, the figs, the clues? Why lead me here?”

Dazai’s gaze slid slowly downward, fixing on a distant spot on the floor. His voice was quiet, devoid of the biting mockery from before. "Maybe I just wanted to see you again, watch you suffer the way I do. Misery loves company, after all.”

He turned abruptly, walking back toward the crates, leaving Chuuya frozen behind him. “But rest easy now, Chuuya. You've confirmed what you needed: I'm not dead yet. The rest—the rest is your own burden.”

Chuuya stared at Dazai's silhouette, numb with a grief that wouldn't heal. There was no reunion. This was a haunting—a ghost of a man he’d loved, twisted by whatever Mori had said happened that night Chuuya had spiraled. The container echoed softly as Chuuya stumbled backward, retreating into the night, away from the ruin of a man he couldn’t save, couldn't hate, couldn't escape.

And Dazai, left alone, picked up the book again, fingers ghosting softly over faded pages, as though the story could distract him from his own unending emptiness.

“Did he tell you what I did…?” Chuuya asked.

Chapter Text

Dazai looked around first before speaking, voice low and even, muffled through the mask:

“I don’t need Mori to tell me what happened. You touched me when I couldn’t move,” he said, as though remarking on the weather.

“I actually remember. Your mouth was warm.” He looked away, as if watching something only he could see. “My throat was still burning. I remember trying to say no, but the sound stayed stuck here—” his hand drifted to his own neck, pressing lightly under the mask. “Maybe you didn’t hear it. Or maybe you did.”

He stared at the same hand a moment too long. “I remember pushing you away. Or was I running my hands through your hair? ”

He paused, eyes half-lidded, searching his memory.

“After that…” His voice strained, forcing the pieces together. “I think you got angry and cut me.” He turned his head slightly.

“Or sewed me. I can’t tell anymore. I felt them, I think…” He sighed. “Yeah. The staples. When I close my eyes. Sometimes I see your teeth. They feel the same.”

The words carried no fury, no accusation. Only the stillness of someone wandering through the ruins of a dream.

“Mori told me you enjoyed it. I can’t remember which part though…” The faintest curl of mockery touched his lips. “But then again… he always says things, doesn’t he? He said you’d do it again. That you already had. That you always will.”

Dazai tilted his head at Chuuya, expression unreadable behind the mask.

“So tell me… was it you, or was it the medicine?” His tone wavered, almost to himself. “Yeah… the medicine. Did I imagine your mouth? Did I imagine your mercy?”

Chuuya froze, the words twisting like a blade under his ribs. His jaw clenched so tight it ached, his face contorting in confusion.

Dazai had seemed fine up until now.

“What? What the fuck are you on about?” Chuuya snapped, voice cracking against the silence. “Staples? Teeth? You think I’d—”

He cut himself off, chest heaving, fury sparking hot behind his eyes.

His hand went unconsciously to his thigh, pressing the faint ridge where the staples had been torn free days ago. The memory of metal digging through skin, Mori’s voice telling him to bite

down, flooded back like bile.

“You don’t know what you’re saying,” he spat, almost desperate. “Don’t twist my scars into yours.”

But the tremor in his voice betrayed him.

Dazai didn’t move. Didn’t blink. His gaze lifted slowly, sharp in the half-light — cold, surgical.

“Why are you angry?” he asked softly, tilting his head so the mask carved his face into darker shadows. “I’m only telling you what I remember. No need to get angry at me.”

The calmness hollowed out the space between them, stripping Chuuya’s fury of its weight.
It felt like staring at someone who wasn’t Dazai at all — just someone wearing his skin.

Chuuya’s voice cracked again, sharper, almost pleading beneath the rage.
“What’s wrong with you? Why are you acting like this?”

He stepped forward, fists trembling. “You think I don’t know what it’s like? I spent weeks in confinement, drugged out of my head, not knowing if it was day or night. I didn’t even know if I was alive sometimes.” He drew in a ragged breath. “So tell me—how long’s it been since we last spoke? Since the fever sweats?”

For a moment Dazai just stared. Then he lifted one shoulder in a loose shrug.

“…Don’t remember.”

The words fell like dust. He tilted his head, gaze drifting toward the ceiling.

“Could’ve been days. Could’ve been months. Funny, isn’t it? Time doesn’t really stick when you’re asleep with your eyes open.”

And then he laughed.

Not warm, not amused — a soft, broken sound that scraped like glass.

Chuuya’s breath caught. Something in the sound rang too hollow, too wrong.

“Look at me,” he demanded.

Dazai didn’t move, fingers idly skimming the book in his lap.

Chuuya yanked it from his hands. The weight was real, the paper coarse beneath his fingers. He flicked through page after page.

Blank. Every sheet, blank.

The sound of turning paper echoed like a mockery. His stomach went cold.

When his gaze snapped back, he finally saw it — Dazai’s eyes, wide, unfocused. Pupils blown too large, swallowing the light.

“Dazai…” Chuuya’s voice faltered, anger bleeding into dread. “What’s going on? Did he… did he drug you too? What did he give you? Do you even remember?”

Silence. 

Then Dazai’s hand slipped into his pocket. He drew out a folded paper packet, pinched between two fingers, and held it out lazily.

“Want some?”

A trace of amusement touched his voice, though his eye stayed flat.

“He didn’t force me,” he murmured. “Only offered.”

The words landed heavier than a confession.

Chuuya’s eyes widened. In a heartbeat he slapped the packet clean out of Dazai’s hand, the paper skidding across the floor.

“DUMBASS!” His voice cracked sharp, too loud for the silence. “Do you know what happened the last time you took LSD? You nearly ripped your own fucking skin off — you didn’t sleep for three days, and Mori had to chain you down so you wouldn’t throw yourself out a window!”

His fists shook, rage and fear tangled together.

Dazai only shrugged, gaze drifting toward the fallen packet. His voice came quiet, flat.
“I want to die anyway. So what’s the point in trying to keep clean when I’ll end up dead regardless?”

He let the words linger, then added almost idly:

“Also… it wasn’t just LSD that time.”

The words hadn’t finished leaving his mouth before Chuuya’s palm cracked across his masked cheek. The sharp sound echoed like a gunshot.

“Don’t you dare,” Chuuya snarled, shoulders shaking. “Don’t you fucking dare bring that up again. Do you even remember what that was like? It was only a few weeks after I joined the mafia — do you even remember how stressful that was?”

Dazai turned his head back slowly, the mask shifting from the blow. He shrugged.
“You took it too. Don’t act like it was me being selfish. There were plenty of times I had to help your ass too.”

Chuuya’s teeth ground together.
“That’s not the issue! Don’t you remember how much you started to rely on it? How you wouldn’t even smile without taking something? How bad the lows were? The withdrawals??”

His voice cracked with frustration, half a shout, half a plea.

The words choked him, splitting him open. Slowly, Chuuya dropped to his knees before Dazai, lowering himself as if submission were the only way to be heard.

“Osamu… listen to me.” His voice shook, pleading and raw. “I know how it feels. I want to see your spark come back too, I mean… when I—” He faltered, shame searing through him.

Silence stretched before he forced it out. “When I sexually assaulted you… it was because I wanted to see you break. A crack in your stoic expression and lifeless heart. I thought if I could force something out of you, even pain, then you’d feel alive again.”

His throat tightened. He bowed his head.

“But you have to believe me when I say this — we can never touch drugs again, ok? We need to find something different. Something that won’t keep disfiguring us. We already struggle enough with that. Our scars show it… so maybe we should at least keep our insides from—”

He stopped. The air shifted. Dazai’s breathing had changed, slow and deliberate, like a shadow curling closer.

“…Let’s try not to put any more toxins in our bodies, ok?”

The plea hung heavy, unbearable in its weight.

It felt as if it were the first time Chuuya had asked Dazai to look after the body he was trapped within. 

At last, Dazai spoke, his tone cool, casual, almost offhand.

“Well… if I can’t take drugs, then you can’t drink. If I can’t do what I want with my own body, then neither can you.”

The shift was instant. Chuuya’s head snapped up, eyes blazing. His body stiffened, fury rushing back through the cracks left by his confession.

“You bastard,” he spat, surging to his feet. “Don’t you dare try to make this about me!”

Dazai tilted his head, calm as ever.

“Then don’t school me either. My body, my rules. I can ruin it however I want.”

The small space felt colder now, silence pressing in.

Chuuya’s fists trembled, still burning from the slap he’d given, still raw from the words he’d spilled.
And then, almost out of nowhere, Dazai said, voice quiet:

“…You sound just like you did back then. Three weeks in. Do you even remember?”

Chuuya blinked, thrown. “What the hell are you talking about?”

Dazai’s gaze went distant, unfocused, like he was looking straight through Chuuya into some half-rotted memory.

“We were Fifteen. In Suribachi City. The Sheep already hated you for breathing the same air as me. And you—” a ghost of a smile tugged his lips, or so it looked like hidden by the mask “—you were drowning. Remember how hard you pretended not to be?”

Chuuya’s stomach knotted. He did remember. The night Rimbaud bled out, when the smoke of Arahabaki still stung his lungs, when he’d sworn to Mori because he had no other place left to go. He’d been fifteen, furious, grieving, terrified, and all Dazai did was watch him break apart with those same flat eyes.

Chuuya’s jaw clenched. “Of course I remember. I didn’t have a choice. You think I wanted any of that? I didn’t even know who the fuck I was back then.”

Dazai’s laugh was brittle, papery. “Neither did I. Still don’t.” His head tilted. “Maybe that’s why it worked. We were both orphans—me of boredom, you of identity.”

“You call that working ?” Chuuya snapped, heat sparking again. “We tore each other to shreds every damn day—”

“And yet,” Dazai cut in smoothly, almost gently, “you’re still here.”

Chuuya froze at that.

The silence stretched thin, stretched until it felt like something would snap. Then Dazai spoke, his voice quieter, almost distant.

“…You keep forgetting, Chuuya. I was on something the whole time back then.”

His hand turned lazily, as though he could pluck memories from the air. “Opium, amphetamines, LSD when I could get it. Whatever I could find. Half the time I didn’t even know what Mori’s men were slipping me. Didn’t care, either.”

His eye flicked back to Chuuya, sharp and deliberate. “And you were there for it. Every pill, every high, every collapse. Don’t pretend you weren’t.”

Chuuya’s gut twisted. He opened his mouth to retort, but Dazai went on, softer now, almost tender.

“Do you remember the first night we actually smiled at each other?”

The words landed heavy. 

Chuuya’s breath caught before he could stop it. He did remember — the rooftop, the city lights hazy through the smoke, the brief moment when the weight had lifted and for the first time since joining the Mafia, he’d felt less like a weapon and more like a person.

Dazai had told him, deadpan but sincere, “I’m glad you’re my partner.” And Chuuya, against his better judgment, had believed him.

They were happy, acting like the kids they were supposed to be…

Chuuya’s throat worked as he forced the words out. “…Why can’t you be like that now?”
The question hung raw, aching, too close to a plea.

For a moment Dazai just stared, his silence almost kind. Then the faintest curl of mockery tugged at his lips.

“Because I was drugged out of my mind that night. High enough I could convince myself anything felt good. Even you.”

The memory cracked like glass. 

Chuuya’s chest hollowed, the warmth he’d clung to for years collapsing into ash. His fists trembled, nails digging into his palms.

“…You’re lying,” he managed, but the words rang weak, as though he already knew the truth.

Dazai tilted his head, unreadable behind the mask. “Am I?”

Chuuya staggered back half a step as though the words had hit him physically. 

His throat tightened, the air catching sharp in his lungs.

That night — that one night — had been the thing that kept him sane when everything else felt poisoned. 

He’d clung to it in the middle of betrayals, Mori’s games, Arahabaki’s shadow. The thought that maybe, just maybe, Dazai saw him as more than a weapon. 

Maybe there was something human between them.

Something soft and warm.

And now Dazai was tearing it apart like it had been nothing but smoke.

“You—” Chuuya’s voice cracked, raw and unsteady. He tried again, louder, desperate. “You’re fucking lying. You have to be.”

But Dazai didn’t answer right away. He only tilted his head slightly, that calm mask of detachment more brutal than any knife.

Chuuya’s chest burned. His nails bit into his palms, trembling with the effort to hold himself together. 

“That night—” His words broke off, thick in his throat. He forced them out anyway. “That night was the only thing that kept me believing you weren’t completely empty inside.

That maybe you and me… that maybe we weren’t so different. That you—” His voice fractured, almost a whisper. “…that you loved me. Even just a little.”

Silence pressed down on the room. Chuuya’s breath shook with the weight of it, his eyes wet but furious. He hated himself for how much it hurt.

Across from him, Dazai leaned back slightly, expression unreadable behind the mask. His eye flickered once, something too quick to name, and then the coldness settled back over him.

“…Love,” he said softly, almost curious, as if tasting the word on his tongue. A thin curl of amusement touched his lips. “Funny, isn’t it, how drugs can make you believe in impossible things.”

For a moment, Chuuya just stood there, trembling, chest heaving as if his ribs might break under the weight of his breath. Dazai’s words echoed in his head, tearing that last fragile thread he’d been clinging to.

And then something inside him snapped.

With a raw sound that was half snarl, half sob, Chuuya lunged. His hands slammed against Dazai’s shoulders, driving him back hard until his body hit the floor with a dull crack against concrete.

“Shut up!” Chuuya roared, his voice shredding in his throat. 

His boot slammed into Dazai’s ribs, the impact ringing hollow through the shipping container like a gong. 

The metal walls trembled with it, every blow echoing back at him, making it sound like there were a hundred Chuuya’s all beating Dazai at once. 

His leg jolted with the crunch of bone, shock shooting up to his hip. Still, Dazai didn’t flinch — didn’t beg, didn’t curse. Just lay there, twisted in the dim light, one arm already bent wrong, blood darkening the mask.

That calmness was unbearable. That laugh — hoarse, bubbling through blood — was worse. It crawled under Chuuya’s skin like maggots.

“Shut the fuck up!” Chuuya roared, stomping down again. The collarbone, he thought. Then the arm. Then the jaw. He wanted to break every piece of him until he couldn’t laugh anymore. Until there was no mask, no smugness, no distance.

But every strike only made Dazai smaller, quieter — and yet somehow more mocking. Like he’d expected this, like he wanted this.

Why don’t you fight back? Chuuya’s mind screamed it, though his throat was too raw to shape the words. Why don’t you fucking stop me? You’re supposed to stop me. You’re supposed to—

He kicked again, harder, his boot skidding on blood. “You always—” another blow, to the ribs, “—tear everything—” another to the shoulder, “—the fuck apart!”

Dazai coughed, the sound wet, blood soaking the mask. And then — that laugh again. Weak, bitter, but still there. A taunt.

Chuuya froze, chest heaving, his foot pinning Dazai’s collarbone. The container felt smaller now, the air hotter, pressing on his lungs. His vision pulsed red.

That laugh told him everything: Dazai didn’t care. The rooftop hadn’t meant anything. The words hadn’t meant anything. Chuuya himself hadn’t meant anything.

And that hurt more than anything Mori could do to him.

His boot ground harder into bone. He wanted to break it all.  He wanted to leave nothing left for him to laugh with. But instead, words tore free, jagged and shaking:

“Fine. If the drugs mean that much to you — fucking keep them. OD for all I care. Die with them, since they comfort you more than I ever did!”

His voice cracked on the last word. Fury twisted with grief, choking him. He spat down, the spit landing wet against blood and bruises on Dazai’s chest. The mark felt final, a claim and a rejection all at once.

“Rot in it,” he hissed.

And then he turned. His boots rang sharp against the metal floor, every step dragging like it weighed a hundred pounds. 

His fists still shook, nails carving into his palms. He didn’t look back — couldn’t. Because if he did, he wasn’t sure whether he’d strangle Dazai to death or collapse beside him.

The last thing he saw was the scattered drugs glittering faintly in the dim light, spread across the floor like another man’s hands holding Dazai.

And that was worse than any rejection.

Chapter Text

The night air hit like a slap when Chuuya shoved the container door open. Metal scraped metal, the sound shrill and final, like a hinge snapping off a coffin. Cold, wet air licked the sweat from his neck. He didn’t realize he was still shaking until his fingers fumbled for a cigarette and the filter crumpled between them.

He lit it anyway. The first drag burned his lungs; he held it until his chest began to ache, then let the smoke leak out slowly between his teeth. The taste reminded him of the rooftop—of laughter that hadn’t sounded forced—and he felt something rip loose inside him like a seam splitting under pressure.

He started walking, not once did he turn back.. Dazai could be dead for all he cared.

No destination. Boots on wet asphalt. The city smelled like rain and old iron. Somewhere, a ship bellowed; the low moan rolled through the docks and shuddered the air around him. He wished it would swallow him whole. He wished it would take the container, and Dazai, and everything that had just happened and sink it in black water until the rust grew over it like scab.

He kept walking. He didn’t want to picture the angle of Dazai’s arm. He didn’t want to hear that laugh again. He didn’t want to taste the spit drying on his tongue.

I hate you, he thought. And immediately, against his will: No I don’t.

He pushed the second thought down like a hand over a mouth.

The first bar was too clean—glass polished, lights bright. He didn’t go in. The second was too crowded, too warm; a wall of noise met him and shoved him back into the street. The third didn’t ask questions. The third didn’t look up.

It was as if the third was where all the depressed and frustrated men and women in Yokohama went.. It was a bar made for Chuuya and his swinging moods. 

He entered like a problem. Heads turned and slid away. He put money on the wood and didn’t care what came back in the glass. Something brown and bitter. He swallowed until the burn outpaced the echo of Dazai’s voice and watched it come back again anyway, like a tide.

He glanced down at his hands he hadn't realised but they were covered in blood.. Same goes for his clothes and boots.. He hadn't realised each red boot print on the wooden floor was trailing behind him.

“I’m glad you’re my partner.” he scoffed without humor. He lifted two fingers. “Another”  The bartender didn’t speak.  He took a quick glance around at the pub goers. It was the sort of place where fights never quite started but never fully ended either, a bruise stretched into architecture.

A shoulder bumped him. Then another. He didn’t move. The bottles behind the bar glanced their glass eyes off him and winked back to sleep. He drank until the edges of things softened, until the room leaned toward him like a confession, until his heart slowed just enough that the shake in his hands turned into a rhythm he could mistake for control.

He wasn't even sure if he could make it back home safely anymore, there was no buzz from the liquor, when he was in this state he wasn't even sure what was real and what was fake. 

Someone spoke at his elbow.

Low voice. Male. The kind that sounds like a cigarette on concrete — rough, tired, and too interested.

When Chuuya turned, the man smiled. Not kindly. Not cruelly. Just the kind of smile that said:

I know what you’re doing. And I’m willing to help you do it.

Chuuya didn’t catch the words. He didn’t need to. He nodded anyway. Said something back. He wasn’t listening to himself. He laughed — too loud, too sudden — and was startled by how real it sounded.

It didn’t feel real. But maybe that was the point.

He should’ve walked away. Should’ve gone back and fixed what he broke — the arm, the jaw, the quiet between them.

But something in his chest — feral and furious — said: No.

So he leaned closer until their sleeves brushed. The man’s knuckles grazed his wrist — deliberate, slow — a question with only one answer.

“Wanna go behind the bar?” the stranger asked, voice low.

Chuuya said nothing, because if he opened his mouth, something honest might fall out.

So instead, he stood.

The room lurched.

He let it.

He followed.

They slipped out the back, where the air was sour with rot and spilled beer. The dumpsters loomed like silent witnesses. Light flickered overhead — jaundiced, exhausted. It smelled like vomit and bad decisions. Perfect.

The stranger’s hand ghosted over the small of his back, a silent guide. Chuuya didn’t flinch. He didn’t lean in, but he didn’t pull away either.

"Because you won't. You're too easy, Chuuya."

A voice. Not the stranger’s. His: Dazai.

Chuuya’s jaw clenched. He welcomed the echo. Let it bite.

The door clicked shut behind them.

“Is this okay?” the stranger asked. He held up his hands — no pressure, no push, just the offer.

Chuuya nodded, sharp and hard. “Yeah.”

Then, softer — because something inside still wanted to be clear, even now —

“I want this.”

The man blinked, surprised. “Alright,” he said. “Just making sure.”

Chuuya stepped forward first. Closed the distance deliberately.

He kissed the man like it was a punch — fast, without hesitation. A demand.

He chose it. That was the only thing he had left tonight — the right to choose the wrong thing.

They didn’t talk much after that.

It wasn’t gentle. But it wasn’t rough either — not in the way that meant danger. It was clumsy and heated, hands fumbling under layers, breath fogging in the cold. Chuuya made it that way — fast, desperate, like he was trying to outrun the guilt already forming behind his ribs.

He touched the stranger like a challenge. Let himself be touched like it didn’t matter. Loud enough to drown thought. Close enough to erase memory.

He made himself the villain in his own story.

It wasn’t about desire.

It wasn’t about pleasure.

It was about control.

See me, he thought viciously. See me hate you.

He bit down on a laugh that wasn’t a laugh and forced a sound from his throat as if he could convince himself it mattered. It didn’t. That made it matter more.

________________________________

Dazai watched the darkness collect itself around the ceiling and begin to drip.

When the high went, it took the soft edges with it. The pain was a clean knife. He catalogued it without judgment at first: the jag of the left forearm, the heat of the collarbone, the spread of warmth under the mask that meant blood he couldn’t quite swallow. The floor was concrete and had a memory of cold that the body kept even when the mind forgot.

He tried to sit up. His arm refused. He didn’t curse. He tried again and used the wall. The pain lit up behind his eyes in a thin white line. He breathed through it, small and neat, like a bead on wire.

Chuuya’s spit had dried to a stiff shine on his shirt. He looked at it and didn’t feel anything at all.

The packet lay near the door. He could have reached it if the arm had been better, if the room had been smaller. He didn’t move for it. Not because he’d decided anything—he was too tired for decisions—but because the idea of bending for it seemed funny in a way that wasn’t funny at all.

He got to his feet. The container swayed once, a ship in a storm, then held.

“Mori will send you anyway”, some practical corner of his mind said. “Better to look ruined on your own terms.”

He found his coat by the door. He didn’t put it on; the arm objected. He draped it across his shoulders and went outside into the air that smelled like iron and wet rope and someone else’s cigarette.

He started walking.

The city was unkind in familiar ways. It didn’t look at him. It didn’t offer help.

He walked past Albatross' bike, Abandoned.  he gave a heavy knowing sigh.

"No bike means drinking..You are too typical Chuuya” he breathed out though his ribs hurt. 

 He followed the places where Chuuya’s boots would have liked the ground—the bars with no questions, the corners with no light. He moved like a list he was too bored to finish.

Pain made a small, tidy metronome in his body. He let it count. He stepped with it.

Second bar, no. Third bar, yes. He didn’t need to go in to know. The sound was right. The laughter had the wrong shape. He stood across the street and waited for the door to open; it did, and two strangers spilled out like water from a dented can, and neither were Chuuya.

He kept moving.

Bleeding in that quiet, unshowy way that leaves stains but not scenes.

The pain was dull now. Blunted by movement. His body rang with bruises like old bells — arm, collarbone, temple — but none of it stung like memory. None of it could compete with that.

He wasn’t looking for the door. But he found it anyway.

Inevitability had a way of carving its own path.

It led out to the bins. The same kind of alley every city breeds — sour with beer and bile, lit by a dying streetlamp trying to forget its job.

He stepped into the stink of the place, ignoring the vomit streak on the concrete. It wasn’t what caught his attention.

It was the slant of a shoulder.

The shift of muscle under skin.

A man.

A stranger.

And Chuuya.

Pinned against the brick wall.

Legs wrapped tight around the man’s hips, arms hooked behind his neck.

The position was unmistakable — lifted, fucked, held.

It was intimate in the way a stage is intimate: lit just enough to show you what you’re meant to see.

And Dazai?

He saw everything.

Not the stranger’s face. Didn’t need to.

It was Chuuya’s body that spoke.

And then Chuuya looked up. Head turned — slow, impossible, intentional. He saw Dazai. He knew he saw him.

Because something in his face changed.

Not surprise.Not guilt. Not shame.

A choice.

A flick of cruelty behind the eyes.

Like pulling a trigger with a smile.

He didn’t stop moving.

He didn’t look away.

He performed.

Threw his head back, jaw slackening, eyes heavy-lidded like every touch from the stranger was divine.

And then —

The sound.

Exaggerated.

Drawn out.

A sharp, breathless moan carved straight from his throat — too loud, too perfect, like a weapon designed to pierce only one target.

He held Dazai’s gaze the way some people hold knives.

And when his mouth opened again — Another sound. Longer. Lewder.

Like mockery soaked in pleasure.

Dazai didn’t move.

Didn’t clench his fists.

Didn’t shout.

He watched.

Not because he wanted to.

But because he didn’t know how not to.

The stranger noticed eventually —

Felt the shift in Chuuya’s attention, the way it was pinned across the alley and not on him.

He turned his head slightly — confused —

But whatever question had formed on his lips dissolved when Chuuya pulled him back in like nothing else mattered, his lips messy and needy as he kissed him open mouthed.. He bit the man's bottom lip as his eyes rolled with pleasure. Whether it was real or not was another question entirely.

Dazai stood long enough for the scene to etch itself into the bone.

Then he turned.

Like closing a book someone else had dog-eared too many times.

Like walking away from a car crash you caused and called beautiful.

He didn’t look back.

He didn’t have to.

Because the sound was still ringing in his ears.

Not Chuuya’s moan —

But the knife inside it.

And what crawled up his throat wasn’t bile.

He turned away quickly and didn't turn back.

________________________________

Chuuya kept his eyes on the empty space where Dazai had been until it blurred. The stranger said something into his shoulder; Chuuya didn’t catch it. 

He finished what he’d started because stopping would mean admitting what he’d been doing, and he refused to give himself that kindness. He made it look like a choice right up until the choice ended.

The stranger kissed his neck in gratitude for a service paid and didn’t see the way Chuuya’s face went dead. The stranger went back into the bar, supposedly to wash his hands of the night, leaving Chuuya with his suddenly achy body and drunken choices. 

He glanced down to his hands again, they now had dry blood on them, the stranger obviously didn't notice.. But now they shook and wouldn’t stop. He curled them into fists and they kept shaking, like an animal breathing through bars. He pressed his tongue to the roof of his mouth until the taste of old copper went away.

He thought of the container, and the book with no words, and the packet on the floor, and the way Dazai had asked “Why are you angry?” in a voice that made it sound like a math problem. He thought of the way Dazai had watched him just now—not shocked, not even disgusted. Just there. Like gravity. Like rain.

Hatred rose quickly. Love rose quicker. He felt both and didn’t know which one belonged to him.

He stood. He dressed up the clothes that had come off with the commotion. He didn’t say goodbye. He never even saw the stranger again as he left the Bar.

He found himself back to the docks because streets always lead you to the things you refuse to forgive. He stopped three times and turned in small circles like a dog making a bed. He lit another cigarette and missed the filter and bit paper and ash. He laughed, a sound with nothing to hold it up.

He looked out to the sea, he swayed slightly with drunkenness.. He knew he should have gone home, back to the port mafia but he didn't. He rested up against Albatrosess’ motorcycle for a few minutes before descending down to the container. 

Dawn was slipping its grey tongue under the horizon. The metal held the night’s cold in its ribs. He stopped with his hand on the door and listened. The silence inside felt heavier than any bodies it might have held.

He opened it anyway.

Empty. The wall where Dazai’s shoulder had briefly leaned wore a smudge of blood like a thumbprint. The floor was clean except for the packet still by the door—untouched, a small, dumb square of possibility that no one wanted.

Chuuya stepped inside and closed the door because that was what the body did in this place: it made small spaces smaller. He leaned his forehead to the metal. It was cool. It was not forgiving.

He slid down until the cold met his spine and then lower until the concrete had him. He didn’t cry. He pressed his teeth together until his jaw ached instead. He breathed smoke in the dark and thought about a rooftop that maybe never happened the way he needed it to.

He let himself imagine, for exactly one second, knocking on Dazai’s door—whichever door that was now—and saying I’m sorry in a voice that wouldn’t turn to dust.

Or Dazai walking back into this container and holding him.. But he know he didnt deserve that.. Why would he? 

He put the image away like contraband.

He sat there until the light made the metal sweat and the sweat slid down in thin, patient lines like writing he couldn’t read.

______________________

Dazai reached the river without meaning to. The water was at that hour when it looked like the sun was peaking over the horizon. He stood with his broken arm like a bad joke and watched a gull pick at something that didn’t fight back.

He thought about the packet and didn’t want it. He thought about Mori and didn’t want that either. 

He stood long enough for a day to start and the port to awaken and then went where people go when they don’t want to be seen: not home, exactly. Just away.

On the walk, a woman passed him with a paper bag cradled like a small life. Bread. The smell lifted and moved through him without touching anything. He waited for a memory to follow it—a kitchen, a laugh, something that might make him feel human for half a second. Nothing came. He filed the data neatly: hunger present; appetite missing.

And somewhere behind him in a door he didn’t close, Chuuya sat in a metal room pretending it didn’t feel like a grave, he slept or more like passed out from all the alcohol in his system.

They would both call the day a victory because neither died in it.

They would both be wrong.

Dazai decided to head back to the mafia, he was in a daze and before he knew it he was at Ogai Mori’s infirmary… he can't remember how he got there but he laid down on the bed in the centre of the room. Shirtless.

The overhead light was too bright – a sterile white that made the edges of the world feel scalpel-sharp. Dazai blinked slowly, vision swimming back into focus. 

The ceiling above him was antiseptic tile, and the air tasted of disinfectant and cold steel. A faint tick, tick of a clock punctuated the silence. He knew this place even before he turned his head: Mori’s office, doubling as the Port Mafia infirmary. Cool, precise, unnervingly sterile.

Mori Ougai hovered at his side, moving with practiced efficiency. Gloved hands ghosted over Dazai’s injured arm, probing the break with just enough pressure to make Dazai’s jaw clench. 

Crack. Dazai sucked a breath through his teeth as Mori adjusted the fractured bone into alignment.

The pain was bright and electric, but Mori’s touch remained steady and oddly gentle. An eerie kind of kindness. The older man hummed under his breath – a lilting, tuneless sound too casual for the situation.

“There we are,” Mori murmured, almost soothingly. He secured Dazai’s arm in a sling, his fingers brushing against Dazai’s shoulder with deliberate care.

The sterile scent of rubbing alcohol wafted up as Mori swabbed a cut on Dazai’s collarbone. Every instrument on the nearby tray was laid out in perfect order, gleaming under the clinical light. Scalpel, forceps, bandages – all immaculate. The room was so clean it felt unreal, as if emotion itself would be sanitized here.

Dazai sat shirtless on the examination table, bandages peeling from his skin, blood dried in rust-brown patches along his ribs and temple. His broken collarbone throbbed dully with each heartbeat. Despite the pain, his expression was distant, almost detached.

He watched Mori’s precise movements through half-lidded eyes, saying nothing.

Mori, however, watched him. Dark eyes flicked up to search Dazai’s face for reaction as he tightened the sling. Finding little, Mori offered a thin smile.

“You’ve been awfully quiet, Dazai-kun,” he said lightly. His voice was soft – too soft – the kindly cadence one might use with a wounded animal. “Not going to tell me how this happened?”

Dazai swallowed. His throat felt raw, tasted of iron. How this happened. In flashes, it came back: Chuuya’s furious roar, the crack of bone, the taste of blood.

The echo of that laugh – his own, bitter and broken, spilling out of him as Chuuya’s boot came down again... Dazai closed his eyes. He could still feel the phantom weight on his chest, the press of fury behind each of Chuuya’s kicks.

“I fell,” he lied flatly, voice low and sandpaper-rough. It was the first thing he’d said since waking on Mori’s table. Typical Dazai deflection – unconvincing and half-hearted. He knew Mori wouldn’t buy it, but explaining was too much effort. Admitting the truth was something he wouldn’t do, not to Mori.

A quiet chuckle escaped Mori, almost fatherly in its indulgence. “Mm. Fell,” he echoed, as if tasting the word.

He reached for a roll of fresh bandages, unraveled it with a crisp, practiced motion. “Off a curb, I suppose? Maybe down a flight of stairs?” Mori’s tone was playful, but a glint of something keen and knowing danced behind his glasses.

He lifted Dazai’s chin with cool fingertips, turning his face to inspect a gash along his jaw. Dazai allowed it, limbs heavy with exhaustion and morphine.

Mori clucked his tongue at the swollen bruise blooming high on Dazai’s cheek. “How clumsy of you.” He dabbed antibiotic ointment onto the wound.

The sting drew a sharp hiss from Dazai, his muscles tensing then wilting – he was too drained to properly flinch. Mori’s touch gentled in response, almost a caress as he smoothed a bandage over the cut. “There… easy.” The kindness in his voice set Dazai’s teeth on edge. It felt too intimate, too false – like a padded restraint.

Silence pooled between them, broken only by the snip of scissors as Mori trimmed the bandage. Dazai’s eyes drifted to the man’s face.

Mori’s expression was placid, focused on his work, but his smile had a razor’s edge. Dazai knew that look. He knows. Of course he did. Mori always knew more than he let on.

As if on cue, Mori spoke again, voice airy. “I’m curious…” he began, almost conversational. “Where is Nakahara-kun tonight?” He didn’t quite look at Dazai as he asked, busying himself with cleaning the blood from Dazai’s knuckles – split skin, probably from when he’d hit the concrete floor.

Still, the question hung in the air like a blade.

Dazai’s pulse gave an uncomfortable kick. Chuuya. The name alone was a wound. He forced his face blank, staring past Mori at the far wall.

White cabinets, neatly labeled. A faint chemical smell, iodine or bleach, scratched at the back of his throat. “How should I know?” he managed, tone void of emotion.

Mori hummed again, a non-answer of a sound that conveyed everything. He pressed a fresh ice pack to Dazai’s cracked ribs; Dazai bit down on a groan.

Mori continued, feigning innocence, lacing his words, “I only ask because I heard there was… an incident.” A delicate pause. “One of our warehouse containers was left in quite a state.

Blood on the floor, door wide open to the rain. And witnesses saw a certain executive leaving the scene rather hurriedly.”

Dazai’s fingers curled against the edge of the exam table. Of course the Port Mafia grapevine had already delivered a report to Mori. Perhaps it had been Akutagawa or one of the guards.

He was toying with the question out of pure amusement – or to see how Dazai would respond.

A sickeningly sweet smile played on Mori’s lips as he finally met Dazai’s eyes. “It wouldn’t have been Chuuya who caused these injuries… would it?” he asked, mild and lilting, as if the idea were just a wild guess.

His fingers lingered on Dazai’s shoulder, ostensibly adjusting the sling, but the grip was just a touch too firm, anchoring Dazai in place for his answer.

Dazai’s mouth flattened into a hard line. His instinct was to deny it, or to deflect again with a joke – “No, I actually did fall, you see. I should watch my step.” But he felt Mori’s gaze carving into him, scalpel-sharp, dissecting any lie before he could speak it.

And Dazai was exhausted – far too exhausted for their usual cat-and-mouse. So he just let the truth slip out, soft and tired: “We disagreed… about something.”

A spark of triumph lit in Mori’s eyes, quickly masked by concern. “Ah,” he sighed, almost sympathetic. “A disagreement.” His hand finally released Dazai’s shoulder and drifted down, brushing away a smear of blood that had dried on Dazai’s collarbone.

The gesture was tender, almost paternal – yet Dazai felt like a specimen pinned under glass.

“You know,” Mori went on lightly, “Nakahara-kun has always been… volatile. Passionate, to use a kinder word.” He reached for a syringe on the tray, tapping it to clear any air.

Dazai caught a glimpse of the label on the vial: a strong painkiller, one typically reserved for severe injury – or recreation.

Mori plunged the needle into the vial and drew out a dose, continuing in that same conversational tone. “That temper of his makes him useful in battle, I admit. But in personal matters… a liability.”

The word hung in the cold air, thin and sharp. Dazai’s eyes narrowed.

A flicker of anger sparked in his chest, hot against the numb ache. “Chuuya isn’t a liability,” he said, voice low.

It came out more defensive than he intended. He fixed his gaze on the floor, on the scattered shards of his own dried blood.

The memory of Chuuya’s furious, hurt eyes flashed in his mind. Liability? No – if anything, Dazai thought bitterly, I’m the liability. I push him too far. I break him and he breaks me right back.

Mori gave a soft, skeptical hum. He slid the needle into Dazai’s good arm without warning.

Dazai inhaled sharply as a new kind of burn entered his vein – liquid relief dulling the pain in his ribs and shoulder almost immediately.

His head went light. Mori’s face blurred at the edges, the room tilting in a cool haze. “Easy now,” Mori murmured. He pressed a cotton swab to the injection site and withdrew the syringe. “This will help with the pain.”

Dazai’s tongue felt thick. Already the morphine or an illegal painkiller was already spreading a heavy warmth through his limbs, pulling him toward a foggy respite. He hadn’t wanted it – not really – but Mori hadn’t asked permission.

Through the gathering haze, Mori’s voice floated, gentle and insidious. “You see what I mean, though, don’t you?” He tilted his head, examining his handiwork – the neatly wrapped ribs, the immobilized arm, the myriad fresh bandages marrying Dazai’s pale skin. “Our dear Chuuya nearly destroyed you.

And himself, not long ago.” Mori tutted softly, disposing of the syringe. “After his… outburst the other month, I had no choice but to confine him. Strictly for security reasons, of course.”

Dazai’s heart gave a weak thud. Confine. He remembered all too well: Chuuya, pale and unconscious in this same room after nearly bleeding out; Mori’s medics hooking him to monitors and IVs. Then the aftermath – Chuuya strapped down to a bed in a medicated haze, weeks of enforced isolation “for recovery.” Dazai had paced outside that locked door more than once, listening to Chuuya’s delirious mutterings through the small window, feeling helpless…

Mori continued, voice dripping with a reasonableness that belied his cruelty. “It was necessary. He was a danger to himself – and potentially to others. An ability user of his caliber in such an unstable frame of mind? I couldn’t risk another incident. You understand, don’t you, Osamu?”

Dazai’s hands had gone cold despite the morphine glow. He flexed his fingers slowly, grounding himself in the bite of pain that still lingered at the edge of consciousness.

Mori’s question was not really a question. Dazai recognized the manipulation coiled in it: I did what had to be done. I protected everyone – I protected you.

“…I understand,” Dazai mumbled after a long moment. Each word felt extracted, hollow. His compliance hung in the air like a defeated flag. It was easier to agree; fighting took energy he didn’t have. Perhaps a part of him even did agree – the logical part that could step outside himself and see Chuuya as the world saw him: a wild dog straining at the leash, teeth bared at anyone who got too close. He hurt me, Dazai thought, and the thought was tinged with something like betrayal, like grief.

But then he pictured the last look on Chuuya’s face – fury twisted with anguish, a snarl to hide the heartbreak. The image stabbed through Dazai’s morphine calm. He drew a slow breath, wincing as his broken ribs protested under their tight binding. “It wasn’t his fault,” he whispered, barely audible.

Mori raised an eyebrow, pausing in the act of peeling off his surgical gloves. “Hm? Did you say something?” His tone was polite, but Dazai caught the warning beneath.

Dazai forced himself to meet Mori’s gaze, though his vision wavered. “Chuuya…” He wet his cracked lips. “I provoked him. I knew what I was doing.” His voice was flat, resigned. “So if you’re going to blame someone, blame me.”

For a heartbeat, Mori’s pleasant mask slipped. Something dangerous flickered in his eyes – displeasure, perhaps, at Dazai’s stubborn loyalty. Then it was gone, replaced by a mild smile as he stripped the gloves and tossed them away.

“Now, now,” Mori sighed, almost pitying. “Always so quick to martyr yourself, aren’t you?” He stepped closer, reaching out to adjust the blanket draped around Dazai’s shoulders. The gesture might have been caring, but Dazai felt the phantom of a leash tightening. “It’s admirable to defend your partner, but let’s call this what it is.”

Mori’s hand came to rest lightly on Dazai’s uninjured shoulder. His eyes pinned Dazai, needle-sharp. “Nakahara-kun is unstable. You may have lit the fuse, yes, but the dynamite was already there, hm?” His fingers gave a small, almost absent squeeze – a show of support, or a subtle reminder of control. “I worry about you, Osamu. Being paired with someone so… mercurial.”

A ghost of a smile touched his lips. “You are my best, after all. I can’t have my protege laid up in bandages because of a lover’s quarrel.”

Dazai’s stomach churned at the phrase – lover’s quarrel. He opened his mouth to deny it, to correct Mori that it wasn’t like that, but no sound came. Maybe it was like that, in its own twisted way. And Mori, the perceptive devil that he was, caught the lack of protest. His smile widened a fraction.