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The first time he uses Corruption, Dazai cradles his body after the fall. Chuuya is asleep; eyes closed, hair draping in soft pieces over his brow and forehead, lashes brushing the bottom of his cheek, and Dazai pulls off his jacket and unwinds his bandages so that when Chuuya is in his arms, they are skin to skin. Chuuya’s jacket lies in ruins too, and he still has blood on his face. Dazai doesn’t clean it, just fits his chin in the hollow between Chuuya’s shoulder and neck and presses them cheek to cheek.
Chuuya is still in sleep. He breathes loudly, hair puffing up from each breath, but he, for once, is not in motion, succumbing to the gravity that he controls. Dazai would mock him, would poke his cheek, but his hands come and press to Chuuya’s chest instead, pulling them even closer. He’s not used to the sensation of something against his bare skin. His arms and neck are pale, more sensitive than the rest of him, swathed over with scars.
Dazai knows how to move a body, how to make it work to his advantage, but he doesn’t necessarily know what it means to have one. He wears his skin like he would wear a ball and chain, and he thinks, partly, that is why Chuuya fascinates him so much. Chuuya, who moves like his skin is his and only his, with his wide kicks and constant scowls, always in motion, a paddle ball with no string. Even now, he’s sprawled so carelessly, limbs flopping every which way, and Dazai takes a moment just to take him in, the arch of his elbows and the cut of his hip bones where his shirt has hitched up.
His fingers twitch, but he doesn’t touch. Not there. He places a hand on Chuuya’s temple instead, finds his pulse, and breathes hard until they’re matching. Down to the same second of their pulse.
Dazai wants to leave his wounds untreated so there is a space from him to slip inside, some hollowing where he can fit; can slip between each space behind Chuuya’s ribs and stitch him back up inside so he’s locked behind his skin. Dazai wants, with an intensity that both horrifies and fascinates him, something sickening that aches and aches in the throes of his stomach.
He thinks he has forgotten what it feels like to want. But he doesn’t think it’s supposed to feel like this.
He curls his fist up, and feels it. Thrumming, somewhere deep behind his bones.
Chuuya is still sleeping, but he will wake soon. He’ll jerk away the moment it happens, face a mess of conflicting emotions. Half smothered, incredulous; too bright and too there. Dazai doesn’t quite know how they fit together yet, which is why he is here right now, figuring out how Chuuya fits in a different way, how the bones of his shoulders feel against Dazai’s chest. It makes something stir through him, messy and burning.
Something that isn’t close to curiosity at all.
In the wreckage of a battle, in the wreckage between Dazai’s ribs, he holds Chuuya’s face to his chest. They have to go back. The mission is over, Veraline is defeated, they’re okay . They can rest.
***
He carries Chuuya home. He is not sixteen: he is seventeen. His hair is shorter where Chuuya’s is longer.
It is their second time with Corruption. Dazai doesn’t wait to take Chuuya home this time, just gathers him up before the rest of the Mafia can home, and begins the long tread to his apartment. Chuuya is stirring by the time he gets there, so Dazai dumps him on the couch and waits. The younger man tosses and turns a few times, but he stills.
Dazai does not watch him sleep. Dazai simply moves to the kitchen. He fills a glass with water, finds the softest towel he can, wets it, and then heads back to the entry room.
Chuuya is asleep. Dazai can tell by his breathing.
He shouldn’t--he shouldn’t do this. He shouldn’t be here . But with trembling fingers, he brushes Chuuya’s bangs off his face and swipes the towel over his forehead, cleaning the blood and dirt that has collected there.
Chuuya has a trail of blood from his forehead and one from his mouth. Ash is caught in his eyelashes, grey and white, like bits of snow. Dazai loosens his grip on the towel and lets his fingers brush bare skin. He flattens them against his forehead, then drags them down the bridge of his nose, the hollows underneath his eyelids where the skin is most vulnerable, digging his nails in slightly because he can. He doesn’t understand this fascination with Chuuya, but he knows that he is beautiful: in slumber under Dazai, in the throes of a battle, just barely out of reach. Dazai has always liked beautiful things, has always admired them, but the difference is that he likes Chuuya when he is messy, bloodstained and covered in sweat.
And this wanting is so much different than before.
Chuuya’s breath fans warm against Dazai’s own mouth. He is too close.
He takes the towel again and wipes the rest of the blood and dirt off. He does not linger on Chuuya’s face. On when his fingers brush his mouth, the soft dent of it.
Dazai runs his hands under water when he is finished. Burning hot, enough to make them blister, until the strange tingling goes away.
And then he begins to cook.
Admittedly, it isn’t one of the skills he has mastered. He gets distracted by the knives and he doesn’t have enough patience to follow a recipe. Outside it has begun to rain, streaking down the window and clogging up the sky in blues and greys, leaving bruises where clouds should be. Dazai dislikes the rain, but he focuses on the task at hand, chopping vegetables and tossing them into a pot.
He’s so focused that he doesn’t notice Chuuya sneaking up from behind him. “OI,” shrieks a voice in his ear, and Dazai jumps back, smashing into the body behind him.
It’s Chuuya, obviously, in nothing but his white shirt and a pair of jeans. He’s tucked his hair behind his ears, and something about the sight makes all of the blood rush to Dazai’s head, white hot and manic in a way that makes him dizzy. He crosses his arms and pulls a face.
“Ah, you’re up! I thought you would sleep forever, Snow White. Or should it be Snow Red, because of your hair, right chibi?”
“Red because of your blood, maybe,” Chuuya growls, with an alarming glance at the knife. Dazai steps in front of it and gestures to the stove.
“Is that any way to treat someone who made you dinner?”
“You…you what?!”
“Well technically, it’s midnight, so it doesn’t count as dinner. But still!”
“Is it poisoned?” Chuuya says, glaring at the stove. He’s not fast enough to mask his surprise, though, and Dazai smirks.
“Ah, you should have told me before! I’ll make sure to write that down!”
“Bastard. Is that all you can think about?”
“That and women,” he says cheerfully. “You should be more grateful. I saved your life.”
“Bastard,” Chuuya says, but he doesn’t complain. He takes a seat at the kitchen island and rests his head on his palms. “What happened anyways?”
Dazai doesn’t answer at first. He strains the pasta and then pours it into the other pot. “You don’t remember?”
“No. Why else would I fucking be asking?”
“Hm. Well, you made an embarrassment of yourself. Couldn’t fight, just cowered in the corner with that stupid face of yours. I had to save your ass.”
“DAZAI.”
“Ugh, fine.” He stirs the pasta through the vegetables and sauce, pleased with how it turned out. “We totaled the organization. Mori sent executives to deal with the survivors, and I brought you back.”
He’s hoping Chuuya won’t ask why, but of course he does anyway. “And you took me home. To your flat.”
“Believe me, I’m not thrilled about it either.” He spoons the pasta into two bowls. “Here, eat up. I’ll poison it next time, I promise.”
Chuuya glares at him, but he does as he’s told, reaches for his chopsticks and tries it, a bit hesitant. Dazai doesn’t quite understand his own strange sense of satisfaction when Chuuya’s eyes widen, but it’s something blistering; in the way his eyes hook on the faint flush, the arch of his brows, and then he can’t stop looking. Chuuya in that stupid white shirt of his, collarbones exposed, pushing against the fabric.
The wanting, he thinks, is a lot like trying to fill a sink with the drain pulled. It keeps rushing and rushing to fill but it can’t, and he’s pushing back against himself, the desire that he can name but can’t quite understand.
“Good, right,” he says, taking his own seat.
Chuuya looks torn between admitting defeat and stabbing Dazai in the eye with his chopstick. “It’s fine,” he says at last, huffing and looking away. “You’re not as shity as a cook as I would have expected.”
“Which loosely translates to ‘Dazai is the best cook in all of Japan’, right?”
“Hell no.”
“Come on, say it.”
“Never,” Chuuya says, and kicks him under the table. But a moment later he adds, “It is good, though. Fucker.”
Dazai smiles down at his bowl and takes a few bites. He’s never understood the appeal of food, why people prefer certain tastes. Hunger is lost on him, too; he doesn’t think he’s truly ever had an appetite in his life.
But here, in his shitty kitchen with Chuuya, he craves the feeling of normalcy, of domesticity, more than he cares to admit.
“Why’d you bring me back?” Chuuya says at last.
“Pardon?”
“You could have left me there. You did before. Or let one of the others bring me back. So why you?”
There are two boys in a dirty kitchen. One is coming apart at the seams. He’s been tearing apart the stitches for years. The other has skin that lies in puddles around his feet because there is nothing left to fill it in.
“I don’t know,” Dazai says.
Together, they eat shitty pasta, and the rain streaks in slashes down the windows.
***
They’re eighteen when it becomes a routine. Mori has Chuuya using Corruption every month, intent on gaining as much ground as possible, and Dazai is always there to catch him, always there to drag him home and make him shitty meals, molding himself into the hollows that Corruption left behind until he can see, finally, everything that is there.
He learns that Chuuya is a heavy sleeper, no battle instincts; that he likes to brush his teeth while levitating on the ceiling. He learns that he hates horror movies and will yell at the characters, and refuses to drink coffee because he believes it will stunt his growth. Dazai tells him that it is a lost cause and Chuuya yells at him, but he believes, secretly, that Chuuya is big: in the sense that his shoulders fill his coat and that he has what Dazai lacks in his own eyes. Dazai learns how he is a constant line of motion, swinging his legs over the arms of the sofa, walking up the walls and over the ceilings; learns the way he breathes when he is angry or the twitch of his mouth that means he’s sad.
Chuuya at eighteen has long hair which he often ties back into a ponytail. Dazai can see the nape of his neck, the tendons in his skin, and when Chuuya is sitting down, leaning over a book or lying face first on the couch, Dazai will have to resist the urge to touch him there, the follow the veins down to the bumps in his spine and to figure out, how, exactly, Chuuya is built: where the flesh of him ends and the human begins. It is more than that though, but Dazai refuses to look at it, so he cuts it off: snips through the emotion just as easily as he snips through Chuuya’s hair, standing over him while he’s asleep with a pair of kitchen scissors because he cannot bear to see that swath of pale skin anymore. Chuuya yells at him for a solid hour and a half, but Dazai doesn’t focus, just admires how the leftover strands curl over his shoulder, and wonders, exactly, if this wanting will ever stop.
***
It doesn’t. It numbs, hardens into something solid and bitter. Dazai and Chuuya lie side by side, night after night, Dazai wide awake while Chuuya snores beside him. He’s still always astounded by how still Chuuya is, and he hates it, at the same time, because he hates how obvious it is that Chuuya is at peace and he hates how much he is relieved by it.
The physical wanting; that is bearable. He can deal with the aches of wanting to touch Chuuya in the most innocent sense of the word. But this; this sense of relief when he’s okay, the joy when he’s near, the wanting to be near him and make him smile and carry him home where it’s safe--he can’t stand it. It grows like a tumor, something piercing and ugly under his skin.
He needs to cut it out, cut Chuuya out.
(When he leaves, he steals a glove from Chuuya’s car. Leaves a bomb under it, so there’s no way he’ll notice.
The glove sits in his pocket. He hasn’t taken it out, even now.)
***
It is different when they are twenty two. Dazai can’t stay, can’t take Chuuya home, but when he arrives at his apartment after the fight with Loveraft, Chuuya is there anyways, in his kitchen.
He’s angry, doesn’t even bother to hide it, energy barely contained in the lines of his arms and fists. Dazai figures it is justified, but he doesn’t feel like fighting tonight.
“Leave me alone Chuuya,” he says, gesturing to the door. “I’m tired, and I want to sleep.”
“You owe me an explanation first.”
“Aww? Is the dog sad because his master kicked him out? I don’t care, Chuuya. I want to sleep.”
“I’m not your fucking dog!” Chuuya yells before he can manage to contain himself.
“Then why are you following me home with your tail between your legs?”
The hurt on Chuuya’s face is obvious this time. Dazai crosses his arms, and waits for the yelling to come.
“Those last years then? What were they for?”
“Maybe I’ve been manipulating you, Chuuya. You’re just a pawn. And it’s easier to keep you under control like this. How dense can you be?”
“I don’t think so,” Chuuya says, stepping forward. He jabs a finger into Dazai’s chest, right over his heart, flattens his palm and presses it there, fingers scorching even through the material of his shirt. “You cleaned me up after this. You wiped the blood off my face. It can’t be nothing.”
“It can be,” says Dazai, as cooly as he can muster. He left Chuuya once, and he can do it again, can reopen that same scar on both of them.
“No,” Chuuya says, voice breaking. “It fucking can’t.”
His fist flies forward, and Dazai, on instinct, braces himself for the punch.
It doesn’t come. Instead, Chuuya’s fingers tangle in his shirt, and he’s shoving him against the wall, pressing his mouth to his.
Chuuya kisses like he fights; like his life depends on it. He’s trying to break down the walls of a prison that have shattered a long time ago, hands pressed to Dazai’s ribs like he’s trying to unlock something, that cage that has always had a corner for for him, because Dazai knows him, knows the way he arches up on his toes to lick into his mouth, the fire bright heat of his heart.
Dazai understands the wanting, finally; it’s real name. He thinks he’s understood it for a very long time.
“Fuck,” Chuuya says, pulling away, cheeks flushed and mouth bright red. “That wasn’t nothing, you fucking shitty bastard. Look me in the eyes and tell it that was nothing.”
Dazai is burning up.
“I can’t do that,” he says, and then he’s kissing Chuuya again, pushing him against the table, slipping a leg between his knees and forcing the smaller man to settle on the surface. He can’t stop making these shuddering noises, gasping and whiny, enough to make him embarrassed, but he can’t focus, can’t stop touching Chuuya, dragging his mouth down his chin, to his jawline, under the curve of his throat. Chuuya’s back arches and then his hands are in Dazai’s hair and he’s pulling him back up to his mouth, circling his legs around Dazai’s waist so they’re flush chest to chest.
Dazai is static and Chuuya is a magnet and they rip and pull at each other and break and break. But Chuuya has always been just as beautiful in pieces as he is whole, and Dazai is a rainfall of shatterglass under his hands; is crumbling in on himself as he gasps against Chuuya’s mouth. He can’t stop moving, fumbling at the buttons on Chuuya’s shirt, pushing away his own jacket.
“I fucking told you,” Chuuya says, and Dazai is pulling away abruptly. He runs his fingers over his mouth; drags his eyes over Chuuya who sits, flushed and smug on the table. His lip is bleeding from where Dazai must have bitten it, but his cuts are gone--Dazai cleaned him up after Corruption, wiping away the blood from his face like he did so many times. He sat in the field and folded his clothes, Chuuya snoring soundly beside him, and he remembers the ache, fresh and yearning, not the dull bruise it has been but a newly opened up.
“Wait,” he says, quietly, dropping his gaze around from Chuuya. “We shouldn’t.”
“Are you fucking going to back out on me now, asshole? Because I know this isn’t nothing to you. And you still fucking owe me an explanation.”
“I’m not backing out,” Dazai says coldly. “But I’m not kissing you again. Until we clean up.”
It’s Chuuya’s turn to look surprised, lips parting slightly, and Dazai has to remind himself, forcefully, that just because he can kiss Chuuya again, doesn’t mean he should. But he doesn’t resist for long, just leans into him again and fits their mouths, moaning unabashedly at the contact. Chuuya doesn’t push him away either--so Dazai curls his fingers under Chuuya’s thighs and lifts, so that he’s holding the smaller man up: like he did when they were sixteen, seventeen, so many times he’s lost count.
“What the hell?” Chuuya shrieks, but Dazai just laughs, carrying him to the bathroom and setting him down on the lip of the tug.
“You’re dirty,” he explains, turning on the water. “Let me clean you up and make you something.”
“You fucker. You don’t need to be sympathetic. This is just another part of that act.”
“It’s not an act,” Dazai says. He reaches into his coat, and pulls out the glove.
It’s dirty; he’s never washed it, wearing through at the fingers slightly from where Dazai has put it on time and time again. But it’s unmistakably Chuuya’s, and the red flush on his cheeks shows that he remembers too.
“What the hell?”
“I kept them.”
“I wore these when I was eighteen, how the fuck did you--”
“It was never an act,” Dazai says quietly, and presses his mouth to Chuuya’s again. It’s slow this time, soft, close mouthed, hands coming to cup his cheeks, but it says more than any explanation he could manage. “Chuuya.”
“ . . . bastard.” Chuuya hesitates. “You kept it for four years?”
“Why do I have a reason to lie? This thing stinks.”
“That’s Dazai alright,” Chuuya huffs, and slumps against him. “Jesus.”
“Yeah?”
“I missed you. That’s all.”
Dazai doesn’t say it back. He just tightens his hand around the glove and swallows, hard and long, pushes down any words he could manage into the acid of his stomach where they fester, along with the wanting that’s been growing for years.
But he’s here, and Chuuya is right in front of him.
Dazai is sick of waiting for new air, when he could just breathe.
“I missed you too,” he says; kisses Chuuya’s forehead, the hollows of his eyes and the space under his jaw. “You stupid bastard.”
“That’s my line.”
“I know.” He pulls back, hand on Chuuya’s arm. “Get in the bath. I’m going to make something to eat.”
“You just want to see me naked.”
“ . . . do you mind?”
“No,” Chuuya admits grumpily, scowling at his feet. “But I’m putting in bubbles.”
“Bubbles, how threatening.”
“Fuck off and make me a sandwich.”
“As you wish.”
He lets his fingers trail off Chuuya’s arm like a sentence, presses his lips to his forehead one more time. Then he heads to the kitchen.
Making dinner is fairly easy. Dazai has mastered the art of making their shitty pasta, can do it like it’s second nature. He turns on the stove, cooks the vegetables, and sets the pasta out for when the water has boiled.
Chuuya is seventeen, sitting at the kitchen island; eighteen and hovering on the ceiling, spitting in Dazai’s coffee mug and messing up his cabinets. It’s Dazai and Chuuya: it has always been.
He goes back to the bathroom. Chuuya is sitting in the tub. His body is covered in bubbles.
“No peeking or I will chop off your hands,” he warns as Dazai nears him. Dazai laughs, shrieky and uncontained.
“Ah, don’t flatter yourself.”
“Said the one who wouldn’t stop fucking kissing me.”
“ . . . tch.” He settles at the end of the tub, knees on the titles, running his hands through Chuuya’s hair. He washes out the dirt, lathers it, drags his fingers along Chuuya’s scalp until his hair is clean and dark; dark brown instead of it’s usual red.
The words ‘I love you’ sit between them. But it’s been seven years, and Dazai doesn’t think they need them anymore.
“Always,” he says instead, and he knows Chuuya understands.