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Dazai is considering brushing his teeth when there comes a knock at his door. He doesn’t keep blades in the bathroom—that’s boring and obvious—but he does have a tiny bottle of toothpaste, one of the mini ones they give out at nice hotels. He picks that up and opens it for the first time before going to get the door.
“Oi, Dazai—” It’s Chuuya at the door, of course. No other person in the city walks like him, like a stalking animal with too many extraneous bits of fabric attached. (Compensating for something, Dazai’s always thought.) “Are you brushing your teeth?”
“Mm?” Dazai says, mouth full of mint toothpaste. He grins, showing off the pale green smeared on his face and waggling the toothbrush hanging out of his mouth.
“What—” Chuuya starts to snap, then clearly thinks better of it. He’s breathing a little funny.
“This won’t be any fun if you’ve already broken your ribs,” Dazai manages around the toothbrush, before coughing and spitting.
Chuuya takes a very deep breath. Judging by the set of his jaw, it does nothing for him. “I haven’t. And that’s disgusting.” He’s looking at the little puddle of spit and mint on the floor by his feet.
Dazai shrugs brightly. “You’re the one standing at my door, mouse-face. Here to beg for something? I don’t think I’m the disgusting one in this situation.”
Chuuya’s eyes narrow, and, ah, there it is, a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it flick of his tongue. Chuuya knows enough to know his own tells, doesn’t know enough to catch them before Dazai sees. Of course he wants this. Like a starved dog, salivating at Dazai’s doorstep.
It’s been so long since they were the Port Mafia’s monstrous children, Double Black and red all over. He steps aside, beaming with all his teeth to welcome Chuuya inside.
“I don’t have your nice silk ribbons. Think your delicate little wrists can handle it?” Dazai coos.
Goddamn, that still works? Chuuya’s shoulders hitch up, then shove down. “Fuck you. Ropes will do,” he says through gritted teeth. He glares around the empty central living space, as if daring the dust motes to mock him.
“Don’t have those either,” Dazai sings.
“What, a freak like you doesn’t keep a couple nooses handy?” Chuuya growls. He stalks to the other end of the room, which is not very far. Nudges the only table in the room—low, wooden—with his shin before sitting on it, a graceful motion disguised as a careless one.
“I appreciate the offer, but as I’ve told you, your mug is too ugly. Why would I want that to be the last thing I see when I die? No, I want a beautiful woman to be my partner for a double suicide,” Dazai says. Chuuya’s still wearing his jacket. That won’t do.
“I’m not here to commit suicide with you and you know it,” Chuuya mutters. Stretches his legs out and crosses them at the ankles. He’s always been easy.
Dazai pulls the toothbrush out of his mouth. The mint flavour is stinging his tastebuds, and he’s pretty sure he’s swallowed some. It is the work of moments to join Chuuya, lean over, and say, “No, but you’ll be happy to put your life in my hands, won’t you?” Then he twirls away, laughing at Chuuya’s indignant cry, and returns to his tiny bathroom to rinse his mouth.
He could have just gone to the kitchen sink, but Chuuya’s expression when Dazai comes back, twisted and bleeding emotion all over his front, is such a portrait of feeling, Dazai wants to study it.
“Up,” Dazai chirps. “Or is the little dog having second thoughts?”
True to form, Chuuya snarls and rises to his feet, his ability lifting him so he can look down at Dazai. “You left me in those woods. You—You put a bomb under my car? On any other day, I would be glad I didn’t wake up to your jabbering in my ear, but that’s twice now you’ve up and left, and I—You don’t get to be rid of me like that.”
Dazai smiles. The part of him that is, has been, always will be the Port Mafia’s demon prodigy whispers, You think it was only twice? But he’s learning. This is an interesting balancing act, this thing he and Chuuya are doing. So instead he says, “You’ve found me out, haven’t you? So what are you going to do about it?”
Chuuya is the better fighter, and he always has been. Even without his ability, he has the scrappy viciousness of someone who cut his adolescent teeth on gang wars and back alley knife fights. After a thorough grooming from the Port Mafia, he also has the perfect, gliding edge of someone entirely acquainted with every motion their body can perform, and a couple more it can’t. He lunges for Dazai’s throat.
Too bad for Chuuya, Dazai is intimately acquainted with all of those motions too. He shifts his weight back, tilts his head, and hooks a finger through Chuuya’s choker a split-second before Chuuya can close his hands around Dazai’s neck. Chuuya drops to one knee in front of him. (Dazai’s table also lands, with a dull thud.)
“You—” Chuuya starts, still glaring at Dazai.
“I said, up.”
Chuuya stands the same way he sat, just graceful enough to fool anyone who isn’t paying attention. Unfortunately, he stormed in here and demanded all of Dazai’s attention.
“Well?” Dazai prompts.
Chuuya spits, “You’re not worth the trouble of cleaning off my gloves when I’m done with you. I hope you choke on your toothbrush. I hope no one finds your body for weeks. I hope everyone forgets you, and I hope your stinking corpse doesn’t leave so much as a stain on the ground where you died.”
“Of course.” Dazai pats him on the head, once, with his free hand. “I hope all of those things too.”
It’s sunset. It always is, in Chuuya’s vision of Yokohama, the crimson-carmine skies and orange-softened streets of a city that has carved a map of itself into his veins. This is where he roams, where his night’s work begins, where the day’s pedestrian buzzing draws to a close. Dazai’s windows are unremarkable, curtainless, looking out onto a little side street where, Chuuya suspects, standing at just the right angle will reveal a sliver of the main street nearby. They let in so much of the sunset light.
That damnable finger is still caught on his choker, and Dazai smiles pleasantly as he yanks Chuuya along hard enough to dislodge Chuuya’s hat. That curl of his mouth like a cat before a bucketful of cream. They stop at the threshold of Dazai’s bedroom.
The bedroom, really. It’s the place someone could, theoretically, sleep, but it’s too spare to truly belong to someone. It doesn’t look like it’s been used for days.
“Honestly, Chuuya,” Dazai says, slouching back against the doorframe. He’s wearing his implacable smile, the one that fifteen-year-old Chuuya might’ve thought meant something, the one that twenty-two-year-old Chuuya knows will never crack open for him. “So rude you won’t even take off your coat and shoes before you waltz into my bedroom? And not inviting me to dinner first either. You could rend a man’s heart in two like this.” Dazai’s smile widens.
(They are fifteen, or sixteen, because they are always fifteen or sixteen, these pieces of themselves caught on the hooks of their own lives, and Dazai, bored and needling Chuuya on a stakeout, says, Have you ever torn out a man’s heart still beating? Later, storming the headquarters of some pathetic little gang that isn’t even smart enough to invest in decent bulletproof vests, the two of them make a game of it. How many hearts? How many beats? How hard can you squeeze, feel the tough flesh ooze around your grip, without throwing up? Chuuya loses, though not for lack of trying. Every heart he grabs stutters into silence within moments of him wrenching it free.)
“Let go of me,” Chuuya says lowly, “and I’ll take off my shoes.”
“You won’t run, or bite? You’ll heel, like a good dog?” Dazai purrs.
What the fuck is Chuuya supposed to say to that? He glares at the spot above Dazai, where the corners of the doorframe don’t quite meet, a dark little gap in the woodwork. Answer me. Or are you incapable of speech too, you witless slug? Dazai says. Who is this man standing in my place, who isn’t making you beg? Dazai says. Wow. It’s almost enough to make you believe he’s become someone kinder, don’t you think? Dazai says.
“I bet you locked the door anyway,” Chuuya says. “Paranoid little shit.”
Dazai releases his grip on Chuuya. “Now why would I do something like that? If you don’t want to be here, chibi, you can leave whenever you like.” Dazai yawns widely. For a single, orange-red instant, Chuuya’s stupid prey-animal brain thinks, Eat me.
Chuuya takes off his shoes.
Silently, Dazai pulls Chuuya’s jacket off. Shakes it out, and folds it into an immaculate square that he sets on the floor by their feet.
“So?” Chuuya says.
Dazai cants his head to one side, eyes slitting until they’re nearly closed as he smiles. From the pocket of his jacket, he produces a pair of handcuffs, jangling metal like a song. “So?” he echoes.
“This is payback,” Chuuya realizes out loud. Of course the fish-faced fucker would hold a grudge about being chained up. “You damn hypocrite.”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Dazai says serenely.
“Scared?” Chuuya taunts. “Won’t even let me have enough room to move from one end of the bed to the other?”
“Speaking of which,” Dazai says, dropping the handcuffs and turning abruptly to the bed. Chuuya very nearly falls for it, very nearly jerks forward to catch the heap of silvery metal, before remembering it’s Dazai, and when it’s Dazai, every miniscule gesture is a game. “We should change the sheets.”
How did they end up like this again? Again and again—Dazai isn’t even touching Chuuya, and somehow he is still helpless, fifteen years old and arguing as if their clothes aren’t drenched in blood. Dazai has always so loved to pretend his hands are unstained, hasn’t he? Bandages everywhere, mud-drenched and blood-soaked, replaced with pristine new ones faster than Chuuya can say mackerel.
“We? I’m not a maid. If you don’t want to roll around in your own filth, then clean up after yourself.”
“No? That’s right. Lap dogs are different from maids.” Dazai taps his finger on his chin as if thinking. “I gathered quite the pack for you, didn’t I? All your ‘people’, even dear Akutagawa—”
“No,” Chuuya growls, gathering all of his crimson rage and snapping his arm out to wrench Dazai closer by his lapels. “You left. For once in your shitty life, make a choice and stick to it. You don’t get to talk about Akutagawa like that. You don’t get to talk about any of my subordinates like that. Every fucking week since we were fifteen fucking years old, I watched you prove yourself as the worst of the worst of us, and I still covered you on every mission we went on. I know what you are, Dazai, and I’m not taking your shit this time.”
Dazai tilts his head down. Steady pulse, slow breathing, a minute flutter of his eyelashes. (All the things Chuuya learns to catalogue on long nights, when they have no choice but to wait, crammed together into a tiny safehouse, and he isn’t sure Dazai will still be alive in the morning. Always so fucking desperate to die.)
“You could have just said no if you didn’t want the handcuffs, Chuuya.” He produces ropes then, rough and coiled. The fading sunlight slants between them like a poorly-aimed knife.
“Don’t say my name like that, you asshole.”
“Chuu-ya,” Dazai enunciates with liquid satisfaction. “Is that not your name? Do animals like you not have names?”
A wordless snarl erupts from Chuuya’s throat, and it sounds like proof. He shoves Dazai back—bastard has the audacity to stumble, as if something so minor could catch him even a little off guard—and there is that sickly-familiar flash of his ability: there then not then there again.
Dazai digs the nail of his thumb into the skin of Chuuya’s neck as he hooks it through Chuuya’s collar, and almost smiles when Chuuya doesn’t fight it. The length of rope unspools from Dazai’s hand to smack against the bed, a thing as small and uncared-for as the rest of this apartment. We should do this with wire, Dazai muses. Maybe it will be enough to cut off those useless hands of yours.
Chuuya is sixteen years old, and he is looking at Dazai, and for all that like understands like as no one ever again will, he knows one of them is going to die with the other’s teeth in his throat.
This is not technically what Dazai is supposed to be doing right now. Something is wrong with Chuuya, the way he’s allowing this to drag out, and Dazai would ascribe it to sentiment, Chuuya’s usual weakness, but there is the matter of Chuuya’s eyes, wide and furious and far too intent, watching Dazai’s every motion as he drapes the rope loosely around Chuuya’s neck.
“Careful,” Dazai singsongs under his breath. “You’ll make me think there’s a sniper.”
“Fuck off. I miss one guy—”
“But you still remember him too.”
A beat.
“I know what a goddamn noose looks like, Dazai.”
Dazai raises his hands in mock apology, and, quick as snapping, switches to a different type of knot. Chuuya doesn’t flinch.
So it’s not a trick. Not that Chuuya would necessarily be that obvious about an assassination attempt, or this foolhardy, putting himself willingly in Dazai’s hands. Emotional, not stupid, Dazai used to warn himself, back when he still worried about Chuuya in that sort of way.
“You made that guy watch you carve out his organs.”
Dazai pulls on the rope, and Chuuya’s eyes narrow instantly. Another tug, only barely hard to give Chuuya’s pride some plausible deniability, and Chuuya takes a step closer. He wishes Chuuya would stop breathing like that. (He does not cinch the knot to be any tighter against Chuuya’s neck in retaliation.)
“And you didn’t want to?” Dazai says.
“He was shooting at you.”
Both of them, consciously or not, have put themselves out of view of the window.
“All right. Sit.”
Chuuya’s line here is usually something like, Do you really believe I’ll ever take orders from you again? or maybe, Didn’t think you’d take the dog thing so literally, pervert. Instead, he says, “Mori made us do those organ runs, after that.”
“You came to reminisce,” Dazai scoffs. He drops his end of the rope and spins away, makes as if to leave. “If you’re going to be so boring, chibi, I don’t know why I bother.”
“Hey—!” Dazai senses the disturbance of air, the quiet rush of Chuuya pouncing at Dazai’s back, and then the harsh rattle-scrape of the bedframe, and the abrupt, startled sound of choking. “When did you—Are you kidding me?”
Dazai turns back around, beaming, to the sight of Chuuya panting, face twisted in a sneer as he tugs on the rope around his neck, the other end of it tied smartly to the bedpost.
This part has some familiar pleasure to it, Dazai’s remembering. Like when they used to bicker over things as unimportant as meals, and some quiet, watching part of him would mutter, So this is how real teenagers behave. He would mark down the cadence of his voice and the stance of his body for future reference. (It’s not the same with Kunikida. Kunikida’s outrage at Dazai’s food choices is indiscriminately, impersonally compassionate. It stings.)
“That will leave marks,” Dazai says, reaching out to let his fingers hover over the rope. Doesn’t need to look to know the stillness that follows. “Is Chuuya the type of masochist who wants the whole mafia to know exactly how pathetic a dog he is, I wonder?”
“Dick,” Chuuya hisses.
“Why, Chuuya” —there’s that almost-flinch, that twitch of his mouth, which is good, because it means he’s lucid enough to start catching his reactions faster— “I didn’t know you were interested in that sort of thing.”
Chuuya’s mouth shuts with a click of his teeth. “This is—” He takes a few slow steps back, and Dazai says nothing. Never let it be said that age hasn’t tempered Dazai. (Never let it be said sunlight sparking dazzling into your eyes every day doesn’t do strange things to your brain.) “This is too much like before. We’ve changed.”
Dazai glides yet closer, and Chuuya sits on the bed.
There’s just enough slack to work with. Dazai picks it up and wraps it around Chuuya’s wrists. When the second knot is done, Dazai takes easy advantage of the height difference and forces Chuuya’s arms over his head, his chin tilting up with the motion. Gravity continues to act on the both of them exactly the same.
“Should’ve known you wouldn’t even ask,” Chuuya grumbles.
“Your input doesn’t matter here,” Dazai says plainly.
Loyal, Dazai once said, reporting to Mori about Chuuya. He considers saying it out loud here and now, the way he used to say six o’clock, as in cover your blindspots, as in knowledge is power, as in never forget that I speak your language too.
“I’ve changed my mind, by the way.” Chuuya freezes like the threat is real. It could be. Dazai has never faltered from that cruelty before. “Kneel.”
Ever fearless, Chuuya replies, “Make me.”
(Dazai considers all the different ways he could break Chuuya’s legs using just the items currently in the room. Oda wouldn’t like any of them but—Well. Odasaku probably wouldn’t have been in this situation to begin with. So Dazai holds his tongue—he does actually have other things to do—and lifts the rope just that little bit higher, entirely ignoring Chuuya’s half-hearted wriggling against the bindings.)
“Kneel,” he says again, and Chuuya’s eyes flash.
“Even this?” Chuuya demands, jerking against the taut cords. He does not break free because breaking free is not the point of this particular exercise. “Even this? What are any of them worth that you’re willing to ruin this too?”
Dazai drops the rope. Chuuya does not crumple, but it is like a puppet catching itself by its own strings. “You’re not here to reminisce. You’re not here to be obedient. You’re not even here to kill me. What an ego you have stuffed in that little body of yours, to believe that I look after idiotic chihuahuas that ought to be put down.”
“As if you weren’t some mangy stray Mori decided to take in and have his way with,” Chuuya growls. “As if you’re so good because you roped a few kids into your bullshit.”
“What are you here for, chibi, if not a meandering walk down memory lane?”
Chuuya is so terribly good at games where there is no escape. The type of pawn that reaches the other side of the board every time. This is why Dazai sits, spine to the headboard. He grabs that convenient choker again, just for long enough to drag Chuuya where Dazai wants him. Chuuya even bares his teeth.
“I told you, shit-for-brains. You left me back there. Had to walk to the fucking extraction point myself.”
Dazai tips his head back, sparing a glance for the angles of the shadows in the room. Twelve minutes. “You could kill me. How exhilarating that would be for you, right? Your life’s dream achieved. And I would be free of you too.”
“Sure. Let me play right into your hands.”
“You always do, chibi.”
Their abilities lie dormant between them like loaded guns.
Chuuya is not so far gone that he’ll believe the Port Mafia is anything like a family. He’s not dumb enough to think something like that could survive in the acid-ugliness of the Port Mafia’s belly. There’s camaraderie, and shared drinks, and the particular trust he’s spent years fostering among his people, but it is still the Port Mafia. It is still a thing that digests every piece of good in you, spits you out with depravity leaking from you like ink. It is repugnant, and it is bloody, and above all, it is his.
Dazai’s smug smile is dying a slow, beatific death as they face each other here, and all Chuuya can think is, as if he is a shepherd clawing together every wandering member of his flock, You are mine.
Dazai idly lifts the rope up, enough to tug some awareness back into Chuuya’s wrists, then drops it again. Every minute drags by like the sun crawling along its penitent path toward the horizon. Chuuya breathes against the pressure on his throat.
The way they do this is like a dance. Chuuya shifts, drops his shoulder or twitches a finger or leans his weight on the other knee, and Dazai sees through him every time, snatches the rope when he tries to move and smirks when he doesn’t. With a particularly harsh snap, he forces Chuuya to jerk forward, landing elbows-first.
“Your mattress is lumpy,” Chuuya mutters. “And your sheets feel disgusting.”
“I see we’re being nice to each other now. Should I give you a treat?”
“Of course someone like you would keep dog treats before coffee.”
“I didn’t say a single thing about dog treats, but while you’re making suggestions, any feedback on your new leash, doggy?”
Once, and only once, when they did this, Dazai wrestled Chuuya into lying on his back on the bed—different bed, but just as uncomfortable—and stared down at him for so long, Chuuya rasped, Dazai? Chuuya was stronger, could have shoved the kindling and bone marrow of him away, but then Dazai said, Close your eyes. Don’t open them until I say so. All these years later, Chuuya still doesn’t know whether he imagined the brush of lips against his forehead. He woke up unbound in an empty room.
“Time?” Chuuya asks.
“Two more minutes.”
“Liar.”
“Nice guess, but no.”
Dazai isn’t the only one with better things to be doing. (Chuuya closes his eyes. His best equivalent, slumped in on himself and unable or unwilling to reach Dazai’s forehead.)
“It’s terrible, and ugly,” Chuuya says. “This.” He shakes his wrists slightly. It tugs uncomfortably on the portion wrapped around his neck.
“What a shame. And here I thought we were having fun.” Dazai flicks the length of rope by his hip. It’s not enough motion to register on Chuuya’s skin.
Chuuya sits up to meet Dazai’s eyes. Isn’t stopped. It’s not quite scrutiny, but it is something like the most care anyone offered anyone during their old Port Mafia days. If Chuuya is going to be transparent, he may as well be transparent. “This is done,” he says.
“If you say so, Chuu-ya.”
God, Chuuya can’t even bring himself to be mad about that. It’s still his name. It’s still Dazai’s mouth. “What’s so important that you need to be gone so soon?”
Dazai smiles. “A Port Mafia executive ought to already know the answer to that one. If we’re asking questions, I do wonder what it is the shortstack really wants.”
(Chuuya used to think he had something over Akutagawa. Used to think he was in a position to offer some small, private pity to the boy, who would drill hapless skulls open demanding to know who would be worth such betrayal, why Dazai never took him too. He will go back to thinking that soon. Once he leaves this apartment, this building, this entire city block behind.)
“That’s not a question.”
“No?”
“To be free of this.” Chuuya leans his weight back, against the insistent pull of the ropes. “To be free of you.”
“No. Try again.”
This, too. This too is a kindness. Chuuya makes a noise low in his throat, and Dazai gives no indication that he recognizes it, but how couldn’t he? (A thousand years ago, or five years ago, or five hours ago, someone shoots his partner-rival-double, and Chuuya drops a building on them for their trespass. Dazai stays conscious the whole time, calls Chuuya a rabid wolf for the barely-intelligible sounds he barks at their squad afterward.)
Chuuya methodically works the knots open, one wrist, then the other. Dazai sits by and looks amused, limply nudging the rope to one side or the other, helping and hindering by turns. As soon as Chuuya curls his fingers around the loop around his neck, it comes loose, and Dazai is lackadaisically coiling what’s left around one hand. (Uneven rings. It looks atrocious.)
“How long have you even had that for?” Chuuya asks, standing. He doesn’t know why he asks. It’s never been a question that mattered. Dazai has always had the rope, the ribbons, the handcuffs. Has always laughed and then tied the knots anyway.
“Oh…Since this morning, maybe?” Dazai tosses the ropes to the floor and they hit the ground with a quiet clump.
Of course. “Kouyou said she’ll still make tea for you, if you ever visit her.”
“Noted.”
Chuuya picks up his jacket. Goes out, picks up his hat. Dazai doesn’t follow. There is something vaguely sick curdling in the pit of Chuuya’s stomach. When he twists the doorknob, the front door opens for him, unlocked, like a final insult.