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Dazai takes a deep breath, letting the air sit heavy in his lungs for a few seconds, before releasing an exhale long enough to break world records. With each second during the breath out, he forces his muscles to loosen and his jaw to unclench into a charade of normalcy. He could already feel his heartbeat going rabbit-fast under the skin of his chest, but Dazai could only pray Chuuya wouldn’t mention it.
God wasn’t on his side this time. Not that he had ever been before, but, a guy can dream.
Chuuya narrowed his eyes at the small manor in front of them, trying to be ( unsuccessfully ) discreet as his eyes flicked back and forth from the house to his face. The gears of his mind were turning grindingly slow until they halted on the answer to his unspoken question.
It was always easy to tell when Chuuya had figured something out. He always had this stupid expression where his eyebrows would furrow together, and he’d momentarily suck his top lip between his teeth. The expression itself was almost enough to snap Dazai out of the cold numbness threatening to overtake his skin.
Almost.
Obviously trying for casual, as neither have ever been good at approaching heavy topics (never particularly gentle either), Chuuya prods, “You always did handle the cold better than everyone else. Makes sense, I guess.”
Funny thing to say, Dazai thinks, as he stands there about to keel over and die from the freezing snow swallowing their feet. He doesn’t think he’s handling the weather very well right now, but that might also be the result of him facing a different kind of all-encompassing cold along with it. Dazai feels like he wants to implode into a million fleshy pieces— if only it meant the chance to escape this moment, this place. Instead of voicing that, he tries for lighthearted. He’s not sure if his tone hits the mark or not.
“You wouldn’t be cold all the time if you took up my stylish trend of bandages and dropped the little vests, Chuuya. I’m a survivalist at heart,” he lets his lip quirk up, but doesn’t let his eye drift over to see if the redhead is watching him. The eyes give away more than Dazai is willing to let go of at the moment, and he knows Chuuya’s always liable to take.
The deflection doesn’t seem to work.
“Why do you think he sent us here?” Chuuya asks. What he means is ‘why did he send you here,’ but the other boy is tiptoeing around him. Dazai is still standing there, eye unmoving from its hard sight on the house in front of them, frozen into a glass that a wrong step could fracture. And Chuuya is trying not to crack any toes.
But it’s too late for that.
The cracks ruptured from the soles of his feet to his eyes the moment he stepped on this rotten land. Rotten land, rotten water, rotten snow, rotten wood, rotten people. He rolls the idea over in his mind. People , he thinks, is that what they were?
The humorless laugh escapes his lips before he has the chance to stitch them shut, along with the much too honest retort of, “Because Mori thinks I’m forgetting my roots. Trying to remind us that a puppet isn’t allowed to pull his own strings.”
Chuuya flinches at the admission, but does nothing to counter it. He had learned the hard way, after all, the terrible lesson of not letting loyalty cloud reality. Little victories .
A particularly hard gust of white speckled wind blows past them, punctuating the statement. Under the weight of the wind, the house in front of them groans an awful, shrill sound. It looks like it’s one more bad storm away from collapse. That particular line of thought fills his mind with scraped up wooden floors, snapped table legs, broken picture frames. If he listens close enough, drowning out the sound of snow flurrying past his ears, Dazai can hear the phantom hurried and hushed whispers of his mother inside. Another rush of air echoes the grunts and screams of his father through the walls and into the grass they stand on. Or what used to be grass. Now only dead and empty ground.
Even as he tries to tear his sight away from his childhood cage and into the boy next to him (who’s always next to him, why is he always there when he needs him ?), Dazai can feel his own pathetic whimpers flooding his ears and threatening to spill out his mouth. His throat burns with a scream he won’t allow himself to give voice to.
This is a terrible, horrible place, Dazai concludes. But he could’ve told you that even after not setting foot over this open grave in years. Because that’s what it was— an open grave.
The house still standing there, abandoned, seemed to be mocking him by sitting there. Look, it taunts, I’m standing here as your weeping wound for everyone to witness. Does your weakness scare you? Because I know it doesn’t scare them.
Chuuya’s voice cuts over the incessant screaming of his mind like a whip crack echoing violently against his skull.
“What?” Dazai asks. He didn’t catch it the first time, too busy trying to breathe through the water in his lungs.
Chuuya huffs but doesn’t let himself get irritated. Instead he repeats a gentle but firm, “Do you want to break it?”
Now Dazai feels his own confused expression migrate its way onto his own face. The look Chuuya gives him for it could almost be described as fond, and the softness in his eyes managed to thaw some of the frost layering over his mind.
“The fucking house, Dazai. Do you want to destroy it?”
In his bafflement, he lets out a laugh. One a lot more genuine this time.
“If I did that, Mori would lose it. He likes having this here as a testament of his ‘limitless generosity.’”
Chuuya lets his eyebrows furrow in frustration at that, and Dazai barely resists the urge to take his thumb and smooth out the skin. But there are lines they shouldn’t cross. Ones like giving another boy comfort in obvious gestures. Ones like destroying haunted houses for the sake of burying dead memories.
“That’s not what I asked. I said , do you want to destroy the damn thing?”
Dazai’s heart stutters weakly as he looks back towards the house. A cold house in a cold place. No place closer to hell than northern Japan, it seems.
“I mean, yeah, but tha—“
“Okay then you better get started,” Chuuya promptly cuts him off. “This fucking hellhole is so cold my limbs are about to snap off.”
He let his jaw fall shut with a click. This a dumb fucking idea, Dazai knows that, but the itch under his skin is burning something hot and unbearable. Even his fingers twitch with the phantom sensation of that old metal bat in his hand— the one he used to use as a last line of defense, a last resort, because that’s what it needed to be for him. The only thing that stood between him and the furniture flying towards his face— threatening to take an eye with it if he didn’t move faster than the fury of that dying man. Batting practice, how uncharacteristically fatherly that was of him. He might have been the best baseball player on the team with the experience he had. Oh well.
He thinks that this is stupid, and there’s no way it doesn’t end in them both severely disaplined by the time they get back to headquarters. Instead says, “Okay.”
The first few steps, Dazai has to mechanically force each foot forward through the snow, his body pulling out every mental stop to protect him from entering a place he wasn’t sure he would ever have a chance to leave. However, each inch forward proved easier until he almost felt like he was running towards the front door. Chuuya wasn’t far behind but made no move to intervene.
These grand oak doors held a nefarious truth behind them, but it was almost alarming how easily they gave way under the weight of his palm. Was it always this easy? Dazai’s hands burned with sympathetic pain for the ghost of the child who used to pound with every ounce of strength against this wood, desperately trying to escape before the boogie man who lived in the master bedroom left his cave to finish the job. Past weakness leaves a bitter taste in his mouth, and no amount of swallowing can push it down.
Chuuya places a hand on the small of his back, only to push him further inside past the weighted entrance. Despite the shove, there’s a soft expression pulling at his face before he states, “We should find something for you to break it with unless you plan to leave here with a broken hand. There’s probably something lying around this place.”
He’s not wrong, Dazai thinks. There is something lying around, and it’s waiting to find home in his hands one final time. To give it one last grand purpose before becoming nothing more than dead, dented metal.
All too suddenly, his body is moving towards the cupboard at the side of the first room, he pulls out the familiar kotatsu blanket with an old friend swaddled inside. Pulling it out from the center gives the illusion of unsheathing a sword through the swirl of disturbed dust. The first weapon that turned child to monster. Even now, the dried, bloody flakes still lay splattered under the dent atop of the bat.
Crack .
The snap of skull under the force of his strength was the beginning of liberation. Dazai left this wooden cage for a larger prison, but there is something freeing and fleeting in killing your keeper. Mori probably wouldn’t let him stick around long enough to let Dazai feel that twisted sense of euphoria a second time.
The house is one story, but makes up for its lack of height with the amount of rooms. A convoluted labyrinth built to keep a rat in the maze forever. The dust and rot in the air is only a cover up to give an allusion of death— of dying– but Dazai can feel the way the floors warm with a resurgence of life under his toes. All too happy to trap boys back in cages. If Chuuya senses it too, he doesn’t mention it. Just stares and waits for this place to fall apart.
Starting easy, Dazai moves carefully to the small corner he was told to call a room and pulled back to swing. He hesitated— if only for a moment — because there was no going back from this. This was a living nightmare he would leave behind a grave.
Then he holds his breath, and swings.
The drywall does not crumble into chunks but explodes into sharp confetti. Welcome home. Even the pieces of this place were celebrating the death of something in him he cannot bring himself to name. Maybe something that sounds suspiciously like life. No more praying that one day he’ll get it back, that sacred thing he lost, but that it will stay buried here with the rest of him. Even as the jagged edges scratch up his exposed skin, leaving trails of red in their wake, Dazai wants to pull that remaining bandage off his face. To watch with both eyes as this place gets ripped to pieces. He might’ve done it, if not for the sake of giving into this bout of impulsivity, but it would leave him looking much too like the boy who used to haunt these walls. This is not a repetition of the past, but the demolition of it.
Next he moves to the shelves. The small trinkets fly from their place and splash into atoms at his feet. Nothing left to recognize them by, and the idea makes him smile. ‘Do onto others’ and all that.
He wants to know what this place sounds like when it dies.
Pulverizing wall after wall in celebration, the house sobs and cracks under the pressure of his unrelenting swings. Can you hear that, Dazai asks this wooden cage, this is the sound of you shattering to pieces. And as he smashes down on the old kitchen counter, watching in awe as it rises up before splattering down, the house asks him a question of its own: Congratulations! You have decimated this holy ground. Now which haunted house will you implode in next, ghost boy?
His mind is suddenly flooded with fractured memories as he steps over the ruptured bathroom tile floor. Sounds of jiggling locks and muffled screeches are barely drowned out by the explosion of metal hitting glass. The mirror shards come hurtling towards him, and before he has the chance to process it, they glow red and hover at his face.
Dazai’s brain finally catches up with the sight in front of him, pulled from his drowning memory, and turns to look towards Chuuya. He half-expects Chuuya to berate him for being so careless in a fit of protective irritation, but the other boy doesn’t say anything as he lets the shards fall to the ground without a word. The glint of understanding in his eyes speaks back at him louder than words ever could. It’s in the moment of pause that allows Dazai to consider if Chuuya feels that burning itch to rip the world to pieces all the time. If the only time he ever gets to ease that all-consuming tension is when he had to tear himself to pieces too. Maybe they’re similar like that.
As he moves away from the bathroom and back towards the final room, the master bedroom, he can hear the house in his head again. Pray for me, this house begs. Let me be remembered after my final hour. But Dazai cannot pray. This place tore the faith from his hands and replaced it with a gun. This place told him to run faster than the ground crumbling beneath his feet, or get swallowed into hollow ground.
After hearing the bed frame snap, the walls crumble, and the drawers clatter on to the floor, he moved towards the last mirror. This haunted home expected him to place the gun at his own head, but it didn’t expect him to fire at his reflection. The mirror is shattered into a mosaic in his bloodied grip, but it’s never looked so beautiful.
The bat slips down from his hands and hits the floor with a bang, but Dazai doesn’t look down. Too busy admiring the mess of this place that he created. Every wall caved in. He had heard open floor plans were in style these days, and the place needed the renovation anyways. Moving back to the door, Dazai looked back at his work one last time and couldn’t stop the almost giddy laughter that escaped his throat at the sight. The aftermath of one big temper tantrum, and Chuuya was standing at the center of it.
Once he started giggling, he couldn’t stop until he was hunched over himself, coughing up the sharded dust starting to coat the inside of his lungs. In Chuuya’s faux exasperation, he just huffed and helped him stand up to get them out of the house, away from the toxic air. “You’re fucking ridiculous,” he muttered.
However, finally standing outside, Dazai sobered up. Despite the inner destruction, the house was still standing and looking like the perfect outer shell it was when they arrived. The thought pushed him to drive his sharp nails into the bed of his wounded palm until Dazai couldn’t stifle the request any longer.
“Chuuya,” he whispered, uncharacteristically quiet, “Do you think you could…?” But he trailed off when he noticed the redhead already had his narrowed sights in his direction– down at the crimson mess of nails and torn skin. Chuuya’s hands twitched at his sides as he studied the injury, fighting himself desperately to push down whatever urge had overcome him. However, his tone of voice made the other boy’s head snap back to his face and then flick towards the house. Careful compassion washed over his features.
“Yeah,” he nodded jerkily. “Stand back.”
Chuuya made his way to the side of the wooden shell and pressed his palm flat against the surface. The house slammed flat with a final roar of glass, wood, and dust faster than Dazai had the chance to blink.
Silence permeated the land, only shattered by the drip drip drip drip of his blood running off his fingers and hitting fresh snow.
The house was dead.
A jacket suddenly flew over his face, which forced him out of his shocked stupor. Pulling the fabric down from off his head, he watched incredulously as Chuuya stripped off the shirt that sat comfortably over his warm frame and proceeded to shred it.
“As much as I appreciate your exhibitionistic tendencies, Chuuya, indecent exposure is more likely to give you pneumonia right now than get you arrested, ” Dazai jokes, still baffled by whatever he was doing. Chuuya's ears flush red at the accusation, but otherwise didn’t acknowledge the comment. Just continuing to pull the cloth into careful strips.
Seemingly finished with his task by the content glint in his eyes, Chuuya demands, “Give me my fucking jacket. It’s cold as balls out here.” He barely manages to bite down the teasing remark on the tip of his tongue at the demand, but cuts it short as Chuuya maneuvers to his side. So close the remnants of his superhuman body heat still ease the cold over his arms.
Chuuya zips his jacket up tight, cheeks flushed cold from the snow (and maybe something else) and pulls Dazai’s hand into his own. The dark cloth soaks up the crimson mess sitting underneath it, sharply contrasting with the pale of his skin and the white of his bandages. Even the pain as Chuuya pulls the wrapping tight feels tender. It’s the kind of kindness that comes from a deep seated empathy in knowing what it’s like to tear yourself into an open, weeping wound just to shred apart the world in the process.
Dazai didn’t turn back as they walked their way back towards town, and Chuuya didn’t either. There was nothing left to see– nothing left to grieve. Just an empty grave with no souls left to haunt it.
He came into this world screaming, but he leaves here quiet. He leaves here less. Less than he was, less than he will ever be.
And he feels lighter for it.