Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

The fucking sun is trying to uncreatively slaughter him.

The windows of Kunikida’s car are rolled down, hot wind slapping his face, and still it feels suffocating. Maybe it’s the weather, maybe it’s his own skin.

“Summer camps are a joke,” he drawls, stretching his legs across the dashboard until Kunikida swats them down. “But fine, maybe I need one. A fresh start.” He pauses, deliberately solemn. “By which I mean a new boyfriend. Preferably someone capable of fucking me so good I forget my name.”

Kunikida does not, at all, hear. “You look like a nerd.”

“How supportive of you,” Dazai replies smoothly, already sinking further into the seat as if disappointment is his natural posture. “This is why you’re single.”

Kunikida ignores him, eyes trained on the road. He’s an alumni of this ridiculous four-month camp, which is apparently supposed to “build coping skills” and “community” among the suicidally inclined. A legacy of recovered children dragging the current crop of damaged ones into sunlight like stubborn weeds. Noble. Pretentious. Utterly pointless.

Dazai flicks the buckle of his seatbelt and sighs again, louder this time. “Tell me at least Ango and Odasaku will be there. You wouldn’t leave me alone with your dazzling personality for four months.”

“They’ll be there,” Kunikida says flatly. “Volunteers.”

“Thank god,” Dazai mutters, melodramatic hand pressed to his forehead. “I was beginning to picture myself shriveling in isolation, talking to the trees, weeping into group-therapy beanbags. At least with Ango there, I’ll have someone to bully. And Oda… well, Oda’s a saint, I’ll probably try to seduce him out of boredom.”

“Don’t,” Kunikida says, firm as a slammed book.

Dazai smirks. “You’re right. Too easy. No, I want someone new. Someone who’ll knock me flat, put me in my place, maybe choke me a little.” He taps his chin thoughtfully. “Yes, an ideal boyfriend. Does your precious alumni network provide those, or do I need to place a special order?”

Kunikida exhales like he’s aged five years in five seconds. Dazai counts it a victory.

The car keeps rumbling forward, camp drawing nearer, Dazai spinning fantasies aloud until the heat blurs into background noise.

The camp is uglier than expected. All peeling paint, crooked signs about positivity nailed to pine trees, cabins that smell like mildew from here. And yet, in its decrepit way, it screams you’re stuck here for four months, bitch.

He spots them immediately—Atsushi, practically glowing with that irritating earnestness, and Akutagawa, who manages to look like the concept of tuberculosis manifested into a boy. Dazai sighs. Huh. Not surprising, really. Of course the institution’s brochure poster-child and the institution’s future lawsuit are here. Balance. Yin and yang. Useless and aggressive.

He slides out of the car, sunglasses low on his nose, and promptly ambushes Akutagawa by ruffling his hair like a man possessed. “My, my, puppy, they still haven’t put you down?”

Akutagawa shrieks in indignation, swatting like he’s allergic to touch. Dazai adjusts his glasses, perfectly unfazed, and his eyes catch new prey. Tachihara slouching like a delinquent mascot. Yosano, her arms folded, surgical coolness radiating even without a scalpel in sight.

Dazai beams, all teeth. “Ah, Yosano! Don’t tell me you’re here to play house in the cabins with me.”

Her reply is a scalpel in tone if not in steel. “No. Volunteer. Don’t even try.”

“Damnit,” he pouts, melodramatic as ever. “I was so hoping to get away with you as my roommate. Imagine the midnight surgeries.”

She walks off. He follows her retreat with the longing of a thwarted pervert.

Then—Tanizaki, hand clasped tightly with Naomi, both of them hovering near the entrance. Volunteers? Suicidal? Somewhere in-between? With them, it’s never clear. Tanizaki offers a polite smile and gestures toward the gathering crowd. “Hey, look—it’s the Flags.”

Instant loss of interest. Dazai’s thumb finds his phone like it’s muscle memory. He scrolls, pointedly uninterested in listening to the camp’s cool kids wax poetic about their tragic pasts and collective superiority complexes.

Unfortunately, social gravity is crueler than physics. He’s dragged along toward the cluster, and that’s when the obnoxious call pierces the summer air.

“Yo! Dazai, from middle school! Didn’t think you’d crawl out from under your rock.”

Dazai glances up, unimpressed. Albatross—loudmouthed, broad-grinned, already strutting like the entire camp is his stage. He’s the kind of guy whose voice carries like a crow and whose energy screams I peaked in sophomore year and refuse to descend gracefully.

“Still alive, huh,” Dazai replies flatly, as though it’s a minor tragedy.

Albatross grins wider, then turns and shouts across the field to someone at the vending machine. “Yo, Nakahara! Quit hogging the Fanta and get over here!”

And that’s when Dazai looks up properly.

He sees him. Nakahara Chuuya.

The can clinks against the vending slot, his hand catching it like muscle memory. Sun catching copper-red hair. Shoulders broader than Dazai remembers, thighs thick in ripped jeans, mouth shaped into irritation even at a distance.

Oh. Oh, fuck.

Dazai’s gaze doesn’t waver. Won’t waver. Cannot. His brain registers only static, his mouth runs dry, and somewhere in the back of his mind a choir of angels and porn soundtrack guitars strike up in unholy harmony.

Delicious. That’s the word. That man looks delicious.

And Dazai, suddenly, is starving.

Chuuya scowls, that beautiful, hot, obscenely sexy scowl aimed straight at Albatross. “You’re too damn loud. Where’s Piano Man and the others?”

Albatross shrugs, grinning like an idiot. “Getting dorm assignments. Relax, they’ll show.”

Dazai registers none of this. None. His brain is already short-circuiting, because—oh. Oh, he has muscles. If this man so much as lifted his arms and let that flimsy white shirt ride up, Dazai is ninety-nine percent sure he’d glimpse an abdomen carved by gods. His biceps alone look like they could throw him through a wall, and Dazai would thank him. Twice.

The veins in his hands—deliciously visible, practically begging to be traced with teeth. The slope of his shoulders, the unforgiving taper of his waist, the too-tight denim clinging to thighs that could choke a man into prayer.

And those eyes. One brown, the other blue. A misprint of the universe. Gorgeous, uncanny, unfair.

Haha.

Dazai has met his future boyfriend.

He can faintly hear Atsushi’s voice at the edge of reality, “Dazai-san? Are you… okay?”

No. No, he is not. His eyes are drifting lower and lower, gravity working overtime. And oh. Ohhh. It’s definitely big.

The kind of big that makes four months of mandatory coping-skills camp suddenly feel like destiny.

“Well,” he announces, loud enough to turn heads, “if the rest of you don’t want him, I’ll happily volunteer to be the one riding Nakahara’s dick all summer.”

Silence.

It’s instantaneous, brutal. Even the cicadas in the trees seem to choke mid-song. A hot, suffocating stillness blankets the camp entrance, as if the entire world collectively decided we need to pause and process this man’s audacity.

Chuuya’s beautiful face erupts in red, crimson spreading from ears to throat like spilled wine. For once in his goddamn life, he looks speechless—mouth open, words not forming, eyes darting between Dazai and everyone staring at him.

From a distance, the Flags freeze in perfect unison. Albatross, halfway through cracking open a soda, doesn’t even blink. Someone else fumbles a cigarette. Another Flag mutters “no fucking way” under his breath, staring like he’s watching a car crash in slow motion.

Atsushi looks horrified, like the earth itself betrayed him. “Dazai-san!” His voice is a strangled squeak, hands waving in frantic disapproval.

Akutagawa’s face contorts into murder. “You—” he spits, like he’d gladly shred Dazai on the spot.

Yosano’s lips twitch—not quite a smile, but dangerously close. “Oh, this’ll be fun,” she murmurs, clearly entertained.

Tanizaki claps a polite hand over Naomi’s ears, as if that will erase the corruption already seeping into the air. Naomi only giggles behind his palm, far too entertained to feign shock.

Kunikida, from where he’s still unloading bags, stops dead and stares. His expression is the grim, exhausted acceptance of a man who knows his worst nightmare just came true in real time.

And Dazai? Dazai adjusts his glasses, unfazed, basking in the silence he’s created. A slow grin curves his lips as if he’s proud—no, ecstatic—to have detonated the room before even entering it.

“See?” he says, eyes never leaving Chuuya’s. “Fresh start.”

Chuuya finally finds his tongue—and, unfortunately for the structural integrity of the camp, it’s sharpened into a blade. His glare could cauterize wounds.

Dazai, of course, meets it with a dazzling grin, all shameless teeth and mockery. He steps forward like he’s taking center stage, hand pressed theatrically to his chest.

“Nakahara Chuuya,” he intones as if he’s reading scripture. “I have seen your glory, beheld your form, and been struck down like Saul on the road to Damascus. Therefore, I ask—” He bows with ridiculous flourish. “Will you be my boyfriend?”

“No."

Dazai gasps. “Perfect. In that case, let’s be roommates.”

“No.” Even sharper this time, as if the word itself could punch him.

Kunikida barrels in before the world combusts. “Enough,” he growls, grabbing Dazai by the collar. “I have to get this idiot registered. Excuse me.” He shoots Chuuya a look that’s half apology, half please set me on fire and end my suffering.

“My sincerest regrets for his existence,” Kunikida mutters as he drags Dazai bodily away.

Dazai, unbothered, winks at Chuuya over his shoulder, feet skidding against gravel as Kunikida yanks him like a leash on a rabid dog. “We’ll talk later, darling!” he calls, grin widening as if rejection is just foreplay.

The crowd exhales at once, mutters breaking out, Flags exchanging looks, Atsushi whispering “what just happened” like a prayer.

Chuuya rubs his temple, cheeks still burning, and vows—loudly, to no one in particular—that if Dazai comes within ten feet of his cabin, there will be blood.

Kunikida practically strangles him, fists bunched tight in the collar of Dazai’s Nirvana shirt. “You’d better behave here,” he hisses, low and deadly serious. “I am not kidding, Dazai.”

Dazai waves him off with the limp flourish of a dying aristocrat. “Oh, please. I just met the love of my life, I’m still suffering from the dopamine rush. Can’t you let me bask for five minutes before you strangle me into celibacy?”

Kunikida scowls, arms cross, jaw tight, eyes sharp behind his glasses.

Dazai smiles, but the curve is hollow, paper-thin.

“It’s fine if you want to enjoy yourself here,” Kunikida says, teacher-patient. “But this better not be some weird attraction thing to red flags.”

Dazai gives him a look, one brow arched, tone dripping sugar over arsenic. “Chuuya is definitely not a red flag. And he’s definitely not a rebound to my psychopathic ex.”

Another silence.

Kunikida sighs, pinching the bridge of his nose. “Just… behave, hm?”

Nothing.

Dazai adjusts his glasses with two fingers, the faintest glint in the lenses, and tugs at the hem of his oversized shirt—black, Nirvana logo peeling from years of wear. His armor of irony.

Finally, Kunikida tries again, softer. “You can call your uncle anytime you want, you know. Rehab at least allowed that much.”

A hum is all he gets, quiet and evasive.

Dazai picks up the registration clipboard and scrawls his name down in elegant, mocking loops, as if the act itself is beneath him. A new beginning, written like a joke.

___

He smiles to himself as he drifts down the dormitory hallway, humming like this is some charming little scavenger hunt. A quaint little game; which door could Chuuya Nakahara have chosen? Which corner of this bland, forgettable building has the misfortune of being blessed by his presence? Perhaps he’s already settled in. Perhaps Dazai’s only a few steps away from peeling back the mystery.

The Flags? He knows nothing about them, and less than nothing about caring. Not then, not back in middle school, not now. Funny—he can’t remember noticing Chuuya back then either. Maybe Class A’s shining prodigy was too far above his own Class E gutter seat for their paths to matter. Or maybe Dazai was simply too lucky; after all, he has him now.

The sight he stumbles into feels like a reward for his patience. Chuuya has shed the crisp white shirt, and in its place—bare skin. Unashamed. Alive. So very chokeable.

Dazai lingers, starving, savoring the view like a starving man in front of a feast. Oh, it’s embarrassing, the way his mouth waters. He’d laugh at himself if he weren’t so busy devouring.

He lets his thoughts wander, indulgent, obscene, to all the things that compact, wiry body could do to him. All the ways it could fold him, pin him, crush him, kill him—ah, it’s such a delicious fantasy that he almost forgets where he is. Almost.

And then Chuuya ruins the daydream in the most Chuuya way possible; with a random pillow hurled across the room like it’s a weapon.

It catches Dazai square in the chest. He stumbles back with a startled laugh, arms flailing like some clown, glasses slipping right off his face and clattering onto the floor. The stumble is real, not feigned—Chuuya’s throw carried more strength than he expected.

“Man, you’re strong,” he wheezes, grinning wide even as he blinks into the blur of light and shape. “I could’ve sworn you were aiming for my heart. Oh, wait—you did.”

He crouches, hands patting aimlessly over the floorboards. Of course, the glasses are nowhere to be found. The world swims around him in hazy streaks, but he refuses to crawl like some insect. Instead, he tilts his head up, helpless and smiling.

“Chuuyaaa,” he sing-songs, “be a darling and help me, won’t you? My poor fragile eyes can’t find their way without you.”

“Get ‘em yourself, dumbass,” Chuuya snaps, already moving across the room. The mattress creaks as he sits back down, clearly uninterested in saving him.

Dazai huffs, dramatically, dragging himself to one knee like a soldier wounded in battle. “Cruel, cruel man. What if I step on them by accident and blind myself forever? Would you take responsibility for the rest of my life? Guide me tenderly by the hand? Undress me so I don’t trip and break my neck in the bath?”

“God, shut up.” There’s the telltale shuffle of feet, closer than before, and then a sigh. “You’re pathetic. Here.”

A blur bends into focus—Chuuya, crouched, holding the bent frames between two fingers like he’d rather be holding a dead rat. Dazai tilts his head, grinning so hard his cheeks ache.

“See? I knew you’d come rescue me. You just can’t resist.”

“Rescue you? I should’ve stepped on them and saved the world the trouble.”

“Oh, don’t be shy. You threw yourself at me first—pillow and all. This is practically domestic already.”

Chuuya groans, shoving the glasses into his palm. “You’re delusional.”

Dazai slides them back onto his face, blinking as the blur sharpens back into glorious clarity—into Chuuya’s scowl, the set jaw, the flushed neck. He hums softly, leaning back on his heels.

“Maybe. Or maybe I just see clearer than anyone else.”

Chuuya stiffens, but doesn’t answer.

Dazai decides, glasses safely back on his face, that this is the perfect chance to take stock of his new kingdom. Pastel sky-blue walls—soft, gentle, like someone painted the inside of their chest cavity and left it open for the world to see. He likes it. Very different from the dingy grey hospitals and rehab centers he’s used to staring at.

There’s a bunk bed, neat and sturdy, though it already creaks under Chuuya’s movements. Dazai mentally calls dibs on the top bunk. (Of course he does—he’s always preferred being above Chuuya.) One low table squats in the corner, a big drawer waits for clothes, and the space feels just bare enough that his chaos will thrive.

He dusts his hands off and flashes Chuuya a grin. “Don’t go anywhere, shorty. I’ll be right back. Don’t miss me too much.”

Chuuya doesn’t even respond—just levels him with that flat, irritated glare. Dazai hums as he exits, almost skipping through the hall.

The registration office stretches out wider than he thought; the dormitories bleed into it, all seamlessly connected. Practical. Predictable. He spots his bags where he left them, both bulging, heavy, littered with stickers and unnecessary charms that jangle as he pulls them up. His entire personality is basically screaming from the luggage before he even re-enters the room.

On the way back, he passes the lobby, glimpsing it from afar. Wide, buzzing, interesting. Something to explore later. For now, his new territory waits.

He kicks the door open and dumps his stuff onto the floor dramatically, like a traveler returning from war. But then—oh. Oh.

Chuuya isn’t shirtless anymore. Which is a tragedy. Instead, he’s buttoned into a red flannel, sleeves rolled up in the way only Chuuya can manage. His hair is tied up now, exposing the gold piercings glinting in his ears, delicate, precise, expensive. And around his throat—Dazai nearly chokes on his own spit—sits a black choker, snug and daring.

He practically drools, and he doesn’t even try to hide it.

Chuuya catches the stare instantly, of course. His frown is sharp, cutting straight through Dazai’s theatrics.

And Dazai knows what that expression says: fucking weirdo.

Not that he can argue. He is a fucking weirdo. His hair’s still a mess from the trip, his oval-shaped glasses make him look like some reject professor, his silver dangling earrings (not even real piercings, just clip-ons) swing against his jaw, and the contrast of all that with his oversized Nirvana shirt, ripped fitted jeans, and beat-up black Converse screams disaster chic.

After the long dramatic silence, he plops onto the floor cross-legged like a kid at Christmas and unzips his bags with a flourish.

The first luggage bursts open like a corpse exhaling—clothes spilling out, crumpled, wrinkled, not even pretending to have been folded. Four months’ worth of fabrics, half of them band shirts and dark jeans, the other half hoodies with suspicious stains and holes. Dazai rifles through them carelessly, holding up a black shirt to the light as though checking for mold, then tossing it back into the pile.

Then he cracks open the second luggage, and oh, this one is his pride and joy. A neat arsenal of distraction and obsession. At least eleven books, all on wildly unrelated topics. One on ballistics, one on eighteenth-century poetry, one on advanced probability theory, a thick medical pathology tome he probably stole, a travel guide to Prague for no reason at all. He spreads them out in a fan, grinning like a game show host presenting prizes.

Next, he pulls out his collection of gadgets like some kind of tech dragon hoarding its mismatched treasure. Headphones—wired and wireless. A battered mp3 player with stickers peeling. His sleek laptop. A tablet. His regular phone. And, with a magician’s flourish, a Nokia brick phone “for emergencies.”

L

Then come the journals. Three thick and empty, waiting like blank coffins. And one already half-filled with his rambling essays, strange diagrams, maybe the occasional violent metaphor he doesn’t want anyone to read.

He sits back and admires the spread of his own madness, like an artist surveying his masterpiece.

Chuuya just… stares.

The expression on his face is equal parts baffled, horrified, and begrudgingly impressed. His arms fold across his chest, flannel pulling tight across his shoulders. His mouth opens like he’s about to say something, then closes again, because what do you even say when your new “roommate” unpacks like a doomsday prepper who’s also an academic failure and possibly a lunatic?

Dazai tilts his head up at him, flashing that lopsided grin. “What? You expected me to travel light? I need stimulation, Chibi. Books, gadgets, journals—it’s all foreplay for the brain.”

“You’re out of your fucking mind.”

“Thank you. I do try.”

Chuuya doesn’t keep standing like some judgmental saint—no, he lowers himself to the floor across from Dazai, cross-legged too, as if they’re equals. (They’re not. Dazai’s a visionary, a pioneer of madness, and Chuuya’s a glorified camp counselor with pretty arms. But still, the symmetry’s nice.)

Chuuya jerks his chin at the pathetic spread of electronics and journals.

“You do know they’re gonna confiscate all that for the next four months, right? Camp rules. You get one phone if you need to call your legal guardian or whatever.”

Dazai freezes mid-motion, a dangling headphone cord in his hand.

He stares. Confiscate?

“What if,” he starts slowly, like someone explaining calculus to a toddler, “I have a question that only Google—divine, omnipotent Google—and three days of obsessive research can answer? What then, Chuuya? What then?”

“There’s a library nearby. Old-school, with shelves. You’ll survive.”

Dazai clutches his chest like he’s been shot. “A library? What am I, a medieval monk copying scripture by candlelight?”

Chuuya just shrugs, unimpressed.

“And what about music? What if I can’t sleep without it? What if my fragile, tragic psyche requires a playlist of Mozart and My Chemical Romance to lull me into unconsciousness?”

“Then you’ll be so fucking tired from the day you’ll pass out without noticing,” Chuuya replies, dry as desert air.

Dazai gasps. “How cruel. How unsympathetic. You’d let me die in the silence of my own thoughts, wouldn’t you?”

“Yes."

Chuuya’s frown deepens as his gaze drifts to the crime scene of clothing sprawled across the floor. He sighs like a man staring down the apocalypse.

“Top drawer’s yours. Mine’s the middle. Bottom one’s for your useless junk,” he says, already moving toward the dresser.

Then—without fanfare, without permission—he crouches, grabs one of Dazai’s wrinkled shirts, and starts folding it. Crisp, precise, efficient. Then the next. And the next.

Dazai, too busy fussing over his shrine of electronics and journals, doesn’t notice at first. He hums to himself, sorting headphones, deciding which book gets top billing. But then he looks up.

And stares.

“What… are you doing?”

Chuuya doesn’t even look at him. “Folding your clothes. So it’s easier to put them in the drawer.”

Dazai blinks, wide-eyed, as though someone just confessed undying love to him. “…Why?”

Chuuya finally flicks his eyes up. “So it’s easier to put in. Duh.”

Dazai tilts his head, studies him, like he’s peering at an alien who just offered to colonize his soul. His lips twitch into that lazy grin.

“Why would you do that?”

Who in their right mind would willingly, voluntarily fold his clothes?

Chuuya rolls his eyes and keeps going, folding another shirt with aggressive precision. “Because it’s disgusting. You’re disgusting. And I don’t want to live out of a landfill for the next four months.”

Dazai leans back on his hands, watching him with something dangerously close to awe. “…Chuuya Nakahara, folding my clothes. This is practically foreplay.”

The pillow comes flying again.

Thirty minutes later, Chuuya’s lugging one of Dazai’s overstuffed gadget bags, while Dazai drags his feet like they’re on a death march.

“This is inhumane,” Dazai groans, arms dramatically limp at his sides. “Cruel and unusual punishment. Do you know how much trauma I’ve already endured carrying my own heart around every day? And now, you add—what—even more weight?”

“Shut up,” Chuuya mutters, adjusting the strap on his shoulder.

They pass the staircase on their left, and Dazai perks up.

“Ohh, stairs. Another floor. Don’t tell me—that’s where you hide the secret underground dungeon? Or is it just showers and more dorms? Either way, I’m intrigued.”

Chuuya ignores him.

By the time they reach the main lobby, the place looks like an airport security checkpoint had a baby with a prison intake. Volunteers line the tables, handing out clear plastic strip bags. The other campers—future inmates—are already stuffing their phones, chargers, even handheld consoles inside, slapping name tags on, and passing them over. Somewhere in the back, there must be a locker room swallowing up all these little bags of broken dreams.

Dazai drops his tech arsenal on the counter with the air of a man delivering contraband, pouting as the volunteer seals it all away. He waves dramatically at his gadgets like they’re war widows.

“Goodbye, my loves. I’ll think of you every night I cry myself to sleep.”

When it’s done, he turns to Chuuya, squinting. “How do you know so much about this place, anyway? All the rules, the layout, the everything.”

Chuuya’s voice is casual, but his posture’s not. “Rimbaud manages the whole thing. He’s the head. My dad.” He ticks names off like a grocery list. “Verlaine’s my brother, he helps run it. Kouyou’s my sister. She’s in charge of half the programs.”

Dazai blinks. “Oh, so it’s a whole family business of saving suicidal brats. Adorable. But wait—” He cocks his head. “Why aren’t you part of the staff, then? Don’t tell me you’re just here for the bunk beds and charming company.”

Chuuya's eyes slide away, jaw clenching faintly. He shoulders Dazai’s bag higher and keeps walking, like the silence itself is the answer.

Silence hangs between them like a held breath. Dazai feels the prickling of it—Chuuya’s stiffness, the tightness at the jaw—and, because he’s not a monster all the time, he shuts up. He fishes his marker out of his pocket with a small, self-conscious flourish and starts slipping his gadgets into the clear plastic strip bags like some tragic tech-worshipper offering up sacrifices.

The volunteer seals each bag with a practiced flip and hands them back over the counter. Dazai scrawls his name—florid, unnecessary—on each label and passes them across like they’re artifacts.

“Goodbye, my treasures,” he murmurs, and the volunteer gives him a look that reads, we close things for a living, sir, then gestures to the next line.

They walk. The lobby door opens and the world tilts into green.

Ahead lies a forest so wide it feels like a promise. Trees stand like quiet sentinels. Paths braid between trunks—narrow dirt trails that wind off to the garden, wider boardwalks leading to the hot springs, a sliver of glassy lake visible where sunlight bounces off water like a coin. Every route smells faintly of pine and wet earth and something older than grief. 

It’s spacious in a way that makes Dazai breathe differently; spacious makes room for him to perform, to disappear, to be theatrically noticed or theatrically lost. He likes that. He likes the way nothing in this place is cramped—except maybe the feelings.

They approach a villa that’s less a house, more an invitation. There’s no solid front door—just an open arch leading into a cavernous common room. Inside, long wooden tables run the length of the space. Volunteers bustle at the sides, arranging plates of fruit, stacks of bread, little labeled snacks—a small army of caretakers turning nourishment into ritual. 

A door to the side likely hides the kitchen; upstairs, a balcony peels away from the second floor and looks out over the whole clearing like a theatre box. The architecture is warm and honest, built more for function than for pretense, which suits Dazai perfectly: he enjoys places that let him be loud and obscene without the world giving him the stink-eye.

He lets his eyes drift up to that balcony and, because he is human and because he is theatrically morbid, he wonders—just for a ridiculous, delicious second—if he’ll die if he jumps from there. He imagines the flight like an absurd stage trick—no dignity, possibly a failed attempt—and the very image makes him laugh, not with desperation but with the bright, nervous amusement of someone who loves testing limits.

Chuuya, beside him, says nothing about the balcony. He’s not watching the architecture or Dazai’s foolish mental stunts; he’s watching the people—volunteers organizing, a small cluster of campers arranging their mess kits, a kid nervously plucking at the hem of his shirt. There’s a tilt to Chuuya’s shoulders now, a guarded softness Dazai pretends not to notice. He doesn’t say a word, and Dazai is content to be quiet too, doing the small, decent thing: observing.

They drift toward the tables where the volunteers pass them a small paper cup of tea, steam fogging in the cool air. A woman with a tidy bun and a name tag smiles—gentle, practiced—and asks if they need anything. Dazai, ever the ham, inclines his head with mock solemnity. “Everything is perfect. This will do,” he says, voice honeyed.

Chuuya rolls his eyes, the ghost of a smile threatening at the corner of his mouth before he tucks it away. “Eat,” he says, not unkindly. 

They take their cups and choose a place at the nearest table. From here, Dazai can watch paths fan outward into the green and imagine all the small, terrible acts people perform when they think no one’s watching. He thinks of confessions said under the cover of night, of fists unclenching, of people learning to keep breathing for another day. For the first time since he announced he needed “a new boyfriend” like it was grocery shopping, something quiet and unperformative presses at the hollow behind his ribs—a small curiosity about how people become whole again, if they do.

He sips the tea. It’s simple, not for drama. The warmth slides down his throat and steadies him in a way that’s not cinematic at all.

Chuuya nudges him with an elbow. “You going to stare at the trees all day or actually help set up the cabins?” he asks.

Dazai smiles, genuinely this time, the grin less show and more a small, private thing. “Both,” he says. “I will stare. Then I will dramatically assist. Possibly in a way that involves me tripping and you rescuing me.”

Chuuya snorts, a small, involuntary sound that is almost—almost—a laugh.

Volunteers calling out names, trays clinking, the distant sound of someone tuning a guitar. Dazai watches the balcony once more, the ridiculous image of a failed jump dissolving into the ordinary task at hand. 

Chuuya breaks the silence first, side-eyeing him. “You didn’t wear glasses before. What gives?”

Dazai, halfway to pocketing his third cookie, shrugs. “I read in the dark a lot. Helps when my uncle comes sniffing around with questions. Easier to fake sleep if the lamp’s off.”

He doesn’t say Mori’s invasive as hell, doesn’t say every question feels like a scalpel probing bone. He just takes another bite like it’s nothing. His own fault, really. The headaches, the blur. The prescription’s just proof he’s a loser who can’t even stare at a page without breaking.

“So now—astigmatism."

Chuuya squints at him, like he’s trying to see through all the deflection. Before he can push, Dazai tilts his head, almost curious. “When did you get so hot?”

Chuuya’s eye twitches. Hard.

Dazai props his cheek on his palm, elbow lazy on the table. “I’m just saying,” he drawls, “I remember you back then—well, not really—but you definitely didn’t look like… this.”

His eyes flick down and back up in a way that makes Chuuya want to shove the whole cookie tray in his smug face.

“And I mean this—” Dazai gestures vaguely, shameless as ever, “the shoulders, the legs, the way your shirt doesn’t quite hide—”

“Shut the hell up.”

“—you really filled out, Chuuya. In all the right places.”

Chuuya flips him off. “Go die.”

Dazai leans in slightly, though not by far. “You know,” he murmurs, “I’d let you push me down right here. On this table. No hesitation. Rip the belt off, hold me by the throat, fuck me until my voice cracks—” he smirks, unbothered by the way Chuuya’s ears flush scarlet, “—and I’d still beg for more.”

Chuuya glares, but it only makes Dazai’s grin widen. “Bent over the balcony upstairs, maybe? Everyone watching while you take me apart. Or in that forest out there—imagine, me on my knees, dirt in my hair, choking on—"

"Dazai. You think this is a game. It’s not. I don’t like anyone who fucks around with my feelings.”

For once, Dazai blinks. “Ah,” he whispers, almost delighted, “so that’s your line.”

He tilts his head, that irritating glimmer in his mismatched eyes sharpening into something almost scholarly. He doesn’t bother sugarcoating it—why would he? He folds his long fingers under his chin like some pompous philosopher.

“I do like you, Chuuya. That much should be obvious, unless you’ve convinced yourself my constant commentary about your frankly obscene bone structure is just the ramblings of a bored lunatic. But let’s clarify something. When I say I like you, it doesn’t mean flowers and candlelight and all that sentimental horseshit. It means you’ve become my new subject. And when I take up a subject, I don’t skim it. I devour it. Obsessively. Until there’s nothing left but marrow.”

“Do you understand what that entails? I’ll catalog the curve of your mouth like an astronomer charting constellations, analyze the slant of your shoulders like a physicist mapping vectors. I’ll memorize every tick of your jaw when you’re angry and every twitch of your fingers when you’re lying. I’ll read you the way I read a ballistic trajectory: with exactitude, with inevitability, until I know precisely how you’ll hit me—and how hard.”

A smile—lazy, vulgar, yet too sharp to ignore—spreads across his lips.

“In short, my dear Chuuya, you are no longer just a person. You’re coursework. And I am, regrettably, a very diligent student.”

Chuuya stares at him like he’s trying to decide whether Dazai’s worth the oxygen he wastes, then grabs the plate of cookies and shoves one into his mouth like the only way to drown him out is sugar. His voice comes out muffled, sharp anyway:

“Shut the fuck up, Dazai.”

Dazai doesn’t shut up. He never does. But he does fall silent for a beat, long enough to catalog the exact flicker in Chuuya’s mismatched eyes. Brown and blue. He files it away, a sticky note in his already cluttered brain. Heterochromia—fascinating anomaly. He’ll study it later, probably lose two nights reading obscure ophthalmology papers just so he can casually drop the terminology into conversation and watch Chuuya’s vein twitch.

The villa starts to fill. A low hum rises, shoes scraping tile, voices overlapping, laughter bouncing off the open beams. Dazai straightens in his chair, scanning. It’s more than a hundred people—easily. The air feels crowded in a way he usually hates, but the sheer size of it prickles his curiosity. He shifts his gaze, narrows his focus, listens. No, not a hundred. Five hundred at least, maybe more, judging from the rhythm of footsteps and the density of chatter. How the hell big is this place?

He spots familiar faces scattered in the sea of strangers—Atsushi’s nervous smile, Akutagawa’s permanent scowl carved into his pale face. Others, too—people he half-remembers, fragments of middle school days blurred into adolescence. All of them now woven into this massive, orderly chaos.

Up front, the volunteers gather, stiff-backed and prepared. The alumni drift to join them, radiating authority without needing to speak. Dazai drums his fingers against the table and grins to himself. Oh, this is going to be fun.

Chapter Text

Ah. So that’s the infamous Arthur Rimbaud.

Dazai leans back in his chair, pops the last crumb of his stolen cookie into his mouth, and finally gives his attention to the man at the front.

He looks like he was carved by a French sculptor who hated joy. Tall, unnervingly symmetrical, every angle deliberate, not a single hair out of place in that flowing black hair. His shirt is ironed within an inch of its miserable life. The man probably doesn’t sweat; he probably exhales discipline. If he owns pajamas, they’re also pressed and color-coded.

His face—ah, yes, here it is, the pièce de résistance—is void of expression. Golden eyes, but as if iced in its corners. Charming, in the way hypothermia is charming, right before you go numb and die.

Dazai sighs. So this is what Chuuya’s dad looks like. Great. He’ll never stand a chance, not if that iceberg is the blueprint.

Rimbaud doesn’t clear his throat or wave his hands. His silence is oppressive enough that the entire hall folds under it, five hundred idiots shifting in their seats like chastised dogs.

“My name is Rimbaud,” he says with a polite smile. “I am the head coordinator of this program. For the next four months, you are under my responsibility.”

Dazai props his chin on his palm. Responsibility. Ha. How benevolent. How parental. How utterly suffocating.

“This camp exists because you are alive.” Rimbaud pauses, lets it hang, as if it’s a fact worth savoring. “That means you are meant to be here, whether you chose it or not.”

Dazai nearly snorts. Meant to be here. Right. I’m sure the stars arranged themselves for this very moment: me, sweating in a glorified prison-camp, longing for the body of a man whose father looks like a fascist saint.

Rimbaud’s gaze sweeps the crowd again, glacial and merciless. When it brushes past Chuuya, it doesn’t soften. If anything, it hardens.

Dazai notices that. Dazai notices everything.

He, of course, does not look at Rimbaud when he ought to. No, he stares shamelessly at the profile of the boy sitting beside him—well, not a boy, not anymore, but a man disguised as one. Chuuya doesn’t fidget, doesn’t bite his nails, doesn’t lean away like everyone else under Rimbaud’s frostbitten voice. He only glances aside away from his father’s gaze, as if refusing to give him the satisfaction of acknowledgment.

Oh, fascinating. Daddy issues wrapped in starched collars. Dazai could bottle that tension and sell it for profit.

Rimbaud continues. “There will be a variety of activities each day. For now, settle in, familiarize yourselves with the grounds. If you encounter a problem, approach an alumnus or volunteer.” A pause. “I hope this experience will be a useful change for you.”

Useful change. He almost laughs. He’s heard car mechanics use warmer language about oil changes.

He's never had a father, not really. Only Mori, who insists on being called “uncle.” The man is currently in rehab, and that’s a long and bloody story, not for this table, not for now.

“Ango,” Rimbaud calls.

Ango gets up from his volunteer seat, looking like he’d rather be filing taxes, and adjusts his glasses. He’s holding a clipboard thick with paper, which already smells like bureaucracy. “We’ll be dividing you into groups,” he announces, tone flat as always. “These are the people you’ll share tables with during meals and activities. Each group will have a facilitator assigned.”

Dazai slouches, half-listening, until he notices Chuuya’s shoulders stiffen further, his jaw tighten. Oh-ho. Someone’s anxious. This is more entertaining than Ango reading names, no offense to him.

“Hey, Chuuya. Think they’ll put us in group therapy together? You know, so I can tell everyone about my raging daddy kink while you tell them about your actual dad?”

The air curdles. Chuuya’s fist clenches on the table. Ango’s voice trips mid-syllable. Someone two rows down chokes on their water.

Dazai beams. 

Ango clears his throat, loudly—louder than necessary, the kind of cough that’s less about phlegm and more about control yourself before I strangle you. His narrow eyes slice over the rim of his glasses, locking on Dazai with a glare sharpened by years of being his unwilling handler.

Dazai only smiles wider, all teeth, all false innocence. A cat caught wrist-deep in the goldfish bowl, daring anyone to scold him. He wiggles his fingers in a little wave.

Chuuya, though—Chuuya doesn’t have Ango’s patience. He whips his head toward Dazai, hissing under his breath, “Shut the fuck up before I—”

But he cuts himself off.

Because from across the room, another presence slices through the noise, a tall blond man, his resemblance to Rimbaud unmistakable but warped, more violent in its elegance. His hair is a softer blond, longer, brushing past his jaw, but his posture—rigid, soldierly, almost predatory—gives away what he is before anyone names him. Paul Verlaine.

His eyes are colder, a pale steel gray that doesn’t just look through you, but disassembles you piece by piece to see if you’re worth keeping. His shoulders are broad, his black shirt simple yet severe, and the way he leans forward ever so slightly as his gaze locks onto Chuuya—no, not Chuuya, Dazai—is enough to freeze the room.

Chuuya goes quiet. Instinctively. Almost obediently.

Dazai, though, doesn’t wilt. He tilts his head, grin softening into something sly. Ah, another one. Another piece of this family portrait of beautiful, terrifying people who scowl like it’s their native tongue.

Ango, with all the patience of a saint forced into daycare duty, clears his throat again and keeps reading names off his clipboard. Dazai tunes most of it out, only perking up when his name inevitably tangles with Chuuya’s. Fate’s sense of humor is sick, but consistent.

When the lists are done, the crowd starts shuffling into their designated corners, and Dazai drags his feet with exaggerated dramatics until he finds Table Five. Oh, what a zoo.

Atsushi’s there, looking like he just got lost on the way to being an actual person. Akutagawa’s next to him, looking like he’d rather be stabbed repeatedly with a rusty fork than breathe the same air. Dazai barely resists the urge to ruffle his hair again just to hear the growl.

Then there are the others. Random suicidal maniacs, their faces already blurring together in Dazai’s head; blank stares, shaky hands, that particular heaviness in posture that reeks of therapy worksheets and pills they forget to take. Nothing interesting.

Except—ah. One.

Hair like white lilac spun into silk, falling just so against pale skin, and eyes the soft gray of ash right before the wind blows it away. Pretty. Very pretty. Fragile in that porcelain-doll way that makes people want to cradle or crush. Dazai watches him for a beat too long, curious. But no, not as pretty as Chuuya. Chuuya’s beauty is fire-forged, a blade with a heartbeat. This one is moonlight—cold, quiet, breakable. Dazai prefers flames.

They sit.

In the middle of the table, commanding it without even trying, is an old man with the air of someone who has seen too much and bothers to regret none of it. His posture straight, his hair a shade of white that isn’t surrender but style, his gaze sharp as ever. Hirotsu.

Dazai blinks, recognition clicking into place. Mori and Hirotsu used to work together at the hospital back when “hospital” was a flexible word meaning “place where questionable men do questionable things in lab coats.”

“So this is where you retired to, Hirotsu-san,” Dazai mutters under his breath, equal parts impressed and horrified. “From human experimentation to babysitting the clinically miserable. What a career trajectory.”

Hirotsu meets his eyes and smiles warmly, lines crinkling by his eyes as if time itself bowed politely around him.

“Osamu,” he says, gentle. “You’ve grown.”

Dazai actually feels a flicker of respect—something rare and unwelcome—and returns it with a faint smile.

Hirotsu claps his hands once. “Now that everyone’s here, let’s introduce ourselves. Name, age, what you like, what you don’t like… and a fun fact.” His eyes sweep around the table. “Let’s start with you.”

The boy nearest him lifts his head. “…Sigma,” he says after a pause. “Nineteen. I like… books. And card games.” His fingers twitch as if tempted to shuffle something invisible. “I don’t like crowds. Or not knowing what’s expected of me.”

There’s another pause, a tiny almost-smile that doesn’t quite make it.
 “Fun fact… I don’t really remember my past. Feels like I was… created a few years ago.”

The table goes quiet for a beat. 

Hirotsu nods politely, as if hearing “I was created” is no more alarming than “I like strawberries.” He gestures to the next person.

Introductions roll on. Someone mutters about liking naps. Another says they hate their mom’s cooking. The blonde across the way drones about exercise routines.

Dazai doesn’t bother listening. He’s already seen the type. Broken toys dressed up in different packaging. He twirls the small silver hoop in his left ear, half-wondering if it would feel better ripped out with pliers. His mind drifts—ballistics, recoil, the clean geometry of a bullet’s arc. There’s a formula to how fast a man’s skull caves, depending on caliber. He finds that comforting in a way self-help pamphlets never are.

Meanwhile the kid beside him (not Chuuya) is talking about stamp collecting or trauma or god-knows-what. Dazai hums like he cares. He doesn’t.

It circles around, painfully slow, until it lands on Atsushi. He shifts in his chair, scratches at his arm.

“Uh—I’m Atsushi Nakajima. I’m seventeen. I… like curry, I guess. And cats. A lot.” He pauses, face going redder by the second. “I don’t really like loud arguments. Or, um, myself. I mean—” He clears his throat, clearly wishing a meteor would take him out. “Fun fact, I used to live in an orphanage. But not the good kind.”

The silence afterward is thick enough you could choke on it.

Dazai actually lifts his head from his palm, watching. He doesn’t miss the way Atsushi’s fingers twist in his lap like he’s trying to wring water from air, or how his voice wavers on orphanage.

Seventeen, Dazai thinks. Barely a person yet. No one should be spilling childhood rot like that at a campfire introduction, but Atsushi always did bleed too honestly.

He quirks a smile anyway, because that’s what friends do in his book; sit front row to your humiliation.

“Nice delivery,” Dazai mutters, low enough for Chuuya to hear too. “Ten out of ten trauma dump.”

Next up is Akutagawa.

He doesn’t fidget like Atsushi; no, he sits there stiff as a goddamn broom, trench coat swamping his shoulders like he’s auditioning for Grim Reaper: The Musical. 

“I am Ryunosuke Akutagawa. Eighteen.” His voice is flat, rasped, like every word costs him blood. “I like literature. Quiet. I dislike incompetence. And… noise.” He flicks a glance at Atsushi—long, loaded, hostile enough to curdle milk. “Fun fact. I’ve coughed up blood since I was six.”

Jesus Christ. Dazai pinches the bridge of his nose, because of course Akutagawa would one-up Atsushi’s tragic orphanage monologue with a consumptive flex. What is this table, a goddamn competition in misery?

He watches the way Atsushi bristles beside him, like a cat with its fur rubbed backward. Dazai nearly snorts. Seventeen and eighteen, snapping and glaring like toddlers with knives.

For God’s sake, he thinks, drumming his fingers against the table, just kiss already. Or kill each other. Or both. Preferably both. Get it out of your system so I can stop babysitting your enemies-to-lovers slow burn.

The circle inches along—blah blah blah, some girl who “likes journaling,” some guy whose fun fact is that he once ate twelve hotdogs in a row (Dazai almost applauds)—until finally, finally, the spotlight lands where it should have been all along: Chuuya.

Dazai shamelessly props his chin on his hand, elbow cocked against the table, and stares. Not politely. Not even slyly. He stares with the kind of obscene attention that makes people either call the cops or marry him.

Chuuya clears his throat. “I’m Chuuya Nakahara. Twenty-one.”

Twenty-one. Oh, that’s rich. That’s delicious. Older. Legal. Practically vintage. Dazai can already feel the blood rushing south with embarrassing urgency.

“I like…” Chuuya hesitates, glancing at his folded hands before meeting the table again. “…sweet food. Drawing. Playing guitar.”

Drawing. Playing guitar. Dazai didn’t even know Chuuya had hobbies, let alone ones that sound like he belongs in some brooding indie band. Jesus Christ, it’s hot. This motherfucker could be strumming tragic love ballads in a smoky bar while Dazai grinds against the stage lights like an obsessed groupie.

“I dislike the dark,” Chuuya continues, clipped. Dazai notices the little flex of his jaw, the way his hands twitch under the table. Hates the dark. Loud-mouthed Chuuya who walks like he owns the room, but here, in this stupid little circle, he’s quieter. Contained.

Is he like this with his friends, too? Does he fold in on himself? Dazai doesn’t know. He wants to know. He’ll tear open the whole boy’s life and rummage through the contents until he’s memorized the taste of his childhood nightmares.

Chuuya exhales. “Fun fact. My family’s… a bunch of adoptions. Paul isn’t my real brother. Kouyou isn’t my real sister. They're not siblings either. And Rimbaud—he’s not my real dad either.”

God, twenty-one. Older. Hotter. Adopted or not, who the fuck cares—Dazai wants to chart the veins in his wrists, wants to know what his voice sounds like when it cracks, wants to—

“Stop staring, freak,” Chuuya mutters, side-eyeing him.

Dazai only smiles wider.

The circle swivels, like the world itself tilting, until all those expectant eyes land on him. Dazai straightens, pushes his glasses up the bridge of his nose with a deliberate flick of his finger, and—for once—his grin fades into something uncomfortably serious. He can feel Chuuya’s gaze burning into the side of his skull.

“I’m Osamu Dazai,” he says, crisp, almost bored. “Nineteen.”

A few eyebrows lift. He pretends not to notice.

“I like spicy food.” He ticks it off like a grocery list. “I like books. Ballistics lately. Chess. Long baths. Conversations that actually lead somewhere instead of circling around people’s fragile egos. And slacking off, when I can get away with it.”

Someone chuckles under their breath. Someone else coughs. Dazai continues.

“I don’t like sleeping. It feels like losing time. I don’t like being bored. I don't like small spaces. I don’t like having a question I can’t answer.” He momentarily glances at Chuuya. “And I don’t like people who try to pry into me without earning it.”

The silence lingers for half a beat longer than necessary. 

“Fun fact,” he says, sing-song, “once I went to school dressed as a girl. Fifty-four percent of the student body either asked me out, asked for my number, or tried to flirt with me. Not a single person realized it was me until the next day.”

Murmurs ripple through the table. Sigma blinks in outright disbelief. Atsushi’s jaw drops. Akutagawa looks like he’s trying not to scowl too loudly. Hirotsu chuckles under his breath, amused but not surprised.

Chuuya, though—Chuuya just glares at him with murder in his eyes, ears faintly pink, like Dazai just set off a firecracker under his ribs. Which, honestly, was the entire point.

“Why the hell would you mention that?”

Dazai blinks, brows flicking up. For once, the grin falters, replaced by genuine surprise. “Wait. You were there?”

“Duh. We went to the same high school, remember? Idiot.”

And just like that, Dazai’s entire brain derails. He stares. Not at the glare, not at the teeth bared like a cornered dog, but at the fact Chuuya just admitted they shared classrooms, hallways, entire years of proximity—and Dazai didn’t notice.

Oh. Oh, that’s good. That’s very good.

So you saw me that day? The short skirt, the stockings, the bra I didn’t even need?” He hums. “Ah, Chuuya. And here I thought I’d only stolen the hearts of half the student body. Turns out I missed the most important one.”

Chuuya goes crimson, ears to throat. “You’re disgusting,” he hisses, trying to look anywhere but at him.

Dazai laughs. “And yet, you remember. You’ve been carrying around the mental image of me in a skirt for years. How adorable.”

Chuuya’s hand twitches like he’s considering launching a fork at his face. Hirotsu clears his throat just in time to keep the peace, steering the introductions along.

But Dazai can’t resist one last jab. “You know, if you ask nicely, I could always reprise the role.”

“Not necessary,” Chuuya snaps. “I’m straight, mind you. So quit with all this bullshit.”

…

And just like that, the air goes out of the joke.

Dazai freezes mid-smile, the comeback perched on his tongue curdling before it can be said. Something cold slips in between his ribs. Straight. Right. He should’ve expected that, shouldn’t he? Another dead end. Another wall slammed in his face.

He tilts his head, lips still curved—but it’s faint now, brittle, empty. He lets the silence fill the space he’d usually occupy with another quip. He lets it sit.

Chuuya doesn’t look at him. Doesn’t want to look at him. But Dazai catches the tiny stutter in his movements, the way his hand grips his thigh under the table, the sudden stiffness in his shoulders. For a guy who just wanted to shut him down, he looks… shaken. Like he hadn’t expected Dazai to actually shut up.

Interesting.

Dazai leans back in his chair, fiddles absently with the silver earring swaying against his jaw. He pretends he’s listening as the next poor soul stumbles through their introduction. But his gaze lingers on Chuuya’s profile, on the heat still crawling up his neck.

Hirotsu claps his hands softly, like a teacher concluding story time at daycare. “That’s enough for now. You’re free to wander, get acquainted with the grounds. Dinner will be served in two hours.”

Chairs scrape back, voices rise. And Dazai, as though he hadn’t just been castrated in public by Chuuya’s “straight” bomb, springs to his feet with that reckless grin back in place. He turns toward his freshly-declared heterosexual, bows his head just enough to look theatrical.

“Well then, Nakahara. Since you’re clearly too popular to waste your time on little old me, how about you give me a tour before you run off to polish the Flags’ egos?”

Chuuya blinks. His throat moves in a swallow, as if the word “no” had formed but got stuck halfway up. “...Yeah. Sure. Whatever.”

The agreement hangs there, stiff, like he’s been blackmailed into saying it.

And so they go.

The crowd disperses back toward the villa, but Dazai trails after Chuuya instead, into one of the tree-lined paths that cut into the forest. The shade hits instantly, heavy and damp. Leaves whisper overhead, cicadas buzz in the background, and the ground is soft with pine needles that crackle underfoot.

It should be peaceful. Romantic, even. Except the air between them hums with the kind of awkward silence that makes Dazai itch. He shoves his hands in his pockets, letting his steps fall just a little too close to Chuuya’s, crowding without touching.

He sneaks a look at him out of the corner of his eye.

“Awfully quiet, aren’t you? What’s the matter? Regretting volunteering as my tour guide? Or are you just rehearsing your next straight-man speech in your head?”

Chuuya sighs. “Look, kid—”

Dazai stops walking. Actually stops. His sneakers grind against pine needles, and the sound is swallowed whole by the forest. Chuuya takes two more steps before realizing he’s suddenly alone, and when he turns back, Dazai is standing there like someone just caved his ribs in.

Kid.

His throat goes tight, his chest pinches. It’s stupid—so stupid—but the word lands like a fist. Like he’s been shoved down a staircase he didn’t even know he was on.

He tries to mask it with a twitch of a smile, but it doesn’t quite reach. He feels raw. Physically bruised. Like the word itself carried weight and lodged between his sternum.

Chuuya, oblivious, sighs again and keeps talking. “I don’t wanna hurt your feelings or anything, but you’re wasting your time with me. Whatever game you’re playing—it’s not worth it. I’m not interested, I’m not your rebound, and I sure as hell ain’t here to play babysitter for some freshman who thinks making dick jokes counts as flirting.”

Dazai swallows. It’s slow, like forcing glass shards down his throat. His ears still ring. Freshman. Babysitter. Kid.

He tilts his head, pretends to adjust his glasses so Chuuya won’t see the crack in his mask.

“Don’t get me wrong—you’re good looking. If I were into men, maybe I’d have given you a chance. But I know about… that thing with Fyodor. And I’m not about to get dragged into some weird fucked-up situationship.”

Dazai stares.

For a moment, it’s all he can do. Stare. He wants to laugh, to defuse, to make some sick joke about how Fyodor was only ever a phantom limb—gnawed, rotting, and already severed. But Chuuya’s voice makes it real again.

His gaze fixes on Chuuya, like he’s trying to memorize the exact angle of Chuuya’s cruelty, the casual dismissal. Good looking, but not worth the bloodstains of a past lover. The absurdity of it. That Chuuya could flatten him with an offhand comparison, as if Fyodor were still in the room, still sitting cross-legged in the corner of his mind.

It’s funny—Chuuya doesn’t even know what he’s done. He doesn’t know that name has teeth, that the past doesn’t stay buried, that Dazai has been bleeding out since the day he tore himself free from Fyodor’s headlock. Chuuya just tosses it like cigarette ash. Like it doesn’t matter.

Dazai doesn’t laugh. Inside, he wants to strangle the world. He wants to press his thumb into the hollow of Chuuya’s throat and whisper, Don’t you ever fucking say his name to me again.

Chuuya finally shuts up, shoulders lifting with that little huff he does when he thinks he’s made his point. The silence swells.

Dazai nods. Slow. Careful. Like he’s putting his own throat back together with invisible stitches. “I understand,” he says, and it’s shockingly even, not the kind of line he spits out to win. His smile doesn’t reach his eyes. “I won’t force myself to hide my feelings for you, though.”

Chuuya blinks at him. Then the scowl arrives. “Are you serious right now? After I just told you—” he cuts himself off, drags his hand through his hair, groaning. “Dazai, you’re unbelievable. You don’t just say shit like that and expect me to what? Be flattered? Melt? Christ.”

 “Well, if you don’t melt, I can always wait for global warming to do the job. That way, I don’t have to lift a finger.”

Chuuya actually gapes for half a second before snarling, “You’re such a jackass.”

Dazai grins.

Finally, Chuuya exhales, somewhere between a scoff and a sigh, and sticks his hand out.

“Friends?”

Okay. Yeah. No. He wants to bite it out of his mouth and replace it with something better—lover, rival, sworn nemesis, literally anything else. But Chuuya’s looking at him like he’s daring him to argue, so Dazai nods. Nods, and slips his hand into Chuuya’s.

On the outside, as you may observe, is a firm handshake, faint smile. Mature, civil, fine.

On the inside, however, he’s a six-year-old girl dropping her ice cream cone in slow motion. He’s Juliet at the balcony, watching Romeo walk away because apparently Romeo is now straight. He’s Euripides rewriting Medea but instead of murdering the kids, Medea just… sighs and friendzones Jason.

The sorrow of unrequited love is so loud he’s surprised Chuuya can’t hear it echoing through the forest like a dying goat. Oh cruel fate, why must the sun himself extend only the palm of friendship when my loins burn for arson?

He shakes Chuuya’s hand like a gentleman.

But in his chest, the violins are wailing, his inner child is lying facedown in the mud, and someone is definitely shouting “BOO, YOU WHORE” from the cheap seats of his psyche.

Chuuya releases his hand, like snapping shut the coffin lid on Dazai’s grand love story, and mutters, “C’mon. I’ll show you the lake, if you want.”

Dazai nods, smiling faintly as though he isn’t being theatrically disemboweled by the word friends. “The lake, hm? Perfect. Maybe I’ll just drown myself in it. Save us all the trouble of my romantic suffering.”

“That’s not funny.”

“Who said I was joking?” 

As he's speaking, a Shakespearean soliloquy is occuring where he is simultaneously Hamlet, Ophelia, and the poor bastard carrying the skull. His mind is draped in black, wailing, Alas, my sun, my sweet gravity, cast me not into the abyss of platonic purgatory! For friendship is but celibacy with better PR!

He walks beside Chuuya. His inner child is dramatically face-planting into the lake before they even get there.

The lake opens before them—wide, glassy, with the fading sky draped across its surface. It looks like something people would write poetry about, or worse, fall in love beside.

Dazai lets out a low whistle. “Pretty. Not as pretty as you, but pretty.”

Chuuya groans. “Jesus Christ, are you ever serious?”

“Always,” Dazai replies. He tips his head toward the water. “You come here often? Or is this just where you lure your unsuspecting victims before shoving them in?”

Chuuya snorts, amused despite himself, and shakes his head.

Oh, look at you, standing there all serene with your lake and your dumb gorgeous heterochromia, pretending you don’t care. You’re rejecting me? Me? I should push you into the water and hold you there until you beg to call me more than a friend.

Why doesn’t he like me? I’m tall, I’m smart, I’m funny, I’m clearly the superior option compared to anyone else who’s ever breathed oxygen near him. What does he want, a saint? I could be a saint if saints were allowed to say filthy things and skip confession.

The lake laps lazily at its banks. Crickets begin their shift. Dazai slouches on a boulder, elbows on his knees, while Chuuya stands nearby, arms crossed, looking like he owns the horizon.

“Y’know, if you pushed me in right now, I’d probably thank you.”

Chuuya raises an eyebrow. “For what, drowning?”

“For saving me the trouble of doing it myself.”

God, listen to him. He says it like a joke, but no one’s laughing. Not even me. If Chuuya so much as breathed a ‘yes,’ I’d chain myself to this dumb lake forever just to please him.

Chuuya huffs, eyes rolling. “You’re a piece of work, y’know that?”

“Mm. A masterpiece, actually.” Dazai tips his head. “Though you’d make a better gallery piece than me. I’d buy a ticket to see you shirtless.”

Chuuya’s jaw tightens. “You never shut up, do you?”

“Not when the view’s this nice.”

Why won’t you say you like me back, dammit? You’re already here, walking beside me, humoring me, tolerating me. That’s basically marriage in my head. Just admit it and let’s skip the foreplay.

Chuuya exhales like he’s tired, but he doesn’t walk away. He studies the water. “You’re weirdly calm, y’know. I thought you’d make a bigger deal outta what I said earlier.”

“Oh? The ‘straight’ bit, or the part where you called me a kid?” 

“…Both.”

Dazai laughs, soft and careless. “I’m used to rejection. You won’t be the last person to tell me I’m unbearable.”

Kid? KID? I’ll show you a kid, you bastard, I’ll ruin your whole life with one kiss so you’ll never look at anyone else again—

He almost says it aloud, catches himself halfway, and coughs into his fist. “Er—what I meant is… kisses are overrated anyway.”

Chuuya blinks, narrowing his eyes. “The hell did you just say?”

“Nothing! Nothing at all. Just… contemplating water pH levels.” 

Smooth save, genius. Absolutely flawless. Definitely not suspicious at all. He totally didn’t hear your brain screeching about kisses.

Chuuya shakes his head. “You’re insane.”

“Thank you.”

They lapse into silence for a few moments. “Do you ever think about what you’d do if you weren’t… you? If you weren’t Chuuya Nakahara, walking around with all that fire bottled inside?”

Chuuya side-eyes him. “What kinda question is that?”

“Philosophical. Or maybe I just want an excuse to keep you talking so I can memorize the sound of your voice.”

There, I said it. I’d record you on loop if I could. I’d bottle your laugh, your curses, everything, and shoot it straight into my veins like a fix. God, I hate myself.

Chuuya mutters something like “unbelievable” under his breath, but his cheeks are faintly pink.

He watches the sky like a man cataloguing the slow death of a day—gold leaking at the edges, not yet full dusk, everything glorified by that impossible light that makes sinners look almost innocent. He hopes, stupidly and with all the earnestness of a tragic clown, that they’ll stay until the sun actually melts. He imagines Chuuya lit from behind, haloed in copper fire, and for a second his face almost breaks into a smile so soft it would be illegal in twelve states. He clears his throat instead, because he is a professional at holding his mouth shut until it hurts.

“Why are you here, anyway? You didn’t answer me last time.”

Chuuya goes still. He looks younger in that pause, like the flinch someone makes when they remember a bruise. He stoops and picks up a stone—small, grey, ordinary—the kind of thing you can throw or keep in your pocket as a dumb talisman.

“We—we were having problems. Pianoman—he’s… going through a lot. Family shit, you know. Lippman’s always been tangled up in money and business drama. Iceman—” He rubs his thumb over the stone until the skin goes white. “Iceman’s been deaf for a year. I’m the only one who knows sign, and it’s like the band’s lost its beat because the rules changed overnight.” He swallows. “Albatross—he puts on a show, but he tried to kill himself. Doc—developed anxiety bad enough he can’t function without someone watching him. They… they broke, Dazai. We all did. So they… pushed for this place. For us. For a timeout before we shredded ourselves completely.”

That little stone trembles in Chuuya’s fingers.

No. I asked about you.”

There’s a small freeze, like a film paused at the frame where someone realizes the punchline was addressed at the wrong person. Chuuya blinks, a micro-movement. He straightens.

Dazai’s eyes won’t leave the stone in Chuuya’s hand. He watches the way the fingers flex. He watches the way the shoulders slope when the story is not about ‘them’ but about the private gravity that drags one human down.

“Why are you here, Chuuya?” he repeats. The forest listens. The sun keeps burning politely at the horizon, as if even it wants the answer.

“Rimbaud thinks my… behaviour is bothersome,” Chuuya says, eyes fixed on the water, words hollowed-out like conjured smoke. He doesn’t meet Dazai’s face. He speaks as if his mouth is embarrassed to make noise.

Dazai leans in because he is literally allergic to subtleties. Chuuya’s whisper is barely there—so soft he has to tilt his head and pretend it’s not half the reason he’s leaning closer.

His brow arches. “Bothersome how?” he asks, terrible bedside-manner and all. He means it the way a vulture means to ask ‘how are you feeling’—curiosity wrapped in hunger.

Chuuya shrugs, the movement small and tired. “I don’t know. I guess I've  been quieter than usual. Not really laughing. Or talk much. It’s not like my grades dropped or I started taking drugs or—” He stops, as if the sentence itself scares him.

Silence rolls in after that, thick and immediate. It’s not the theatrical silence Dazai cultivates for dramatic effect; it’s real, a weight that presses at the ribs and makes breath expensive. The forest seems to hold its breath with them. The sun, a reluctant witness, thins toward the horizon.

Chuuya turns the stone in his fingers like it’s a small, dangerous secret. Dazai watches the way his knuckles whiten, the way the light catches the gold in his ear. For once there’s no joke warming Dazai’s mouth, no flippant deflection ready to be spat out. The bratty asterisk in his head screams for some ridiculous comeback—something inappropriate, something to crack the shell of quiet—but the words stick like chewed gum.

Then, without looking up, Chuuya throws the stone.

It arcs neatly, and taps the lake once—hard enough. The sound is a single punctuation mark. Ripples fan outward, concentric and polite, and for a second the world is nothing but that tiny geometry. Outward, outward, outward, until the lake swallows the disturbance and everything smooths back to glass.

The stone’s flight feels less like a throw and more like a question launched into dark water. How far will the ripples go? Who will notice? Will anything actually change course?

Chuuya’s shoulders slump a fraction. He breathes out—too quietly—and the forest takes the sound and tucks it under a leaf.

“Rimbaud thinks I'm shutting down, But he won’t say why. He just… pulls inward. He thought—maybe a break would help. Maybe it’s nothing. I don't really…know.”

Dazai’s initial reflex is to smirk, to turn this into a quip and leash the room back into tolerable absurdity. But he doesn't. He's not that cruel. “If it’s nothing, then we burn through the nothing until it becomes something obvious. If it’s everything, then we make it ours.”

Chuuya doesn’t answer right away. He watches the last of the ripples. 

The sun drapes itself over Chuuya like someone finally remembered to gild the world in the right places. He stands there, shoulders lit from behind, and Dazai has to fight the urge to weep theatrically and then sell the tears as artisanal perfume. Ethereal. Ridiculous. Dangerous-looking, in the best possible way.

Chuuya exhales. Something in Dazai’s throat tightens—not the old, performative constriction that makes him the darling of pity and gossip, but an honest little ache that wants company. 

“Hey,” he says casually, because casual is the proper attire for confessions that are actually grenades, “do you know that site? The one people use to look for someone to go out with them in the most dramatic way possible? ‘MortisMatch?’” 

Chuuya nods reluctantly, a small movement. 

“I met someone there. Back when… me and Fyodor were on that—pause. We were on a break.” He tosses the words off like they hurt his shoes. “I wanted out, but telling him would make things messier, so for a moment I tried to make the mess someone else’s. Anyone who loves me tends to be psycho anyway, so of course I found one.” He smiles. “His name was Romeo. My username was Juliet—brilliant, right? Tragic, self-aware, and wildly theatrical. We matched. How fitting.”

Chuuya’s jaw tightens. He says nothing; he’s listening, which is already more than most give.

Dazai’s voice gets quieter. “We hit it off—lonely people can be excellent conversationalists. We started planning. Not the details—don’t be an idiot—but planning the where and the when in that oh-so-grand adolescent sense of shared doom. It was ridiculous, and it was sincere, and that is what makes the whole thing stick to me like tar.”

He stares at the lake. The sunset paints the water a color too soft to have any right to be violent.

“But then Romeo flaked.” 

As much as he wants to make a joke out of this, mo matter how older he gets, he still feels like a child. A child whining, defending useleslly that no, he didn’t—he just didn’t. 

“I suppose I deserved better—and worse—both at once. If someone bails on you when you’re trying to be dead together, what a luminous advertisement for commitment they are.” He snorts.

Chuuya’s eyes narrow, not in mockery but in something like comprehension. “And Fyodor?” 

He lets out a breath that sounds like a laugh with the edges filed down. “When he found out, he didn't take it well.” His hand flexes in his pocket; a tiny, involuntary motion of dislike and residual reverence.

For a second, Chuuya’s face loses the line of its usual armor and something softer, almost pitying, flickers across it. He looks away fast enough that it might be imagined.

“I learned a useful lesson. People don’t keep their promises when the promise costs them anything real. They keep whichever promise best suits their narrative.” Another snort. “I suppose the punchline is that the one who stuck around taught me how to be better at brokenness.”

Chuuya says nothing for a breathe long enough that it becomes speech. The lake breathes, the sun finishes gilding the trees.

Finally, Dazai offers a small, crooked smile. “So—there. My romantic failures, concise and edible. Want to roast marshmallows over my self-pity later?” 

“You’re unbearable.” 

Dazai watches the last strip of sun fall. The lake collects it and keeps it, the way all dark things keep the light that touches them. He feels less hollow than he expected, which is probably because sharing a wound sometimes dulls it a little—the friction of confession turning something sharp into a manageable ache.

He doesn’t tell him the last part—doesn’t tell him about the rope burn, the way his lungs clawed for air like rabid dogs before finally admitting defeat, the humiliating fact that he couldn’t even get death right. No, he lets that rot inside, a bitter cherry pit lodged somewhere under his ribs. Instead, he stretches his arms overhead like he hasn’t just confessed something that could crater a man.

“Welp, we should head back.”

Chuuya doesn’t immediately move, just squints at him with those sunset-lit eyes that really ought to be illegal, hands in his pockets like the weight of the world is comfortably lodged there. He shrugs, finally.

“Wherever you wanna go, kid.”

Ah. That word again. Kid. He turns his head, lets his glasses slide a little down his nose, gives Chuuya one of those sideways smiles that doesn’t reach his eyes. “On second thought, I like it when you call me kid.”

Chuuya groans, rolling his eyes so hard it’s a miracle they don’t fall out. He reaches up and ruffles Dazai’s hair with all the subtlety of a man disciplining a puppy.

“Don’t get ahead of yourself,” he mutters, but the corner of his mouth quirks like he’s trying not to smile.

Dazai walks beside him, silent for a moment, but inside—inside, the bratty counterpart is shrieking, clawing at imaginary curtains, flopping around on the velvet floor of his skull like a stage diva. HE TOUCHED MY HAIR, I REPEAT, HE TOUCHED MY HAIR, THIS ISN’T A DRILL—SOMEONE FETCH THE WEDDING RINGS.

Outside, though? Outside he’s composed. Just a kid walking through a forest path with the setting sun at his back, pretending his pulse isn’t doing a drum solo Chuuya could probably hear if he got close enough.

The moment they step back into camp, Dazai’s whole mood shifts. It’s like slipping into his favorite silk robe after a long day of being emotionally skinned alive—because lo and behold, his entertainment committee has already started the show.

On the left is Atsushi, face red, hands flailing like he’s either warding off a ghost or performing really bad interpretive dance. On the right is Akutagawa, scarf snapping like a pissed-off cobra, spitting death threats with all the venom of a man who’s been denied his morning coffee.

They’re arguing over—Dazai squints—ah yes, a tragic, earth-shattering catastrophe: who gets the last steamed bun.

Dazai beams. Oh, joy. The domestic theater troupe never disappoints.

“Children, children,” he calls, striding in like the proud, terrible parent he is. “Is this how you show gratitude for my benevolent guidance? Fighting over bread like Dickensian orphans?”

Atsushi whirls on him, scandalized. “Dazai-san, he tried to kill me over it!”

Akutagawa snarls, “I did not. I merely suggested he hand it over if he valued his pathetic life.”

“See? Attempted murder!” Atsushi huffs, hands on hips.

Dazai gasps dramatically, pressing his hand to his chest. “Ah, love. Always so violent in its youth.”

Both boys freeze mid-bicker, turning to him in unison with identical looks of what the actual fuck.

Dazai claps his hands together, delighted. “You’re already speaking like a married couple. All that’s left is the honeymoon suite—and luckily, I do have a spare room with suspiciously creaky bed springs!”

Atsushi makes a noise like a boiling kettle. Akutagawa’s scarf jerks, probably aiming for Dazai’s throat, but Dazai skips out of range with a laugh, arms outstretched like a conductor orchestrating their mutual misery.

“Keep at it, my star-crossed idiots. Every glare is foreplay, every insult foreplay, every assassination attempt foreplay. You’re practically Shakespearean.”

Behind him, Chuuya pinches the bridge of his nose with all the weariness of a man who’s spent too long around Dazai. “You’re insufferable,” he mutters, before peeling off to where the Flags are lounging, half-watching the chaos.

Dazai doesn’t even notice—he’s too busy egging on the lovers’ quarrel, his grin razor-wide. This—this right here—is his oxygen.

Then, because his attention span is practically non-existent, his eyes flick immediately to the long tables, where Ango and Oda are moving like responsible adults, laying plates in neat, boring rows like they’re staging a crime scene in IKEA. Volunteers and alumni fuss alongside them, all serious faces and folded sleeves, and Dazai thinks: Perfect. Ambush time.

He swoops in like a vulture on fresh carrion, arms slinging around Oda’s shoulders from behind in a back hug that’s equal parts intrusive and affectionate. “Odacchi~,” he drawls, resting his chin against the man’s shoulder. “How’s the labor? Backbreaking? Soul-sucking? Ready to pop yet?”

Oda doesn’t even react much, only sighs the way a man sighs when his cigarettes have run out and life has officially ended.

Dazai perks up, tightening the embrace. “Ah, yes. That’s the sound. The sigh of a man in labor pains.”

He shifts his gaze to Ango, who’s stacking plates with all the desperate precision of someone clinging to order like a lifeline. “Look at you two—” Dazai’s grin widens. “The picture of domestic bliss. Ango the stern housewife, Oda the weary husband, and me—” he pats Oda’s chest proudly, “—your charming, beloved son.”

Oda exhales through his nose, very very slowly. Ango nearly drops a plate.

….Bitch what.

Dazai’s eyes narrow. The air shifts like gunpowder waiting for a spark. Both men—both—very deliberately avert their gazes, eyes darting anywhere but at each other. Ango’s ears a suspicious shade of pink, Oda suddenly finding the table very, very fascinating.

“Hold the fucking minute.”

He straightens, his grin sharpening into something feral. Oh, he’s just uncovered gold. Absolute nuclear material.

“Don’t tell me you two are dating behind my back?”

And then—it’s glorious. Oda moves first, spinning with the speed of a man who’s had enough of Dazai’s shit for a lifetime, arm half-raised like he’s ready to physically remove the parasite clinging to his personal space. “Shut it, Dazai.”

Meanwhile, Ango practically combusts, the stack of plates wobbling in his hands. His face is redder than a crime scene photo, glasses slipping down his nose as he stammers, “N-no! Absolutely not! That’s not—what the hell are you implying—!”

Yes, yes, yes—

He throws his head back and laughs, clutching Oda’s arm like he’s just uncovered state secrets. “Oh my god, you are! Behind my back! My own parents, conspiring in secret romance while I, the innocent, neglected child, am forced to discover it like this—scandalous!”

Oda growls like he might actually kill him. Ango sputters louder, words tripping over themselves, “I-it’s not like that! Dazai, stop twisting—this is work, it’s professional—”

He snickers, and before any of them attempt to kill him, he glances towards Chuuya's direction, whose hands are forming these odd flourishes and the other Flag responding. 

A familiar little language. However, that is a story for another time.

Chapter Text

And I thought I was the weirdo, Dazai muses, utterly transfixed.

He sits there, elbow propped on the table, chin resting lazily on his palm, eyes glued to Chuuya like he’s studying a rare animal in the wild. Except this particular species of Chuuya is doing the most bizarre, brain-breaking ritual: eating.

Because apparently, Chuuya—god, Chuuya—eats rice and viand like some kind of unhinged hybrid monk. Spoon in his left hand (already a red flag—lefties are freaks, everyone knows this), fingers holding it so close to the scoop part that it looks like he’s about to choke the poor utensil to death. And then he—get this—he loads both rice and viand into one neat bite. Every time. Like clockwork. No scatter, no excess, no spilling. Every bite is an event, a production.

Dazai blinks. 

Is he a psycho???

Because what normal human being thinks, “Yes, let me carefully engineer each spoonful into the Platonic ideal of a meal”?

No, normal people either A) shovel rice and meat separately like animals, or B) commit war crimes with their chopsticks until it’s all over. This—this meticulous one-bite harmony—this is something else. This is cult behavior.

Dazai leans forward slightly, narrowing his eyes. He can’t decide if he’s impressed, disturbed, or aroused. Maybe all three.

Chuuya Nakahara, the kind of man who probably organizes his socks by emotional significance. Jesus Christ.

Oh, it gets worse.

Because before Chuuya even picked up the spoon, Dazai had already witnessed a crime against God and casual dining etiquette: the ritualistic plate spin.

Chuuya actually turned his plate so that the rice sat perfectly at the bottom, like it was a stage. Then he carefully scooped the viand—beef, pork, whatever the hell—over to the top left corner, crisp and disciplined. And the “extras”—side veggies, sauce, some garnish nonsense—banished to the top right, like a kid in time-out.

Oh my god, Dazai thinks. He’s a psycho. Not the fun kind of psycho, either. The kind of psycho who would alphabetize knives before stabbing someone.

And then it begins. Chuuya’s eating like he’s conducting surgery, spoon moving with mechanical precision. Bite after bite, neat, perfect, horrifying. Dazai hasn’t blinked in two minutes.

That’s when Chuuya finally freezes mid-motion, slowly tilting his head to glare at him.

“The fuck are you staring at, glasses?”

“Oh, nothing. Just… wondering if I should be concerned that you eat like a serial killer.”

“Says the guy who fakes suicide attempts for attention.”

“Correction, I don’t fake them. I fail them. Completely different skillset.”

Chuuya groans, shoving another Perfect Bite into his mouth just to end the conversation.

Dazai leans in, way past socially acceptable distance. 

“Why do you do that? Isn’t it—mm, what’s the word—completely unnecessary? Food is meant to be enjoyed, Chuuya, not… arranged like a chessboard. How will you taste the joy if you’re too busy playing God with the carrots?”

Chuuya doesn’t even look up, just stabs a piece of meat with his spoon like Dazai’s face is next. “It bothers me, okay? If I don’t do it, I don’t wanna eat it.”

Oh, that’s dangerous.

That one sentence detonates in Dazai’s skull like fireworks. He can feel his brain rifling through its internal Rolodex of half-digested psychology trivia. Obsessive-compulsive spectrum. Compulsions to reduce anxiety. Ritualized behavior tied to appetite. Possibly neurotic, maybe just a quirk. No, this feels bigger—structural. Need to categorize. Study. Pick apart. Chuuya’s brain is showing him a puzzle piece, and fuck, Dazai loves puzzles.

And of course, while his inner Freud is furiously scribbling notes, his eyes never leave Chuuya’s hands. The way his fingers adjust the spoon. The way his movements are exact but irritated, like he resents the ritual yet needs it anyway.

Dazai doesn’t even blink as he murmurs, “Fascinating.”

Chuuya finally snaps his head up. “Quit staring at me like a lab rat, freak.”

But Dazai just smirks, shameless, glasses catching the light. “Can’t help it. I think I just diagnosed you with hotness-induced OCD.”

Chuuya glares at him, spoon clinking against his plate. “No, I’m not OCD. It’s just the way I am.”

“Mm, denial. Classic. But alright, let’s test another variable—are you actually left-handed?”

“Yes??” Chuuya’s brows knit. “Is there a problem with that?”

And that’s all the invitation Dazai needs. His mouth runs before his brain bothers to filter.

“Not a problem, not at all—more like a revelation! Did you know left-handed people make up barely ten percent of the population? Historically persecuted, accused of witchcraft, forced to switch hands in schools. Higher rate of geniuses, criminals, and—oh—more prone to accidental deaths. There’s even a study suggesting lefties live shorter lives, which explains why you drive like a demon on borrowed time—”

He doesn’t get to finish. Chuuya drops his spoon with a clack, snatches Dazai’s chopsticks mid-ramble, and jams a full bite of rice and viand into his open mouth.

“—mmph!” Dazai’s eyes go wide, glasses slipping down his nose.

“Shut the hell up and chew,” Chuuya growls, reclaiming his spoon like nothing happened.

Dazai chews slowly, theatrically, locking eyes with him the whole time. He swallows, licks his lips. “So violent. You’re feeding me in public now, Chuuya? Didn’t think you were into that kind of play.”

Chuuya exhales sharply through his nose, shoveling another carefully portioned bite into his mouth. “I just wanna eat in peace, Dazai. Is that so much to ask?”

Dazai leans back in his chair, dramatically offended. “Peace? During mealtime? Impossible. I can’t eat in silence. My brain’s louder than this whole damn dining hall combined.” He taps his temple with the chopsticks Chuuya had used to gag him seconds ago. “It’s like sitting down with an orchestra that doesn’t know how to tune.”

“Not my problem.” Chuuya doesn’t look up. “Go talk to other people. Bother them instead.”

Dazai’s pout is so exaggerated it should be outlawed. He slouches lower in his seat, chin almost on the table, staring at Chuuya like a kicked puppy. When that doesn’t earn him sympathy, he swivels, eyes landing on Sigma, who’s quietly dissecting his food with the caution of a cat in a stranger’s house.

“Well, well, what do we have here?” Dazai pipes up. “A fellow introvert trapped at the extrovert table. Sigma-kun, right? Tell me—do you always eat like you’re defusing a bomb?”

Sigma freezes mid-bite, pale lilac lashes fluttering. “…I’m just trying to eat.”

“Exactly! That’s what makes it fascinating.” Dazai leans closer. “Your spoon-to-mouth ratio, the pace, the way you avoid eye contact—it’s all screaming ‘socially maladjusted orphan’. No shame, me too. But unlike me, you look aesthetic doing it.”

Sigma, halfway through his soup, blinks at Dazai’s casual intrusion. His voice is careful, like he’s trying not to offend anyone by existing. “...I don’t mind the quiet.”

“Ahh, so you do prefer silence. That must be lonely. No wonder you look like a monk eating his last meal.”

The words hang. The table stills. Even Tachihara, who’d been chewing too loudly, pauses mid-bite.

Sigma sets his spoon down. “...That’s not what I meant.”

The silence deepens. Chuuya’s chopsticks stop clinking against the plate. He’s not glaring at Sigma—he’s glaring at Dazai, daggers sharp enough to pin him to the wall. You just had to open your mouth, didn’t you?

Hirotsu, unbothered, continues his meal with the serenity of a man who has long since transcended Dazai’s antics.

Chuuya finally mutters, “Dazai. Eat your damn food.”

Dazai, unfazed, smiles sweetly like he’s been scolded by a kindergarten teacher. “Maa, Chuuya, you wound me. I was only trying to bring people together.”

___

“I’m gonna go to the bathroom. You coming, or do I need to hold your hand so you don’t get lost?”

“Mm. No, thank you. I don’t like public bathrooms. Or the parade of sweaty, naked men. Pardon my modesty.”

Chuuya pauses in the act of tugging his shirt over his head. One brow arches, skeptical. “...Right.” He lets it hang in the air, then shrugs. “We can always wait it out. Around nine, most guys are gone. You’ll have it to yourself.”

That, however, is not the expected script. Dazai blinks at him, the suggestion lodging like glass in his throat. Wait it out? A ridiculous waste of time. A pointless accommodation. A kindness.

“Why would you wait for me?”

Chuuya fixes him with a look, carrying something in it Dazai instantly detests. Pity’s cousin. Concern’s bastard child. He wants to claw it off Chuuya’s face.

“I just don’t want you getting lost later. Then I’d have to look for you, and that’s a waste of my time.”

Oh.

Right.

Of course.

Dazai’s laugh bursts out too fast, too brittle—awkward little shards disguised as mirth. “Hah—well. Obviously. Naturally. That makes sense. Wouldn’t want to be a burden, hm?”

Silence. He keeps smiling at the wall, like if he lets go of it, his face might finally collapse. Chuuya tilts his head at him, before and drops onto the floor beside him. The towel twists in his hands, knuckles flexing like he’s strangling it instead of folding it. Dazai, sprawled on his knees in front of the bottom drawer, rummages around like he’s searching for the meaning of life in someone else’s socks.

He pauses mid-fumble. “You can go shower now, you know. Don’t wait on my account.” 

“I said I’d wait.”

“What, you really that eager to see me naked, Chuuya?” 

“As if. Don’t flatter yourself.” His towel gets an extra vicious twist for good measure.

“Ouch. And here I thought we were bonding.”

The silence drapes itself thick as wet cloth, clinging to the walls, to his skin. Dazai is still crouched, fingers resting in the hollow of the bottom drawer like a thief who’s lost interest halfway through. He can feel Chuuya’s presence beside him, as if he might bite through his own towel just to have something to do with his teeth.

And then, abruptly, Chuuya breaks it.

“…What do you think about corpses?”

Dazai blinks, tilts his head slow, owl-like. He lets the pause lengthen, dramatic, until it risks suffocating them both. Finally, deadpan, “I’m a little offended. Am I so radiant with death that you can’t stop picturing me as a cadaver?”

Chuuya grumbles, eyes sliding away. “Don’t be so full of yourself. It’s just—the only thing on my mind right now.”

Ah. That makes perfect sense. Of course Chuuya is thinking about rotting flesh while holding a towel, in a dorm room, with him. Dazai smiles faintly, the kind of smile that should belong to an academic lecturing on plague history rather than a boy crouched over other people’s drawers.

“Well,” he says lightly, “Nero, the Roman emperor, killed himself in such disgrace that no one dared claim his body. It was left abandoned, swollen and souring, until his former concubines carted him off and gave him a funeral. Can you imagine? The man who once ruled the world reduced to a rotting slab, touched only by the women he’d used. There’s a kind of poetry in that. Death renders us all meat, but fame ensures the dogs at least know whose bones they’re chewing.”

He leans back against the bedframe, smirking as if this were cocktail chatter and not necrophilic trivia. “So, which version of me are you thinking about, Chuuya? The emperor or the carcass?”

Chuuya huffs, sharp through his nose, as though the weight of answering is somehow beneath him. Still, he mutters, “The emperor.”

Dazai blinks, head tilting again, feigning intrigue when in truth his heart gives the most humiliating lurch. “Why?”

“Because even if you’re a pain in the ass, people still follow you. Doesn’t matter if it’s out of loyalty or pity or because you’re too much of a mess to leave alone. You’d still get carried off in the end.”

Dazai stares at him. At his profile, the stubborn angle of his jaw. That towel twisted too tightly in his hands. It is, on the surface, an insult. He’s a nuisance, a burden, a man impossible to abandon only because of the trouble he causes. Duh. Anyone knowing him for one second can deduce that. But under it—the implication is there. Chuuya would not leave him rotting…

But…why?

Tch. So much for being straight, Dazai thinks bitterly, forcing his gaze down to his hands before his treacherous face can betray the flush rising against his cheekbones. He studies his fingers as though they belong to someone else, as though he didn’t just feel an uninvited warmth wedge itself into the hollow of his chest.

“Ah,” he says airily, masking the tremor with a lazy smirk. “So you’re volunteering to be my concubine, then. How flattering.”

But Chuuya doesn't take the bite. Dazai watches him fold in on himself, knees to his chest, cheek pressed against denim like a boy shrinking back into childhood. It looks ridiculous, unbecoming of someone who plays at fire and venom. And yet—there’s a faint tenderness to it that makes Dazai’s ribs ache.

“So tell me, why are you being so… disgustingly kind to me? You talk like you’ve known me for years. Sure, same schools, same classrooms, same hallways—but we didn’t even interact. Not really.”

Unless.

Unless he’s lying. Unless Chuuya has some hidden reason. Unless he remembers something Dazai does not. Unless. Unless. Unless.

Chuuya doesn’t meet his eyes. He rests his face against his knees, voice muffled, almost petulant. “Maybe I just…did.”

“…You just did?”

“Yeah.” Chuuya shrugs, as if that explains everything, as if the subject is now closed. “Don’t overthink it, kid.”

Dazai stares at him, unsatisfied. His brain claws at the edges, trying to connect threads that aren’t even visible to him. A half-memory flickers in the dark but never quite manifests. And he hates it—hates the gnawing sense that he’s missing something crucial.

So he laughs. Too loud, too dismissive, forcing brightness into his voice. “Ah, of course! You’re just a saint in disguise, then. Should I light candles in your honor?”

The brat inside him, however, is throwing a tantrum. He’s hiding something from me. He’s hiding something and I don’t know what it is.

And he tries. He does. He scrapes at the walls of his memory like a rat in a cage, claws tearing at plaster, desperate for some half-formed picture of why Chuuya said what he said. Some shared moment, some childhood slip of the tongue, something. Nothing comes. His head is nothing but dust and echoes.

So he lets it go. Or pretends to. He’s good at pretending.

Chuuya checks his watch, the faint glow catching against his wrist, and says flatly, “It’s nine. We can go to the showers now.”

Dazai blinks like he’s been caught in a dream. “Right. Yeah. Showers.” He pushes himself up and rifles through the top drawers like a thief in his own room. A band tee—Mindless Self Indulgence, because of course he’d look most dignified half-naked in irony—and a pair of shorts that may or may not pass for sleepwear. His fingers ghost into the bottom drawer, the one that rattles when opened. Bandages, hygiene crap, all the little rituals that keep his carcass from falling apart.

Chuuya crouches low, digging under the bed, and comes back with his things. Then he passes by Dazai to get his clothes from the middle drawer, folded neater than anyone has the right to fold them. Always so organized. Always irritatingly, infuriatingly intact.

They step out together. The hallway is lit faintly in gold, shadows long and warm against the walls. For a moment, it doesn’t feel like a dormitory but some monastery, too calm, too holy, too undeserving of them.

“The lights go off at ten,” Chuuya explains. “So we should hurry.”

Dazai nods, the sound exaggerated, his mouth twitching like he wants to turn it into a joke but can’t quite muster it. “Duly noted. Wouldn’t want to commit the crime of showering in the dark.”

Why the hell does it feel like we’re a married couple rushing bedtime curfews? 

Thankfully, mercifully, the showers are empty. No sweaty, half-naked congregation of strangers to poison the air with their body wash and dick-measuring contests. Just the two of them, and the hollow echo of water pipes, the antiseptic tang of bleach clinging to tile.

Dazai stakes his claim immediately, dropping his things on the nearest dry ledge like a conqueror planting a flag. Band tee folded wrong, shorts crumpled, toothbrush and toothpaste unceremoniously slapped down like surgical tools for some grotesque procedure. He uncaps the paste with idle fingers, squeezes it onto the bristles—

—and looks up just in time to see Chuuya tug his shirt over his head.

Oh. Oh fuck.

The toothpaste nearly slips from his hand, smears dangerously close to the sink edge. His grip spasms, the brush clatters against porcelain.

Chuuya doesn’t notice. Or pretends not to. He’s already moving, quick, efficient, slipping into one of the cubicles with the easy grace of someone who has done this a hundred times before.

Dazai doesn’t move. Can’t move. His face feels hot, his throat tighter than it has any right to be. Really? he thinks. This is what undoes me? A ribcage, a shoulder blade, the glimpse of a back slipping out of sight like some ancient punishment tailor-made for me?

He stares down at his toothbrush, white foam trembling on the bristles. A tool for hygiene suddenly weaponized against him.

We’re going to die here, Osamu, slain by pecs and a goddamn spine.

He stares down at the trembling froth on his toothbrush like it’s the most pressing philosophical quandary of his time. Nietzsche talked about staring into the abyss; Nietzsche had clearly never brushed his teeth while Chuuya Nakahara stripped in the periphery.

He drags the brush across his teeth, half-hearted, foam clinging to his lips. The squeak of the cubicle door shutting echoes like a judge’s gavel in his skull. Then—the hiss of water. The rush of it cascading, splattering tile. The sound alone feels dirty.

Dazai’s tongue presses against the bristles too hard. Foam dribbles down his chin. His reflection in the cracked mirror is feral; wide-eyed, toothpaste dribbling like some failed asylum escapee. If Chuuya saw him right now, he’d probably report him to Hirotsu and request a restraining order.

He’s naked in there. Naked. Full frontal nudity, Dazai. You could walk over, push that door, and there it is, the whole museum exhibit. Once-in-a-lifetime viewing.

He spits into the sink, nearly choking on his own foam. “Shut up,” he hisses under his breath, though no one’s there to hear it. The words echo anyway.

Chuuya hums low in his throat—some half-tune, carried by the acoustics of falling water. Dazai freezes mid-brush. That sound. God. The man’s got the audacity to sing in the shower. It’s not even a full song, just fragments, lazy humming. But it’s too intimate, too unguarded. Like catching him sleep-talking.

Dazai’s grip on the toothbrush slips again. Foam spatters onto his shirt. His heart lurches into his throat, beating too hard for something so utterly, disgustingly mundane.

He rinses, splashes water onto his burning face, then slams the faucet shut. Leans over the sink like he’s been sprinting.

You’re dead, Osamu. It’s over. Write your will, because the water’s going to stop and he’s going to step out, dripping, towel low on his hips, and you’ll combust before you can even look away.

Minutes later. Or centuries if you have Dazai's brain. He hears the door open.

No. Nope. Absolutely the fuck not. He’s not going to look. He has principles, dignity, the last brittle scraps of self-control duct-taped together by bad habits and worse humor. He will not look.

But then, like some cosmic joke, the mirror betrays him. One glance. One. And there it is—reflected glory. Chuuya Nakahara, shirtless, towel in hand, damp hair clinging like fire licking his cheekbones, cargo pants hanging just low enough to leave room for catastrophic speculation.

Dazai’s pulse detonates in his ears, a thunderous percussion line. Exactly the rhythm he always imagined Chuuya would set while—

Nope. Abort mission. Wrong file folder. Delete.

He squeezes his toothpaste tube too hard; a white blob rockets out, splattering the sink like some premature disaster. Real subtle. Freud is rolling in his grave, laughing his ass off.

Chuuya steps up beside him, casual, rubbing at his hair with the towel. The scent of soap and faint cologne cuts through the damp heat. Dazai’s knees nearly buckle. Rail me into next week, you cargo-panted menace.

But outwardly, Dazai manages—barely—to rinse his mouth, pat his face dry, and keep his eyes low. If he looks up, he’ll combust. He’ll go full kamikaze in front of the sink.

His fingers drum nervously on the counter. His throat clicks with a swallow. And because he’s incapable of shutting up for more than ten seconds, the words tumble out before his brain can stop them.

“...So, uh. Do you always cosplay as my recurring wet dream, or is tonight special?”

The mirror catches Chuuya’s glare before Dazai dares to lift his own head. He’s not sure if he’s about to get decked, drowned in the sink, or kissed. Honestly? All three sound equally worth it.

“Go shower already before I shove a towel down your throat.”

Dazai almost says something automatically witty because he's a charm, but his brain has short-circuited. All he hears is yes please. All he sees is Chuuya’s bare chest still damp, water running down into the waistband of those stupid cargo pants.

“Right,” Dazai croaks, grabbing his towel like it’s a lifeline. He bolts into the nearest cubicle and slams the lock in place in record time. His heart is a drumline in his throat, pulse too fast, too loud, and if Chuuya heard the sound of him practically sprinting into the stall, well—Dazai will simply die in here.

He breathes like a man reciting lines before the final act. 

Okay. Okay. 

Be normal. 

He swings his towel over the hanger with the practiced flourish of someone who stages their own collapses, peels off his clothes, lays them carefully on top of the bandages—because fragile ego, fragile skin—and peels the sticky tape with the delicacy of a bomb technician. He doesn’t want to snag a scar and send himself into a long, embarrassing bleed. Precision matters. Always.

Water is a saint. Five minutes under hot spray and he is unmade and remade a dozen times. The shampoo, the brutal honesty of soap, the way the water washes filth and performance off in equal measure. He never liked showing—real exposure is for people who want to be seen—but the stream is mercilessly honest and, perversely, kind. He closes his eyes and lets the noise of pipes drown his chest for a moment. It’s good. Too good.

Then the small, rational terror slides in and licks his ankles.

He has to go out. Naked.

No. No. No. No. No. No. No.

The word repeats itself like a litany, a cheap metronome ticking out impending humiliation. He imagines Chuuya at the sink—a god with cargo pants and damp hair—and himself a peeled grape in full theatrical display. 

“Stupid Osamu,” he mutters to the echoing tiles, voice small and tremulous. “You shall die, you idiot.” This is your moment, you prat—go on, make a scene.

He huddles under the warm tile glow and stares at the knob on the cubicle door like it’s a villain in an old melodrama. In five breaths he will either fling it open with an outrageous flourish and stride out like some exhibitionist martyr—or he will snatch the towel from the hanger, wrap himself like a burrito of shame, and stagger into whatever fate waits on the other side.

For now he rocks on the balls of his feet and whispers to the shower tiles, because that’s what he does—perform to an audience of ceramics and steam. “Alright, Osamu,” he says, breath held, grin a brittle thing. “Decide. Die dramatically, or cheat with fabric.”

However, before he can choose the worst mistake of his life, he pauses mid-spiral, blinking at the tile like it just revealed the secrets of the universe. 

Oh. Right. He doesn’t have to walk out there bare-assed and blasphemous. He has Chuuya. Poor, gullible, easily baited Chuuya. Of course.

He pitches his voice into that sing-song lilt designed to irritate and charm at once.

“Chuuuuuuuyaaa, would you be a darling and fetch my clothes and bandages? Your dear partner is in a state of peril~”

From outside comes the exact brand of silence that drips with restraint—then Chuuya’s scoff,. “You’re pathetic. Absolutely pathetic. Can’t even handle your own damn laundry run.” But there’s shuffling, footsteps and a thunk against the cubicle door.

Clothes first. Shorts, briefs, boxers. Dazai hums, cheerful as he slips each on. “My savior, my knight in a towel. Truly, Chuuya, one day I’ll—”

“Shut up. Bandages, yeah?” 

Dazai plucks them up, smoothing the roll between his palms. “Bandages, yes. Thank you, my beloved nurse.” He’s expecting another insult, but Chuuya just mutters something low, maybe idiot, maybe worse, before the sound of a towel rustling drowns it out.

And now the real problem.

Dazai stands there, half-dressed, dripping, staring down at the length of gauze like it’s a snake daring him to try. Wrapping himself has always been a bastard of a task—too many scars, too many angles, too many places he can’t quite reach without twisting like a pretzel. Mori usually did it with clinical efficiency. A doctor’s hands, precise, impersonal, never dwelling too long. But Mori isn’t here.

And Dazai… has never been good at playing doctor with himself.

He sighs, half-dramatic, half-defeated, rolling the bandage once, twice, stalling. He could do it wrong—he has before—but then it itches, or itches worse, or digs into scar tissue like punishment.

Or.

Or, or, or.

Hear him out.

He could just… ask.

But asking Chuuya to help wrap his bandages? That’s a different brand of naked.

He tries. He really does. He sits on the cold tile like a king who’s been demoted to peasant, bandage trailing from his fingers like a defeated white flag, and he attempts the ancient, humiliating ritual of wrapping himself like some makeshift surgeon on a shoestring budget.

Key word: attempt.

The first loop is optimistic—too tight in the wrong place, like a lover who misunderstands pressure for passion. The second slide is clumsy; the gauze slips, twines around his thumb, and for a blessedly short second he thinks he’s invented a new curse word. He fumbles, reaching a foot to steady himself, and the world tilts because he’s an idiot who thinks complex knots are an acceptable hobby.

Then gravity does its work and he goes down—spectacularly undignified. Something clatters, a bottle rolls, the overhead light throws a mocking little halo around his head as if to say, Look: performance art. He lands half sprawled, bandage unspooled across the tiles, mouth tasting of soap and humiliation. He wants to laugh but what comes out is a dry, small sound that probably counts as both.

He doesn’t want anyone to see the scars. Not like this. There’s already an inventory of shame filed away in the corners of his chest. Failed attempts, failed exits, the smell of hospital corridors, the faces that stayed and the faces that didn’t. Scars mean receipts. And he’s tired of presenting the ledger.

“Why are you so quiet? It’s freaking me out. Don’t tell me you’re doing something stupid.”

“Nothing,” Dazai says, even though nothing is precisely the noise of a man tearing out the stitches of his composure. He tries again to stand, to pretend gravity isn’t a witness, and fumbles the bandage into some half-functional knot that looks roughly like care but feels like cardboard. The bathroom is suddenly a private stage for pathetic theatrics. 

Then boots scrape tile. The cubicle latch clicking open is a pistol shot. The door swings, and Chuuya is there in the doorway like an accusation made physical—towel slung over one shoulder, hair still dripping, eyes narrowed until they’re knife edges.

For a second, his brain writes the joke: See? You fainted, I told you so. But the joke dies in his mouth because Chuuya’s gaze drops—not to the bandage, not to the clutter, but to the pale lines crisscrossing his skin where the gauze wouldn’t quite reach.

“Oh,” Chuuya says, and it isn’t snark or mockery. It’s softer and worse. The word an adult uses when things are broken but still need picking up.

Dazai’s hand goes to cover the worst of it automatically—old reflex, old shame. “Don’t—don’t look,” he blurts, and the absurdity of ordering a man not to look at his own hands is not lost on him. The command is as brittle as the bandage between his fingers.

Chuuya steps in, eyes still steady, and for once his voice is stripped of flippancy. “Give it here.”

Dazai freezes. No! Privacy! Performative dignity!—but something kinder, quieter, coaxes him to move. He hands the gauze over.

Chuuya’s fingers are calm. They’re competent, practiced—not with sterile clinicality, but with the sort of unshowy efficiency someone uses when they’ve had to mend things for other people a lot. He smooths the bandage, tucks the edges, pulls with purpose. The motion is domestic and blunt and painfully intimate. Dazai can feel the heat rising in his cheeks, not only from the proximity but from the way being tended to tightens something that was loose for a long time.

“You’re an idiot. Don’t be stupid and try to do it alone.”

Dazai wants to say something theatrical about vulnerability being a societal construct, about how independence is overrated—he rehearses the zingers—but he doesn’t. 

“Thanks.”

Chuuya grunts and finishes the knot. “Next time,” he says, the way a man lays down a rule rather than begs, “ask me before you invent new ways to embarrass yourself.”

Dazai swallows. The sting of shame is still there, bruising and real, but it’s threaded now with something that feels like a rope tied around him for support instead of constraint. The brat in his head squeals with a dozen different delights, most of them ridiculous, some of them frighteningly bright.

For the first time in too long, he lets himself sit with the bandage snug and the knowledge that someone else noticed the mess and chose not to turn away. It’s scandalously simple. It’s probably dangerous. It’s also—unaccountably—easier to breathe.

Chuuya stands with that quiet efficiency of his, steadying Dazai by the elbow like he’s not even making a point of it. He presses the crumpled black band tee into his hands without ceremony. Dazai pulls it on, half because he’s cold, half because he hates being seen bare for longer than necessary.

“You like bands?” 

Dazai smirks, tugging at the hem of his shirt like it’s evidence. “Quite obvious, don’t you think? Unless you thought I sleep in Mindless Self Indulgence for irony’s sake.”

Chuuya huffs through his nose, lips quirking—an almost-smile he won’t give permission to. “Come on.”

They scoop up their things, and the walk back is short, padded by the quiet of the dorm hallways. Dazai breaks it first, because silence gnaws at him. “You mentioned once—you’re in a band. With the Flags?”

Chuuya hums, stuffing his hands into his pockets. “Yeah. Been on hiatus for a while.”

Dazai nods slowly, pretending he’s not cataloging every scrap of trivia he gets handed. “Because of your deaf friend, right.” He files the detail away like scripture.

Back in the dorm, they drift to their respective corners—Dazai kneeling at his bottom drawer, shoving things into some parody of order, Chuuya crouching to stash his gear under the bed. Dazai squints. There’s a case outline he recognizes immediately.

“You brought a guitar?” he blurts, too loud, too quick, like tact was an elective he skipped.

Chuuya hums again, casual as ever. “Yeah.” He pulls a small lamp from his bag, sets it on the floor, flicks it on. The glow pools golden around his ankles.

Dazai, being terminally stupid, asks, “Why are you afraid of the dark? Most people are afraid of what’s in it, not the dark itself. It’s comforting, if you think about it.” His voice is all pseudo-philosophy, trying to mask the way he’s staring too long.

Chuuya sits on the edge of his bed, fiddling with the lamp switch, shoulders shrugging like the question doesn’t deserve a real answer. “Yeah, well. I’m not most people.”

He watches him a beat too long, then leans over, flips the overhead switch with a little flourish. The dorm drowns in shadow, except for Chuuya’s lamp, the only light, warm and stubborn.

Satisfied with the stage he’s set, he climbs into his top bunk. He stretches out flat, listening to the faint creak of springs, to the rustle of Chuuya shifting below. For once, the dark doesn’t feel like swallowing—it feels curated. A shared secret, golden at the edges.

Now, he usually reserves the dark for theater. A private screening of scenarios no one else would stomach. He runs them like reels in his head—conversations that never happened, deaths that might, absurd fantasies spliced with memories until exhaustion finally swallows him. Sleep isn’t a mercy; it’s just the inevitable collapse of a mind that burns itself out.

Tonight, though, silence prevents him from focusing. The lamp hums faintly, its light bleeding gold against the floor. Beneath him, Chuuya shifts once, then goes still.

“Hey. You still awake?”

A weak hum answers. Half-asleep or half-annoyed—it’s impossible to tell.

Dazai smirks into the dark, rolling onto his side to better aim his words down at him. “Perfect. I’ve got a question.” He pauses, milks it, makes it sound serious. “If you were a corpse, how do you think you’d rot? Like, fast and sloppy? Or slow and dignified, the kind the archaeologists would get excited about centuries later?”

He waits for the reaction, already grinning.

To his own surprise, Chuuya doesn’t spit back an insult, doesn’t tell him to shut the hell up and sleep. Instead, his voice drifts up from the lower bunk, quiet, stripped of all bravado.

“Slow,” he says. No hesitation. “I’d rot slow. The kind that clings. The kind people can’t ignore even if they want to.”

Dazai blinks in the dark, brows hitching upward. Too serious. Far too serious. And yet—he catches every syllable, the way Chuuya’s voice dips, the way the honesty cracks through like an exposed nerve. 

For a moment, he almost says something equally serious. Almost lets the silence between them sink into something heavy. But he’s not suicidal enough to actually stay in that sincerity. So he exhales a laugh and rolls onto his back.

“Slow rot, huh? How poetic. I was expecting you to say ‘fast, like your brain cells dying whenever you listen to me,’ but no, you had to go full gothic tragic hero on me.”

He snaps his fingers in mock realization, grinning into the ceiling. “Actually—no, I take it back. You’d rot in style. Leather jacket, shades, maybe a funeral playlist. The kind of decay that gets five-star reviews on TripAdvisor.”

His voice lowers into a lazy sing-song, “The tourists come from miles away—‘oh, look, kids, it’s the famous Chuuya Nakahara corpse, now with extra preservation!’”

Dazai quiets, because Chuuya is quiet. After a while, anyway.

“…Tell me more about the corpses.”

Dazai’s lips twitch, his first instinct to laugh, to make some crass remark about necrophilia just to hear Chuuya sputter. But something about the way the words leave him—flat, fragile—pins him still.

“…why do you want to now?” His voice comes out softer than he means, almost muttered into the pillow.

A beat. Then Chuuya shifts, the faint sound of sheets rustling. “’Cause I can’t sleep. You used to—” He exhales through his nose, almost like he’s annoyed at himself. “—you used to talk about these random things when I couldn’t. I’m surprised you haven’t changed.”

Dazai’s heart stutters. His brain, usually so good at cataloguing, suddenly blanks.

Chuuya keeps going, quieter. “I figured… when you met Fyodor, you’d…” He trails, lips pressing shut.

Dazai blinks. His throat goes dry, paper-scratch raw.

“…What?”

The question leaves him harsher than he intended, sharper. He doesn’t even know what answer he wants. Only that the air feels thinner, like the walls of the room are pressing in, demanding.

Chuuya sighs, the sound rough, frayed around the edges. “Nevermind. Just… talk. Please.”

It knocks the air straight out of Dazai’s lungs. Just like that—two words—and suddenly Dazai can’t breathe. His chest locks up, his ribs ache like they’re bound too tight.

What is he forgetting? What what what—

His brain claws at its own walls, desperate for a memory that won’t surface. Something Chuuya knows, something Chuuya remembers, and him?

Nothing. 

A black void where there should be something warm.

But he doesn’t find it. Doesn’t even get close.

So he rambles.

About corpses—because that’s what Chuuya asked for. About Nero’s burial again, this time slipping into the absurd details, how the people mocked his swollen corpse, how his ashes didn’t even get a proper urn. 

Then he drags it wider, veering into Egyptian mummies, the Japanese practice of kusōzu paintings—rotting bodies illustrated step by step until they’re nothing but bones. His voice is steady, detached, elaborate, like he’s giving a lecture to a room full of scholars who asked him to romanticize decomposition.

And Chuuya doesn’t interrupt. Doesn’t laugh or groan or throw a pillow at him. He listens, the faint shift of fabric on the lower bunk the only sign he’s still awake.

Dazai keeps talking until the weight in his chest loosens just enough to let him breathe again. Until he almost convinces himself he’s not forgetting something huge.

And when Chūya drifts off—soft, even breaths muffled by the blanket he’s pulled over his head—Dazai feels it. That sting. The back-of-the-eyes burn like he’s been staring at something too bright, too long, except there’s nothing bright in this room. Just a cheap lamp glowing low and the sound of someone else trusting him enough to sleep.

What is he forgetting?

The question loops in his head like a skipping record, needle stuck in the same groove, over and over and over. He waits for an answer, but of course there isn’t one. There never is. His brain, that cruel archivist, has slammed the drawer shut. And he knows better than to pry.

Not that he could—his mind’s decided it’s too tired to cooperate. Too tired for memory, too tired for sense. Been tired for years, actually, but fatigue is no excuse. Not when sleep is the enemy. Sleep is surrender. Sleep is where the thoughts crawl in uninvited, all teeth and whispers.

So he lies there on the top bunk, wide awake in the dark, staring at the ceiling he can’t even see, pretending his body doesn’t ache for rest. Pretending it’s fine, because he’ll never give sleep the satisfaction of swallowing him whole.

Chapter Text

And then Dazai wakes up to a pillow shoved against his face.

He groans, voice muffled in the cotton, dragging out, “Five more minutes—” loud enough to echo off the walls.

“Time to get up, kid,” comes Chuuya’s sharp reply, way too awake for someone who probably only got three hours of sleep himself.

Dazai cracks one eye open, squinting against the dim morning light. His groan is even louder this time, theatrical, dripping misery.
 “It’s not even five a.m.,” he complains, like the words themselves should grant him divine exemption from existing.

“Joke’s on you. It’s five-oh-ten.”

Dazai groans louder, rolling dramatically onto his side like he’s preparing for burial.

Chuuya sighs, long and exaggerated, and says, “Come on.”

Finally, after centuries and generations, Dazai dangles one leg off the bunk bed like a man lowering himself into an execution chamber, spine curling, hair sticking in ten different directions that make him look less like a genius strategist and more like a drowned cat. His descent is painstaking, his feet slapping the cold floor with the resignation of a martyr.

Chuuya, already dressed and combed and disgustingly competent at this ungodly hour, doesn’t even give him the dignity of silence. “There’s a morning activity.”

Dazai groans yet again like the words themselves are torture. “An activity? In the morning? Why does this feel like a targeted hate crime against my entire existence?” 

His hands drag down his face, stretching it grotesquely as though he might melt back into sleep if he pulls hard enough. “I refuse. I’m filing a formal complaint. Where’s the suggestion box? Better yet, where’s the nearest cliff?”

“You don’t even know what it is yet.”

“I don’t need to know. If it’s before noon, it’s fascism. Pure and simple.”

“Odasaku-san will be leading it.”

Dazai freezes mid-whine, jaw hanging open like he’s been sucker-punched by divinity. Eyes lighting up, back straightening, his tone morphing from theatrical despair into something dangerously close to reverence.

“Oh. Oh, well—why didn’t you say so sooner, Chibi?” He smooths his hair with exaggerated care, suddenly composed, suddenly respectable. “For Odasaku, I’d gladly endure the indignity of sunrise.”

Chuuya just stares at him like he’s watching a car crash he’s seen too many times. “Pathetic.”

Dazai only beams, shameless.

After the dorms, they make a quick detour to the bathrooms. Afterwards, they come out in mismatched silence—Chuuya tugging his hoodie sleeves down like he’s bracing for battle with the morning chill, Dazai fiddling with the hem of a long-sleeved shirt he didn’t even want to bother putting on. He almost leaves without his glasses—half-blind and squinting like an idiot—until Chuuya sighs, grabs them, and slides them onto his face with the same gruff efficiency one uses to slap a sticker on a trash can.

“Don’t trip and die,” Chuuya mutters, then vanishes toward his friend group.

Dazai falls into line with the others, letting the damp smell of dew and moss settle in his lungs. The forest is quiet in that early-morning way, like the world hasn’t fully woken up yet. For a second, he almost lets it trick him into peace.

Then he spots Yosano, who greets him with a smirk sharp enough to draw blood too early in the morning. He drifts toward her like he always does, brushing shoulders with strangers as the group makes its way toward the villa.

Behind them, Atsushi and Akutagawa trail side by side, both caught in a pathetic truce of exhaustion. Atsushi’s head keeps jerking upright like he’s fighting a losing battle with gravity, while Akutagawa has already surrendered, forehead pressed to Atsushi’s shoulder. Dazai hides a grin. Cuties. Pathetic, tragic cuties.

Yosano tilts her head at him. “So. What’s your whole deal with Chuuya?”

Dazai doesn’t miss a beat. “Got friendzoned. Brutally. Because he’s straight.” He spits the word like it’s a medical diagnosis, one he deeply disapproves of.

Yosano blinks at him once, twice. Then she bursts into a laugh that could make flowers wilt.

Dazai pouts. “I’ll make him fall for me,” he declares. “Just… not tonight. Timing, darling. Art requires patience.”

Yosano snorts. “At this rate you should just become a girl. It’s simpler—try shifting the packaging and watch the world misread you. People get confused and fall in love with the label.”

“Maybe I will,” Dazai says, the idea delicious enough to savor, before a ripple of hush runs through the gathered campers and alumni. He tilts his head; whatever domestic theatre he and Yosano were crafting folds away. The center of attention tightens like a lens.

Oda steps forward. He’s practical as ever, the sort of man who could read a map in a hurricane and still make you trust him with your life. 

“Good morning,” he says. “Today’s activity is a group hike up to the ridge—about two kilometers with a steady incline. We’ll set up at the lookout and do a guided stargazing and grounding session.”

Dazai listens with one ear and half his heart already cataloguing constellations into erotic metaphors. He watches Oda’s lips shape the plan. Not romantic moon-gazing nonsense, but the real, responsible version. Oda’s voice is measured, no hyperbole, the opposite of Dazai’s natural habitat. It’s almost boring, and therefore comforting.

“We’ll split you into small groups,” Oda continues. “Each group will have at least one alumnus or volunteer with them. Walk in pairs or threes. Keep your buddy in sight at all times. If anyone feels unsafe at any point, flag your facilitator and we’ll get you back immediately.” He points out where the med kit, water stations, and emergency radios are stationed. Practical, efficient—no theatrics.

Ango chimes in with logistics. “We’ll leave in thirty minutes. Bring a water bottle, wear good shoes, and carry a layer—temperatures drop quickly at the ridge. This isn’t about endurance or proving anything. It’s about movement, fresh air, and being able to look up at something bigger than this room.”

“At the lookout we’ll do a short guided exercise—breathing, naming things you can see/hear/feel, and then a sharing circle if you want to. No one is forced to speak. Volunteers will remain present. If anyone needs private support, we have counselors available at all times.”

Haha. A flock of young wrecks hauled up a hill, the sky poured over them like a consoling hand. The whole thing is so earnest he wants to both mock it and commit to it fully. He will mock it. He will commit. He will probably do both in equal measure.

The groups scatter like loose cards, names read off, pairs divided, alumni assigned like careful babysitters. Dazai ends up where he always does—wedged shamelessly against Chuuya’s side, because proximity is leverage, and Hirotsu, long-suffering saint that he is, doesn’t bother to untangle them. He only sighs once, as though one more of Dazai’s games will age him another decade. 

So they walk. The path winds upward, damp earth breathing underfoot, the chorus of insects dragging the air thin and sharp. Dazai, uncharacteristically, keeps his mouth shut. 

He watches Chuuya’s gait, fluid even in the incline. He watches the way the morning light catches his hair, igniting it into something unholy, a brand against the dull green of the forest. He watches, and behind every motion there is that richochet of last night’s voice—the hushed way Chuuya had asked tell me more about the corpses, the too-serious tone, the way he’d said I figured… when you met Fyodor, you’d…

Something there. A crack he didn’t chase.

Dazai chews the inside of his cheek, hard. He knows he’s forgetting something, knows the shape of absence like a missing tooth he can’t stop tonguing. It gnaws at him, the blank. Like an answer scrawled on a board, then erased, leaving only the chalk-dust outline.

What was it? What was it, Chuuya expected him to say? What did he expect himself to say?

He narrows his eyes, staring at the path ahead, the stones, the moss, the relentless rhythm of boots in dirt. Chuuya’s voice drifts back occasionally—something about the incline, about how idiots better not twist their ankles—but Dazai barely registers the words. He’s mapping ghosts, tracing broken synapses, dragging his brain through the mud for a memory that refuses to surface.

He wants to ask Chuuya again. Wants to poke. Wants to bite into it until something bleeds. But Chuuya’s shoulders are square, his breath even, his whole being wrapped in the armor of routine. Pushing now would only get him snarled at.

What am I forgetting?

And the worst part is—he thinks Chuuya knows the answer.

Dazai’s too deep in the swamp of his own head, too busy chewing holes into memory that refuses to give, when his foot catches on some useless twig masquerading as an ambush. He stumbles—an inelegant hitch in his stride, a dead giveaway that he’s thinking instead of living. A few heads swivel back at him with sharp glares: shut up, keep up, don’t ruin the pace. He grins sheepishly at their backs, like he’s apologizing for existing too loudly, and pushes his glasses higher up his nose.

And then—without ceremony, without permission—Chuuya kneels. Fingers tugging deftly at his laces, double-knotting them with the instinct of someone who’s done it before.

Dazai’s heart halts mid-beat, stutters, and claws its way forward again with too much force. He doesn’t even breathe. The forest holds its breath with him.

See, this is exactly why something’s wrong. Why the itch in his brain won’t quiet. Shoelaces tied without hesitation, as if Chuuya’s hands know their way around his life. Dazai doesn’t like it. He hates it. He’s terrified.

He tells himself it’s impossible. He doesn’t forget things. He catalogues. He hoards. His brain is a library of rot—shelves lined with bloodstains and discarded exits. Trauma doesn’t erase; it carves. But—what if? What if there’s something missing? Suppressed. Swallowed. Stolen.

Chuuya rises smoothly, brushing dirt from his knee, and hooks an arm through Dazai’s like it’s the most natural thing in the world. Not tugging, not dragging—leading. Yeah. No. This is fucked.

He can feel it—Chuuya knows something. Knows something he doesn’t. Knows it so deeply he doesn’t even think twice before tying his laces, before touching his arm, before walking as if they’re tethered.

It bothers him so fucking much he could scream. Instead, he laughs under his breath, jagged, thin.

What the hell am I forgetting?

Chuuya mutters, low enough it could’ve been the wind, “You think too damn loud, y’know that?”

Dazai’s head tilts mockingly. “Sorry, didn’t realize I was trespassing in your fragile little ears.”

Chuuya bristles instantly, snaps back with more bite, “Fragile? Please. If you weren’t so busy making everything about you, you’d notice not everyone wants to listen to your bullshit brain static.”

That shuts him up. A little too cleanly. His grin dies at the edges. He looks forward, frowning, the silence between them suddenly denser.

Chuuya glances at him sidelong, studies the lines of his face that makes his skin crawl. Without thinking, his hand slips lower, fingers brushing until he hooks Dazai’s pinky, surprisingly gentle. 

“…Tying your laces wasn’t an insult, idiot. Just don’t want you faceplanting every five minutes. I don’t mind looking out for you.”

No.

Dazai yanks his hand away like it burns, shoving both hands deep into his pockets. His stride sharpens, putting distance between them.

“Don’t.” He says flatly. Don’t be nice to me. I’ll choke on it.”

Dazai knows he’s being rude; childish, more like. But he doesn’t care. Chuuya’s silence trails behind him like a shadow all the way up the slope, and by the time they reach the clearing at the top, the sky is bleeding from black into navy, stars still clinging stubbornly against the pale wash of dawn.

Odasaku’s already standing near the ridge, steadying for this early hour. The others gather in loose clusters, but Dazai tilts his head back and pretends the only thing worth listening to is the night refusing to die above them.

Stars. Tiny pricks in a rotting fruit of sky.

Man, it’s not like he’s been acting strange. If anything, he’s been perfectly himself—his standard of normal, which is to say irritating, erratic, and occasionally suicidal. So why the hell does Chuuya look at him like he’s something warped, like he’s almost tolerable if you squint hard enough? That kind of patience makes his skin crawl. He hates people who act like that. Hates them worse than people who hate him outright.

“…the ancients didn’t just name them,” Oda’s saying, “They connected the dots. Drew meaning where there wasn’t any. Constellations—maps of memory, of gods, of monsters. All stories. We’re just seeing possibilities in pinholes of light.”

Dazai breathes out, slow, watching Orion bleed pale into the brightening edge of morning. Stories. Monsters. Possibilities. Always someone else’s shape drawn over him. Always someone else’s meaning pinned like a knife.

He smirks at nothing.

Possibilities. What a joke.

“…and remember,” Oda continues “most of what we’re seeing are corpses. Stars that died long before you were born. Their light just travels slow enough to trick us. Beautiful, but gone. It’s only our eyes that keep them alive.”

Dazai swallows, throat tight, that casual phrase slamming harder than it should. Corpses of light—yeah, that’s about right. He stares at Orion until the dots blur together, until he almost sees a face where there shouldn’t be one.

A shift of presence beside him. The faint crunch of boots against damp earth. Chuuya.

He doesn’t even need to look. He can feel him, close enough that it needles under his skin.

“You’re awfully moody in the morning,” Chuuya mutters, half under his breath.

“No shit.”

Silence settles again. Thick, ugly. The kind that gnaws at him, digs into bone. The kind that makes him want to scream just to ruin it.

He pushes his glasses higher, staring harder at the sky like he can pretend he’s above all of this.

And then Chuuya sighs like he’s grinding down his own teeth. “Alright. Enough dancing around it. I’ll get straight to the point.”

Dazai blinks, caught off guard. Straight to the point? With him? As if there even is a point to any of this. “What do you—”

But the words are cut short because suddenly, suddenly, Chuuya’s dragging him. Not roughly, but firm, tugging him a few careful steps away from the others, out where the murmurs fade into distance. And then—oh fuck.

Chuuya stands right in front of him, close enough that Dazai can count the faint scatter of freckles across his nose if he wanted to. Close enough that Dazai’s breath does a little traitorous stutter.

And then those fingers. Calloused, unhesitating. Chuuya presses two of them against the side of Dazai’s throat, right where his pulse betrays him.

Dazai freezes. The hell—

But Chuuya’s not done. He takes Dazai’s own hand, curls it around his wrist, guides it up, and lays Dazai’s fingertips against his pulse, steady and warm beneath fragile skin.

Dazai’s chest seizes.

What the fuck is he doing.

What the fuck is happening.

He should pull away, make a joke, twist this into something crude. He should, but he doesn’t—because the moment he looks up, he’s caught.

That eye. Blue so sharp it feels like a blade pressed against his ribs. It hooks into him, drags him under without mercy. It’s not just looking at him, it’s looking through. Stripping him down, peeling apart layers he didn’t even realize he still had.

God help him—he can’t breathe.

He is probably hyperventilating. Probably. His lungs feel like paper bags collapsing on themselves, but he doesn’t dare move, not with Chuuya’s fingers pressed to his throat, not with his own hand forced against Chuuya’s pulse.

And then—oh, Christ—it syncs.           

His pulse stumbles, catches, then starts drumming in tandem with Chuuya’s. The rhythm folds over itself like two mirrors swallowing their reflections.

What the fuck is happening.

His eyes are trapped, pinned open, because the dark is faint enough to let him see every blue fleck in Chuuya’s iris, and it’s—no, he’s not exaggerating—it looks like stars. Actual stars. Pinpricks of cold fire drowning him whole.

And then it happens. Not in the room, not in his body, but in his head.
 A voice. A ripple.

"Who are you? Which universe do you belong to?"

Dazai doesn’t answer in words. He answers in the twitch of his own skull: what the fuck, what the fuck, what the fuck.

And then comes the pain.

Not neat, not poetic. It rips him open like glass dragged through nerves. His skull, his ribs, his chest, his heart—every part of him spasms at once, and it’s so unbearable he actually makes a sound. Half-snarl, half-choked cry—except Chuuya is faster. His palm clamps over Dazai’s mouth, muffling him like a priest stifling a confession.

And then—just as suddenly as it came—it’s gone.

The synched heartbeats dissolve. The stars drain from Chuuya’s eyes. Dazai’s brain goes white and blank, gutted clean of thought.

Empty.

A void.

Like a machine rebooting after a blackout, his eyelids twitch, then lift.

Oh.

Right.

He remembers now.

All this talk of corpses, of the wandering, of ghosts stitched where they shouldn’t be—

Right.

He’s dead. 

Or at least, he was. Here he is, crammed into someone else’s body, a parasite playing human.

Chuuya’s fingers twist in his collar, jerking him forward until their foreheads almost touch. There’s no warmth in the grip, only fury; nothing new, nothing old.

“Where did you come from?” Chuuya’s voice isn’t a whisper this time. 

Dazai just blinks, as if confused by the question, as if none of the last sixty seconds happened at all. His lips curl slow, because he is an absolute asshole.

“Mm. That’s a little personal, don’t you think?” He tilts his head, smile widening. “Most people at least buy me dinner before asking what dimension I crawled out of.”

A beat. He chuckles.

“Where did you come from, Chibi? Or did the universe just get so bored it spat you out to nag me for eternity?”

Chuuya’s jaw ticks, teeth grinding audibly. “I knew it. From the start—something was off with you.”

Dazai tilts his head, much languid for someone with his collar still clenched in another man’s fist. His glasses catch the faint edge of morning light. “Oh? And what gave me away, hm? My devastating good looks? My charming social skills?” He leans in. “Or was it your ability whispering little secrets to you?”

The way Chuuya stiffens is answer enough.

“Not that it matters,” Dazai drawls, “because I’d just love to know—what ability do you have, Chuuya?”

“None of your damn business. What matters now is that you tell me where you came from, so I can—”

“So you can what? Replace me with the real Osamu? Trade in your defective model for the one you keep fucking up every goddamn time?”

Chuuya falters, grip loosening by a fraction, his lips parting but no sound coming.

Dazai watches the hesitation with predatory curiosity, smile thinning into something more dangerous than amusement. He tilts his head, like a cat watching a mouse twitch. “What did you do, Chuuya?”

Chuuya’s glare sharpens, but he draws a deep breath through his nose before answering.

“I made you conscious. The real Osamu’s still in there—tangled up with your soul because you barged into a body that wasn’t yours to begin with.”

Dazai laughs. A low, humorless ripple. “Oh? And?"

“All the red flags were there. From the moment you couldn’t remember—”

“—When you used to fuck him and then roll over, tell him you were straight? Real slick, Chuuya.”

“It wasn’t like that.”

“Mhm...right. What else?”

Chuuya steadies his breathing. “We tend to keep certain memories close to the heart. Only the soul has access to those. When another one moves in—when it tries to wear a body that isn’t its own—those memories disappear. And what’s left starts bleeding together. You might have his face, his voice, even the same fucked-up little smirk, but that was the first red flag.”

For once, Dazai doesn’t interrupt. He studies Chuuya in silence, his grin fading at the edges into something more difficult to decipher.

“That saying about eyes being the window to the soul? Ridiculous cliché. But it’s true. You don’t have the same eyes as my Osamu.” 

Dazai’s mouth twitches into a scoff. “Your Osamu?” He leans closer, crowding into Chuuya’s space until their foreheads nearly touch, the grin spreading like oil on water. “Cute. Possessive. But fine—let’s play pretend. Yes, I stole this body. Yes, I don’t have access to all those warm little memories of whatever you two got up to under the sheets.” His voice drops, honeyed and vile. “But instincts, Chuuya… I’ve got very good instincts. And mine tell me you and him were nothing more than a toxic little secret you both kept choking on.”

Chuuya seethes—actually seethes—and his fingers twitch before he finally, begrudgingly, unclenches his hold on Dazai’s collar.

Dazai brushes a nonexistent speck of lint from his shoulder, then adjusts his glasses with the sort of self-importance that makes it unclear if he actually needs them or if he just enjoys the gesture. By now, the sky is bleeding pale gold, the sun dragging itself lazily above the trees. The crowd is beginning to shuffle, the activity wrapping itself up in neat, meaningless bows.

Chuuya exhales through his nose sharply. “You can’t stay in that body for too long. Or else it’ll be—permanent.”

“Permanent? Oh, Chuuya, you make it sound like a prison sentence. Truth is—I wouldn’t mind. Torturing another version of you for years? That’s practically a vacation. I’ve done it before, after all. My Chuuya…” He tilts his head. “…is my dog.”

Chuuya stiffens, and his mismatched eyes are practically knives he’s restraining from throwing. “We’ll talk about this later.”

And just like that, as if nothing unholy had passed between them, they rejoin the crowd. Two bodies blending back into the mass of half-awake teenagers staring at the sunrise, their little great war beginning, unveiled, beneath the hush of morning.

___

The mirror doesn’t lie, but it doesn’t tell the truth either.

Dazai stares at it, at him—this Osamu boy he’s parasitizing like a tick—and it feels like watching a stranger rehearse his expressions with a clumsy script. The head tilt, the half-smirk, they all appear, but the rhythm is wrong.

For one, he doesn’t wear glasses. Never needed them. Yet here they are, clinging to his face like an afterthought, as if someone decided he should squint harder at the world. And the clothes—buttoned, adolescent, neat—an aesthetic prison. He was born to stain sleeves with gunpowder and wine, not drown in detergent-scented long sleeves some idiot mother probably folded with care.

And the body—teenage, unfinished. Scars that whisper instead of scream. A frame that slouches but doesn’t mean it. A ribcage that pounds with a pulse not his own. Cruelest contrast of all is that he’s conscious. Every breath is a reminder that he doesn’t belong here. He’s renting. Squatting. A trespasser in flesh.

Still, he can’t help but admit; the face staring back is pleasant. Angelic, if he tilts toward the light. Shame it’s his. Shame it isn’t.

Almost innocent, this reflection. Nothing like him. Nothing like the real Dazai.

The door bursts open before he can decide whether to sneer or spit at it, and Chuuya steps in—locks the door behind him like they’re plotting treason.

Ah. This version of Chuuya. Twenty-one. Not even the kind of age gap worth writing home about—he’s twenty-two, technically, though age has never mattered between them in any universe. It’s the soul that stinks of fire.

For clarity’s sake, he sorts it in his head: Osamu is the child whose flesh he’s infesting, and Dazai—himself—is the parasite making better use of it. Much cleaner than having to untangle which name belongs where.

“Well, well. Locking the bathroom door with me already? Chuuya, darling, if you wanted me bent over the sink, you could’ve just said so.”

Predictable as sunrise, Chuuya’s fist twitches. He looks about two seconds away from knocking Dazai’s skull against the mirror until it shatters.

“My ability only works in the dark.” he says instead.

Dazai tilts his head, glasses sliding just enough to make him look like he’s considering whether to laugh or purr. Of course, he takes it as blood in the water. “Oh, how poetic. You, afraid of the dark, yet only useful inside it. What’s next—gonna tell me you sleep with a night-light? Don’t worry, Chuuya, I won’t kink-shame.”

“Shut up. Suck it up and sit down.”

He does, folding onto the cold tiles with an exaggerated sigh, legs sprawled. Chuuya drops to the floor opposite, cross-legged, like a monk preparing for exorcism. His shoulders are stiff, though, and when he breathes, it’s the sound of someone exhausted of explaining himself.

“My ability,” he says finally, “is a bunch of recycled tropes. Seeing ghosts. Talking to the dead. All that cheap horror flick shit.” He runs a hand through his hair, grimacing. “But here’s the part that matters: I can see ghosts that don’t belong. The ones that slip through universes and crawl inside bodies that aren’t theirs. And if I’ve got a clear visual of their home universe—if they let me—I can send them back.”

Dazai hums. “Fascinating. Because in my universe, you wield gravity. And not the kind they teach in dull little physics classes. No—something feral. The kind of power that makes gods look like playthings.” His voice dips, almost lustful. “I’ve seen you collapse cities into marbles. I’ve seen you tear yourself apart in a fit they called Corruption—burning bright, beautiful, untouchable. A star eating itself alive.”

Chuuya scowls, cutting him short before the admiration can rot into indulgence. “What’s your name?”

“You already know.”

“Not the name you’re wearing. Your real one.”

Dazai leans back against the tiled wall, mouth curved lazily. “It’s still the same. Osamu Dazai.”

Chuuya studies him like he’s waiting for the trick, but when none comes, he just nods slowly. “Fine. How old are you?”

“Twenty-two.”

Chuuya raises a brow. “You look younger in that body.”

“Ah, but don’t I wear it well?”

“Not the point. You got a job?”

“The Agency. I left the Port Mafia at nineteen. You can imagine how much they miss me.”

Chuuya’s expression doesn’t shift, but his silence carries the weight of someone measuring every word for lies.

“And what do you do there?”

“Investigate. Meddle. Keep the world from burning down while still trying to find excuses to die in the middle of it.” 

Chuuya narrows his eyes, staring at him for a long moment. “You’re answering too honestly.”

Dazai shrugs, spreading his palms as if to say what else can I do? “Well, you did ask. And you wouldn’t believe me if I lied.”

Chuuya sighs, dragging his palm down his face. “Okay, okay… fine. What’s your ability, then? Anything special? Or are you just a freeloader in both worlds?”

Dazai spreads his hands, mock-offended. “Still the same old No Longer Human. Touch me and your ability goes poof.”

Chuuya nods, filing it away, but he doesn’t stop. He keeps asking technical questions, which city does he live in, does he have siblings, blah blah blah. Dazai makes sure to cooperate, since all of this is boring and he'd like for it to end quickly.

“What’s the state of your universe? Wars? Terrorism? Oppression? Anything like that?”

Dazai pauses. He tilts his head back against the bathroom tiles, pretending to think, lips curving like he enjoys dragging this out. “Well… funny you should ask. Right now, we’re knee-deep in a crisis. People’s abilities are going berserk, turning against them. Whole cities choking on ability users losing control. It’s… theatrical.”

His tone makes it sound like he’s narrating a play rather than describing disaster.

Chuuya stiffens. “So your world’s on fire.”

Dazai smiles faintly. “More like… drowning in smoke.”

“Then tell me this—how did you die?”

Dazai opens his mouth, ready to lace the answer with wit, but nothing comes. A sudden, absolute blank. No memory, no image, not even a shadow of the event. 

A void.

He blinks once, twice, and finally admits it. “I… don’t know.”

Chuuya studies him, then nods like that alone tells him everything. “That’s fine. I’ve got a pretty clear picture now.” He draws in a steadying breath, exhales, and reaches over to flick off the bathroom light.

Darkness swallows them whole.

Dazai’s mind, predictably, plummets into the gutter. Two men, locked in a bathroom, pressed close in the dark. He can’t help it. 

A strange shift curls in Dazai’s gut. Maybe the idiot really is about to send him back. He hadn’t planned on falling into this place anyway.

Chuuya’s hand lifts slowly, fingertips brushing against the pulse at Dazai’s throat. The touch burns. Dazai, reflexive and reckless, mirrors the motion—pressing his own fingers to Chuuya’s pulse in turn.

For a moment, there is nothing but the synch of their lives. Breath, heartbeats caught in some obscene, involuntary harmony. And Dazai—God, Dazai could drown in this. It feels too good, indecently good, the kind of good that could birth an addiction if he let it.

He drags his gaze up, meets the impossible blue of Chuuya’s eye, and it’s like falling. Galaxies unfurl inside that iris, devouring him whole, and he doesn’t resist. Why would he? Oblivion never looked so exquisite.

Chuuya’s palm presses firmer against his throat, and Dazai nearly groans. The dark is absolute, but the sensation—oh, the sensation is sharp enough to etch itself into bone.

Chuuya is working. Concentrating. He treats it like some exorcism, steady and ritualistic, but Dazai? He is desecrating it in his mind. He can’t stop. He won’t. Nothing has ever been lovelier than this. The brush of Chuuya’s pulse under his own fingers, the rhythm of their hearts tangling like a knot that neither of them can cut free from, the electric promise of death inching closer with every breath.

Death is supposed to be cold. Dazai finds it incandescent. Erotic. If he dies like this, with Chuuya’s heartbeat pressed into him, it might as well be the perfect climax.

Then the flashes start.

At first, fractured sparks behind his eyelids. But then sharper, images ripping across his mind, undeniable. And he knows, somehow, instinctively, that Chuuya is seeing them too. Their breaths stutter in tandem as the visions pour in.

Chuuya, his Chuuya, incandescent and monstrous, swallowed by Corruption, body unraveling into raw, divine gravity. His wrist caught in Dazai’s grip, the only tether between godhood and ruin. Gunshots splitting the Port Mafia’s nights. Blood spattering concrete, his hands, Chuuya’s hands. That first meeting—Chuuya younger, feral, still King of the Sheep, foot pressed harshly to his chest, spitting venom even as Dazai smiled back like he’d just discovered religion.

And then the reel begins to warp.

Faces twist, places collapse, memories bend into grotesque parodies of themselves. The Port Mafia’s hallways buckle into infinite corridors. Blood spills upward instead of down. The Sheep are faceless, eyeless, mouths yawning wide in silent screams. Corruption swells until it fills the universe—until Dazai’s body, his mind, his soul is nothing but the act of holding onto Chuuya’s wrist.

The tether stretches. Frays. Splits.

And then he doesn’t see his life anymore.

He sees Osamu’s.

His head bent, shoved under, breath clawing against water until lungs shriek. A hand holds him there, patient, merciless. The sting of disinfectant, the sting of absence—years and years inside a white room that isn’t white at all but coffin-bright, designed to peel away sanity one hour at a time. Bandages knotting around a body carved open again and again, as if the skin itself were an enemy that must be punished into obedience.

And there.

Fyodor. Like a rot blooming beneath the walls. A lover in name only, predator in truth, the grin of someone who calls torment an embrace. His shadow leeches into the memory like ink.

And then, finally, Chuuya.

But not cleanly. Not fully. Every time the image tries to settle, it glitches. His face fractals, distorts, pixelates like a corrupted file. Blue eyes flashing then splitting into void, his voice there and not-there, his outline slipping away just as Dazai reaches for it.

Suddenly Dazai can’t breathe. At all.

The pulses that tether them both detonate, erratic and violent. Chuuya grunts, hand spasming against Dazai’s throat, breaking contact because the feedback is too much. Dazai wrenches away too, coughing, gasping, clawing at air like it betrayed him.

And just like that, it stops.

The bathroom is itself again. The dark is only dark. Their bodies remain their own.

Normalcy.

As far as it can go.

Except for the sound. Heavy. Vicious. Two people dragged out of drowning, breaths ragged, syncing out of desperation rather than design.

Chuuya presses his palm against the tile like he needs the wall to remind him what’s real. Dazai leans back, chest heaving, and for the first time in a long time, he isn’t sure if what just happened was exorcism or violation—or if there’s even a difference.

Chuuya rasps, “What the hell—did you do something?”

Dazai huffs, breath sawing out of his chest, shoulders trembling with the aftershock. “Tch. Don’t pin every little catastrophe on me. I wasn’t the one twitching like a short-circuited light bulb.”

Chuuya glares, though it’s more exhaustion than rage, eyes still blown wide from whatever the hell that was. “Was your damn nullification on or not?”

“No. I don’t think so. And believe me, I’d know if I was playing the off-switch. This—” his breath snags, the smirk breaking on an exhale—“this was something else.”

Silence, thick, punctured only by their harsh breathing. The space feels too full, like the bathroom walls have started listening in.

Then three sharp raps against the door.

“Dazai-san?”

Shit.

Akutagawa.

Both their eyes fly wide, like schoolboys caught in a crime.

The boy clears his throat. “We’ve been looking for you. Breakfast was—” he glances at his watch—“over thirty minutes ago.”

Chuuya glances at his watch, frowning, but says nothing.

“Ah…well, you know me, Aku. Time is just a series of irrelevant numbers, really.”

“Is there someone with you? I can hear—”

Chuuya waves both hands violently, eyes wide, no, no, no!

Dazai smirks. That insufferable, all-knowing smirk. Slowly, deliberately, he reaches for the light switch.

Chuuya hisses, stepping up behind him. “If you dare open that door, Dazai—”

Too late. Dazai opens the door.

And then, Akutagawa, in the moment of recognition—or maybe disbelief—settles over. Because standing there, with that smug grin and that impossible casualness, is not the Dazai he remembers.

Chuuya stays perfectly still behind him.

Dazai leans slightly forward. “Good morning, Ryunosuke. Surprised to see me?”

Akutagawa says nothing. At first. Then he goes ahead and throws the grenade. “I will make sure everyone entering this bathroom heeds warning. It appears…activities of a sexual nature occurred here.”

Chuuya’s head snaps up. “WE DID NOT FUCK!” The sheer volume rattles the faucets.

The yelling stops—not because it’s quieted, but because another voice cuts in, hesitant, incredulous. “Who…who fucked?”

Dazai’s pulse nearly stops. Atsushi. His wide eyes, a pink flush rising like sunrise. And then, inevitably, other voices join in—people who know them, people who don’t, but now all suspect.

Chuuya’s hand clamps onto Dazai’s wrist like a vice. Without another word, he drags him, practically sprinting through the dorm corridors.

Once safely inside, Chuuya spins on him, and for once, Dazai remembers why he fears him sometimes, “If you say a word of this to anyone I will break your legs.”

“Oh, Chuuya…please. I’d love to see you try. But do be gentle—don’t want to damage these beautiful legs of yours.”

He stiffens and with a swift motion, he hurls a pillow at Dazai’s head.

He ducks—barely.

Chapter Text

Well, well, well. 

Here they are.

On the floor. 

Dazai has imagined their bonding time as more thrilling, perhaps a bit of bloodshed, explosions here and there but he'll take this any day. 

Chuuya sits cross-legged on the floor, pinching the bridge of his nose like the weight of the universe is pressing there and only there. Eyes shut, he looks less like a twenty-one-year-old and more like some ancient general trying very hard not to declare war on the idiot across from him.

Dazai mirrors him, cross-legged too, except he isn’t brooding. He’s staring, openly, like Chuuya’s frustration is the most fascinating television program he’s ever had the pleasure of binge-watching. After the pillow ambush, his only retaliation is to adjust the glasses perched on his nose, like he’s the picture of scholarly composure. The smirk ruins it, of course.

Chuuya breathes in, breathes out, mutters through clenched teeth, “What now?”

Dazai rolls one shoulder infuriatingly. “Now? Oh, I don’t know. A nap? A public execution? Surprise me.”

“Shut up.” Chuuya’s voice is sharp, but tired. “Listen. My power—it’s not as simple as you seem to think. I can’t just hop dimensions for fun. I need a soul to guide me. A dead one, specifically. And even then…” He opens his eyes finally, blue and brown flickering in the dim dorm light. “Something wasn’t supposed to happen. What we just did? That—” he jerks his chin in Dazai’s direction “—should’ve taken us straight into the universe I was visualizing. It didn’t. We hit a wall. Something’s blocking it.”

Dazai tilts his head, pretending interest, though his grin makes it clear he’s entertained more than concerned. “So all that heavy breathing and throbbing pulses and—oh, what’s the word—intimacy wasn’t even productive?”

Chuuya’s palm drags down his face. “That wasn’t for fun. We have to sync our heartbeats so your soul doesn’t tear away from the body. Without that, you’d—”

“Explode? Implode? Become deliciously unrecognizable?”

“Die, dumbass.”

Dazai hums like it’s a compliment. Then his gaze narrows. “So what—syncing heartbeats is also why your eyes do that mismatched glow thing? Heterochromia, supernatural chic?”

Chuuya groans, head tipping back like he’s bargaining with the ceiling to strike Dazai down. “Do you have any idea how many times I’ve been asked that question? By classmates, by strangers, by nosy bastards who think it’s cute to stare? I’m sick of it. No, my eye color didn’t come from some tragic anime backstory. It’s because when you deal with the dead, you get stained by them. One eye for me. One eye for the other side. Happy now?”

“So you’re telling me you’re basically half-ghost? Kinda hot, Chuuya.”

“I swear, Dazai, if you don’t shut up—”

“—what, you’ll throw another pillow? Please. At least make it interesting this time.”

Chuuya exhales like he’s emptying a kettle. “I’m basically a failed NASA experiment,” he snaps, half-joking, half-not. “Supposed to be blue, but surprise—surprise—botched pigment. Two-tone eyes, two-tone life. Cute, huh?” He rubs at his temple, the motion a small surrender.

Dazai studies him as if every twitch is a syllable in a language he’s just learned to read. “A failed orbital satellite of emotionally unavailable men. Charming.” He hums, then leans in with actual interest. “Do you know your ability’s full potential? Like… level up, unlock new moves, go God-mode?”

Chuuya’s laugh is bitter. “Not really.” He sits up straighter. “Rimbaud ran the study on me. He—he’s the one who designs the damn tests. Verlaine got thrown into the same project. When things went sideways for Verlaine, they moved the protocol to me. Ane-san was Rimbaud’s intern; practically his daughter. She handled the paperwork, the ethics forms, the smiles when the families insisted everything was ‘for the greater good.’”

Dazai taps his fingers, pretending to doodle questions in the air. “So Rimbaud’s lab coat wrote you into existence then abandoned you in the footnotes. Nice.” 

He folds his arms, eyes never leaving Chuuya’s face. “And the studies—are they written down? Filed? Any juicy footnotes about ‘unexpected cross-universe bleed-through’ or ‘soul incompatibility’?”

“Probably. If Rimbaud wanted it on paper, it’s there. In his charts, in his reports. Maybe in Verlaine’s files, maybe in Kouyou’s. I don’t know details—just what the trials felt like. You don’t forget being dragged through corridors and told you’re a specimen.” He looks away for a fraction of a second, then back, steady enough. “I know I can see the dead that slipped between worlds, and I can make a path back if I get a clear visual of their origin and they cooperate. That’s the gist. The rest is Rimbaud’s property.”

The grin thins; curiosity sharpens into something colder. “So you’ve been lab-tested, probed, and scheduled for inconvenient revelations. And the one who keeps the receipts is your father figure, who treats you like an asset. How quaint.” He breathes that in for a moment. “And us? We just… collided into each other like two drunk metaphors.”

Chuuya’s jaw tightens. “It wasn’t supposed to happen like this. There was protocol—pairings, safety margins, contingency plans. None of that accounted for a soul who wandered in without registration.” He rubs his forearm absently. “Something’s blocking the corridor. Either the ghost is unwilling, or the crossing point is corrupted. Or—” he pauses—“someone or something else planted a lock.”

“So either a ghost is playing coy, or someone’s got a taste for cosmic security systems. Either way, boring for them, delicious for us.”

Chuuya gives him a stare that’s half threaten, half plead. “This isn’t a game, Dazai. If you’re going to be in Osamu’s skin, you need to understand the rules. You can’t go arsing about with other people’s bones and expect to come out unscathed.”

Dazai’s smile returns—wilder, more private. “Rules are suggestions in my universe. But fine. I’ll read the handbook. If you’ll let me.” He pauses, then, softer, “Who files Rimbaud’s reports, by the way? Where do the notes live? I like libraries.”

“Somewhere in Rimbaud’s office. Some in the camp’s archives. A lot of it’s locked. You’ll need permission to see most of it.” He looks at Dazai, measuring. “You actually want to know?”

“Information is a kind of intimacy. Yes. I want to know. And if someone’s been poking at you—testing you like a mechanical toy—I intend to read the manual and then break the manufacturer’s warranty.”

Chuuya rubs his temples like he’s trying to massage away the very existence of Dazai, muttering something about “soul mergers and migraines.” 

“Until I can figure something out, you just act as always. No one’s gonna suspect shit. Technically, your souls are merged; meaning you’ve got Osamu’s personality, his beliefs, his memories—except the private ones.” He almost spits the word. “So unless you decide to be a colossal asshole and announce it to everyone, nobody will notice.”

Dazai’s lips curl into that infamous smile that’s gotten him out of murder charges and into trouble more times than Chuuya cares to count. “Now, why would I ever do that?”

The quiet hum of satisfaction in his tone makes Chuuya’s hackles rise. He’s about two seconds from launching the nearest lamp at his head when Dazai leans forward, eyes glinting.

“Instead,” Dazai drawls, “why don’t we sneak into the office later? When everyone’s busy. No one would see us.”

“Are you insane? We can’t just skip the activities. Someone will notice.”

“Correction, they’ll only notice if we’re sloppy. And I, my dear Chuuya, am never sloppy.”

Chuuya snorts so hard it sounds like the beginning of a laugh—except it’s not. He looks two breaths away from throttling him.

“Whatever.” he pushes to his feet, his movements clipped, decisive. “Just behave. Don’t step outta line. If someone brings up a memory you don’t remember, you play along. Got it?”

Dazai rises too, lazy in contrast, like the world itself should adjust to his pace. They leave the dormitories side by side.

“So. When you do that little ritual of yours…you see my memories. Both Osamu’s—and mine.”

Chuuya hums, curt, a tacit yes.

Dazai’s grin widens. “Then why not make it easier? Give me all of Osamu’s memories. Save us both the headache. No masquerade, no risk of me tripping over the wrong inside joke. Just hand them over, and I’ll play the role so well you’ll forget I was ever me.”

“It’s not your damn business, Dazai. You don’t get to pick through what’s not yours. And don’t flatter yourself—if you had any more of Osamu in you, the chances of me letting you walk away would drop to zero.”

As they walk, Dazai folds Chuuya’s refusal into his thoughts, rolling it across his tongue like a bitter lozenge. Why not hand over Osamu’s memories? Efficiency demands it. He could slip into the skin of the alive without seams showing, no risk of error, no one any wiser. Yet Chuuya clings, guards them like contraband.

Possibility one: he doesn’t trust Dazai not to mutilate the memories, to warp them into something unrecognizable. Fair. Dazai’s never met a truth he didn’t want to gut open.

Possibility two: the memories aren’t complete themselves. Maybe riddled with gaps, maybe dangerous to touch. A defective archive, good for nothing but haunting.

Possibility three—and the most interesting—Chuuya isn’t protecting Osamu’s memories at all, but his own. Because buried in the boy’s life are strands of Chuuya’s, tangled, intimate, unseverable. And those, he’d rather slit Dazai’s throat than hand over.

Still. It leaves Dazai pacing through the silence of his own ignorance, staring at a door in his mind that won’t open. Why is he dead? Why this body, this masquerade, this binding? And what, exactly, is Chuuya’s ability—this strange, stitched-together NASA experiment—meant to achieve? Abilities aren’t common here, so why force one on him? It reeks of desperation, of someone trying to force a hole in the universe where there wasn’t one.

The villa looms ahead, voices spilling from it like warm smoke. He smothers his grin, adjusts his composure. The masquerade resumes.

They step inside, head toward their table—

And the chatter dies. All at once.

Dazai halts mid-step, blinking at the sudden hush. Oh. Of course. The rumor. That he and Chuuya had defiled a bathroom in the most carnally obvious way. His lips twitch.

Ah, right. Apparently, we fucked.

He catches it the moment they cross the threshold; Chuuya’s ears, flushed crimson. The rest of his face is carved into composure. To anyone else, he looks composed, ready to sit through another dreary activity. To Dazai? He looks like a lit fuse pretending it’s just a candle.

They weave between tables. The silence follows them like a tide pulled by their gravity. Dazai fights the urge to whistle innocently, because oh, Chuuya, your poker face is cracking, and I haven’t even done anything yet.

They reach their seats. Hirotsu looks up, and greets them with a cordial nod. “Nakahara. Dazai.” His tone is neutral, but the faint twitch at the corner of his mouth betrays it. he’s heard. Everyone has.

Chuuya sits down with a clatter that’s a little too loud for a chair on wood. Dazai glides in beside him like he’s descending into velvet. He steeples his fingers, leans forward, and flashes Hirotsu a smile so bright it ought to have a dental plan attached.

“Good morning, Hirotsu-san. Apologies for our tardiness. We were… occupied.”

Chuuya jerks like someone’s just shoved an electric current through him. His eyes snap to Dazai, blue-and-brown wide with horror, lips parting as if to bark denial. But if he does, he’ll only confirm suspicion. Dazai savors the silence Chuuya chooses instead, every second of it another nail in his coffin.

Hirotsu only adjusts his glasses. “Occupied.”

“Yes.” Dazai leans back, languid. “It’s difficult, you see, to rush something that demands… endurance.”

Chuuya hisses through his teeth, low enough that only Dazai can hear, “I’ll drown you in the goddamn lake.”

“Oh? But you seemed to like water play, yesterday—”

The sharp kick under the table nearly dislocates Dazai’s shin. He winces with exaggerated drama, clutching his leg. “Ah! Passion! Even now, he can’t restrain himself.”

There’s a strangled sound from the next table over—Atushi choking on his drink. Akutagawa slaps him on the back. Someone else mutters, “Wait, so it’s true?”

Chuuya’s face is now a furnace. “We. Did. Not. Fuck.” He says it loud enough that two tables away people stop mid-bite. A spoon clatters.

“Who fucked?” Everyone turns to Sigma, then to Chuuya and Dazai.

Silence again. Every gaze lands squarely on their table. Chuuya freezes, lips parted in horror, as if the words themselves have physically stabbed him. Heat explodes across his face. Opposite to Dazai who seizes the opportunity.

“Such a crude question, Sigma-kun. You should ask instead—how many times.”

Half the table inhales at once.

“Attention, everyone! It’s time for our next activity.” An alumni facilitator claps their hands for order. “You’ll each be given materials and a blank mask. You’ll paint whatever you wish on it, then later we’ll gather for group sharing—why you painted it that way, whether it reflects who you truly are, or the face you show to the world. The facilitators will be guiding you.”

A ripple of chatter moves through the room.

Dazai turns his head slowly toward Chuuya, eyebrows raised high, lips curving into a smile that says Well? Nows our chance. Perfect cover. We slip out and no one notices.

Chuuya stares at him, deadpan, face still hot from earlier, brows drawing tight. His entire expression screams one thing. Are you out of your fucking mind? No. Too risky.

Volunteers move like dutiful ants, ferrying trays of brushes, palettes, plastic cups of murky water, and pristine white masks as though this is some great artistic sacrament. Each mask lands in front of them like a challenge. Here, prove you exist. Prove you’re not just a meat puppet with a face.

Hirotsu, who seems entirely too invested in the sanctity of this exercise, clears his throat. “If any of you find the tables too cramped, you may work wherever you feel most comfortable.”

Dazai doesn’t even hesitate. He drags his chair back with a squeal and slides down to the floor, legs folding in an unbothered sprawl. A few others follow his lead, curious or simply tired of posturing at polished wood.

He ends up directly across from some girl who twirls her brush like it’s a wand. Chuuya, not about to let that stand, shuffles after him and drops onto the floor at his side, muttering something under his breath that could be translated as I swear you’re going to get me killed, but fine.

Paint and brushes arrive in a clatter of plastic cups. Dazai takes his mask in hand and instantly dips into grey paint, dragging the brush across its surface in bold strokes. He doesn’t think about what he’s doing, which is precisely why it looks intentional. Inspiration, after all, is just the art of not caring whether you’re a genius or a fraud.

As the wet lines spread across blank white, he leans toward Chuuya.

“Here’s the plan. When we’re done with this little charade,” he gestures lazily with his brush, flecks of paint dotting the floor, “one of us spills on the other. Shirt, pants, doesn’t matter. Big enough mess, small enough scandal. Then—” he twirls his brush like a conductor’s baton, “curtains down, lights out. We make our exit.”

Chuuya exhales through his nose, long-suffering, tilting his mask so he doesn’t have to look at Dazai’s smug face. “Fine. Whatever.”

Dazai’s smile sharpens. Perfect.

And he doesn’t hesitate. He paints the entire mask in flat, unyielding grey first, as if priming it for a funeral. Then he dips the brush in red, dragging it around the eyes. Not dripping—no, not that obvious—but rimmed, raw, as though the mask has stared too long at something it shouldn’t have. He takes up black next, sketching fractures branching outward from the corners of the eyes, little spiderwebs that he softens with a haze of white, as if someone tried and failed to mend the cracks. Finally, he returns to red, carving a long, upward curve across the mouth—too wide, too sharp, stretching to both cheeks. A grin, but not quite.

He sets the brush down, satisfied. “Done.”

Chuuya blinks at him like he’s just been slapped. “Already?”

Dazai smirks and leans back, mask balanced in his lap like a verdict. “Perfection doesn’t dawdle, Chibi.”

Chuuya ignores the jab, still staring at his own blank mask. Slowly, carefully, he dips into red. He paints only the left side—swirling, layering, thickening until it resembles a nebula, alive and violent, like the left half of the mask is ready to combust into stars.

Dazai doesn’t say a word. He just watches, too attentive, his gaze hovering over every stroke. His brain is loud—too loud. Thoughts crawling over themselves like vermin, chewing holes through any silence. This is what he gets for being trapped in this body; he can’t switch it off.

On the right side, Chuuya moves differently. Softer. Patient. He paints in pale, pastoral shades—pastel blue, thin streaks of white, gentle yellow, touches of green. A sunrise after the storm. A quiet meadow opposite a battlefield.

The contrast is violent, paradoxical, and it takes time. A long time. Dazai sits there the whole while, silent, unblinking, watching him paint like it’s more important than air.

Dazai shifts his gaze from Chuuya’s mask to Chuuya’s face.

Blank. Stripped bare. Not cold—worse. Detached, as if he’s painting in a trance, like each brushstroke is a transaction, not an expression. It irritates Dazai in a way he can’t explain. Funny—he’s always found Chuuya to be too much emotion, violent torrents of feeling that Dazai himself could never quite manage to taste. Yet here, now, he sees none of that. Just a body moving through color. The irony nearly makes him laugh. Chuuya paints galaxies like they mean something, and Dazai, who’s seen too much meaning in the meaningless, can’t feel a damn thing.

His mind drifts—spirals, rather—teasing him with unwanted thoughts about souls and hollow men and how Chuuya can turn a nebula into art while he can only ever sculpt emptiness.

A shadow falls across them. Hirotsu leans down, his ever-patient presence hovering like incense smoke. His eyes scan Dazai’s mask first. He tilts his head, thoughtful, like a curator considering whether to hang this grotesque in his gallery or burn it in the back.

“Well,” Hirotsu says. “Yours speaks. Dullness first, yes—the monotony of existence. But the cracks around the eyes, the rims of red… that’s not sorrow. That’s the ghost of sorrow. Tears that never fall because behind them—” He gestures faintly, elegant fingers circling the bloody smile. “—is only emptiness. A hunger that isn’t fed, a grief that isn’t even real anymore. Just the outline of one.”

Dazai’s smile is instant, easy, practiced. It doesn’t reach his eyes, of course. Those stay flat. “Oh, Hirotsu-san, you make it sound as if I’ve lived a terribly interesting life.”

Hirotsu doesn’t return the smile, but there’s a faint hum in his throat. A noncommittal acknowledgment. Then his gaze shifts.

To Chuuya.

For a moment Hirotsu simply looks. He takes in the swirling nebula of red on the left side, the pastel calm of the right. He says nothing. Chuuya, still holding his brush, looks ready to snap at him, but the silence stretches. It almost feels like reverence.

“Curious,” Hirotsu murmurs finally. “One side violent, turbulent—chaos made visible. The other… a fragile peace. Not the absence of war, but the kind that exists only because war waits outside the door. A mask cut in half, as though the painter cannot choose between destruction and serenity.”

Dazai glances sideways, watching Chuuya’s jaw tighten, lips parting like he wants to argue, deny, bite back—but Hirotsu keeps going, voice calm, dissecting.

“It reflects a paradox. A man who carries violence not as an act but as a burden, and yet… longs for stillness. The tragedy of course,” Hirotsu straightens slowly, brushing imaginary dust off his coat, “is that stillness rarely survives men like that.”

Silence. A heavy one.

Chuuya’s brush stills midair. His face doesn’t crack, but his knuckles around the handle go white.

Dazai leans back, smirking. “Ah, Hirotsu-san. Always so insightful. But you forgot one thing.”

Hirotsu lifts a brow. “And that is?”

Dazai tilts his mask, showing the bloody grin. “All masks lie.”

Hirotsu, satisfied, drifts away with that usual air of politeness-as-weapon. The moment he’s gone, Dazai leans forward on his knees, eyes still on Chuuya’s mask—but it’s not the mask he’s staring at, not really. He’s staring at the hand painting it, veins drawn sharp by concentration, wrist flexing, the kind of anatomy Dazai could map with his teeth if he were less polite.

And then—oops.

He doesn’t even know what started it. Maybe his elbow jostled the table, maybe Chuuya was too quick with the palette. Either way, something tips. A brush clatters, the water jar flips, and in one split second, a spray of paint arcs like confetti.

Red splashes across Chuuya’s shirt. Black dribbles onto Dazai’s lap.

“Oh no,” Dazai says, tone entirely flat, like the problem is less ‘stain’ and more ‘divine punishment for existing.’ He blinks down at his trousers, slick with streaks that could be mistaken for arterial spray. “Well. This is suggestive.”

Chuuya snaps his head up. “Suggestive? It’s paint, you creep.” He looks down at himself, at the blotch of red blooming across his chest, and groans. “Damn it—this was my only clean one.”

“Now we match. I’ve been shot in the crotch, you’ve been shot in the heart. Poetic, isn’t it?”

"You’re a disaster.”

“An artistic disaster,” Dazai corrects, grinning, though the corner of his mouth twitches like he’s suppressing something far less innocent. “We should… clean up. Before Hirotsu comes back and thinks we’ve turned art therapy into abstract pornography.”

“Shut up. Just—come on.”

They excuse themselves with a vague mutter of spilled paint, sorry, and slip out the side toward the dorm villa. The hallways echo with their footsteps, Chuuya muttering curses under his breath, Dazai padding along behind like a cat who knows it knocked something over and is unbearably smug about it.

The dorm door shuts, and suddenly it’s quiet. Chuuya rips his shirt over his head without a thought, exposing lean muscle still humming with leftover sunlight.

Dazai stops dead in the doorway, mouth going dry.

“Don’t stare,” Chuuya growls, tossing the ruined shirt onto the bed.

Dazai smiles too slow. “But Chuuya… I have paint in my lap. I can’t take off my pants without you thinking I’m indecent.” He spreads his hands, mock-helpless, though he’s already working at the button. “What should I do?”

Chuuya rolls his eyes so hard it’s audible. “Change, idiot. And if you make one more joke, I’ll drown you in a paint bucket.”

Dazai chuckles, stripping down anyway. The dorm feels suddenly too small, air thick with color, fabric hitting the floor. 

He pads barefoot across the dorm floor, tugging open the drawer with one hand, shirtless, streaks of paint still drying faint against his skin. He pulls out a clean shirt, something soft, neutral, nothing special. He’s about to pivot back when he feels it—eyes.

Chuuya’s.

Caught like a deer in the glare of headlights, Chuuya freezes mid-motion, still clutching his ruined shirt in a fist. His mouth parts slightly, and there’s heat crawling up his neck into his face, blooming crimson across his cheekbones.

For once, Dazai doesn’t have a line prepared.

He just stands there, shirt dangling loosely in his hand, staring back. His stomach knots—not with excitement, but something stranger, unwelcome, invasive. He has not stripped in front of anyone. Not Mori. Not a woman. Not anyone. There’s a reason: his body’s nothing to look at. No carved muscle, no sharp edges. A sleeper’s build. A boy who spent more nights collapsed in books and bottles than in gyms.

And yet here Chuuya is, staring.

Dazai clears his throat, the sound too harsh in the silence. He tries to force his mouth into shape, tries to conjure a smirk to armor himself. “Careful, Chuuya. Stare too long, and you’ll fall in love.”

He just wants those eyes off him before they pin him down further.

Chuuya blinks, startled, then snaps his gaze away like he’s been burned. He yanks his clean shirt over his head too quickly, hiding whatever expression was starting to surface.

Dazai slips into his own shirt and pants without ceremony. 

They head out, then pad up the stairwell on tiptoe, the floor groaning like an old beast beneath them. The villa outside is a humming beehive of murmurs and guided talk; the second floor is mercifully quiet. Dazai breathes it in—that delicious hush before theft—and watches Chuuya walk ahead like a man who knows where the knife drawer is kept in every kitchen he’s ever robbed.

“Usually they’re gone. Rimbaud’s…out a lot. Verlaine and Kouyou, same. Perfect window.” He doesn’t bother looking back; his feet find the hallway with measured certainty.

They come to Rimbaud’s door. A respectable slab of wood with a respectable lock. Of course it’s locked. Of course the thing with answers is behind thickets of authority and awkwardly framed diplomas.

Chuuya turns toward him. “You know how to pick a lock?” he asks, like this is an everyday necessity, like this is nothing but a Tuesday errand.

Dazai smiles the sort of dazzling, dangerous smile that has gotten people to sign bad contracts and worse confessions. “Of course.” His tone is breezy as lungfuls of smoke. “As easy as breathing. As natural as lying.”

Chuuya makes a small sound that is almost a scoff and produces a single hairpin from the crown of his head—thin, black, unpretentious, the sort of utilitarian thing he probably stole from a horror movie wardrobe department. When he shakes his hair free the red loosens at the sides, a shock of rebellious strands falling. Dazai watches the move the way a starving man watches bread rise. A drool he does not own collects at the corner of his mouth and he swallows it back like it’s contraband.

He takes the hairpin and slides it into the lock. The mechanism sighs under his touch. He’s done this a thousand times in a thousand forms; libraries where knowledge was barricaded by brass, hospital doors with moral locks, the softer, more dangerous locks of people’s histories. This one yields faster than the rest, because he is practiced at forcing things that refuse to open on polite terms.

Five seconds. Maybe less. A tiny click, a shiver of movement in the bolt, and the lock gives like a secret deciding to be spoken. Dazai withdraws the pin, and turns the knob with the air of a man entering his favorite stage.

“See? Breathing.”

Chuuya’s jaw is a line—not displeased, not approving either. He nudges the door open a fraction and slips inside. Dazai follows.

The office greets them like a mausoleum of secrets. Dust-coated bookshelves sagging with hardbound arrogance, a table scarred with the weight of bureaucratic elbows, drawers swollen with paper no one reads until it’s suddenly useful. The air itself has a tang of caffeine-stained nights and the sort of paranoia that clings to men who think files are stronger than fate.

Chuuya doesn’t waste time on reverie. He stalks toward the desk, muttering as he pulls drawers, flips folders, sorts through the scattered litter of Rimbaud’s life. “We’re looking for a binder. Files on the project. NASA logo. Confidential stamp, whatever.” He makes it sound like a scavenger hunt designed by Satan.

Dazai, with his maddening calm, drifts along the bookshelves. His fingers trail across spines; Goethe, obscure French poetry, astrophysics manuals that look like no one’s touched them since the Challenger went down. “Does this masterpiece of bureaucratic horror have a name?” he asks sweetly, tilting a volume halfway out before sliding it back again.

Chuuya shakes his head without looking up. “Don’t remember. Don’t care. If it’s NASA, it’ll scream it on the cover.” 

Minutes scrape by, filled with the sounds of rifled pages and increasingly frustrated exhales. Dazai pulls open one cabinet, only to find it stuffed with tax records and receipts so dull they practically yawn. Chuuya snaps a folder closed and shoves it aside, muttering curses under his breath about “goddamn dead ends.”

And then Dazai freezes. A flicker at the edge of his vision, the way prey registers the gleam of a predator’s eyes in the brush. He tilts his head, squints, and there it is. High in the corner of the office, a small, unblinking CCTV camera, its glass eye drinking them in with the patience of eternity.

“Oh.” He raises a finger like a professor pointing to a particularly damning clause. “Chuuya.”

Chuuya glances up. Follows the line of his finger. Sees it. His face tightens.

Dazai smiles. “Want me to break it?” 

The glare Chuuya gives him could disintegrate stone. “Do you want us caught faster?”

“Caught is such a limiting word. “I prefer noticed.”

Chuuya doesn’t dignify that with an answer. Instead, he jerks his chin toward the desk. “Computer. Check it.”

And so they migrate to the hulking desktop machine sitting on Rimbaud’s desk. It’s beige, old enough to be an antique, but alive enough to hum faintly when Chuuya presses the power. The screen blooms with a login window.

“Of course,” Dazai murmurs, leaning over Chuuya’s shoulder. “Our friend locks his secrets with digits. Isn’t that charming? Rimbaud, guardian of cosmic truths, undone by four numbers.”

“New problem.”

“Not a problem. A… puzzle. And I do love puzzles.”

He leans closer, a mock whisper, as though the machine might overhear. “Shall we guess his sins, Chuuya? Birthdays, lovers, the year he signed his soul away to Uncle Sam? The password is always the softest part of a man, wrapped in numbers.”

Chuuya exhales, pinching the bridge of his nose like he’s aged forty years in one sitting. “Fine. Go ahead. You do it.”

Which is, of course, the worst thing he could’ve said.

Dazai stretches his fingers with mock solemnity, cracking knuckles as though he’s about to perform a concerto instead of a digital burglary. He leans over the keyboard, eyes gleaming, and begins to type. 

Password habits. Rimbaud isn’t imaginative, he’s paranoid. Paranoia breeds familiarity. Birth year? Anniversary? Dead lover? Pet? Something as common as it is pathetic. Try four digits first, if not, expand. Always start basic; never assume brilliance in a man whose faith lies in binders.

Click. Enter. Denied.

Dazai hums, not discouraged. “When’s Rimbaud’s birthday?” he asks without looking up.

“November.”

Tap-tap. Denied again. Dazai grins. Not a sentimentalist, then. Or maybe he is, just in the wrong direction.

“Does he have a mistress?”

Chuuya stares at him like he’s grown two heads. “What the hell are you—how the fuck would I know that?”

“Mm, no use pretending. Men always betray themselves somewhere. Women, whiskey, or work.” Dazai shrugs, entering another string. Denied. His smile doesn’t falter. In fact, it grows. Paranoia makes men predictable. Predictability makes them mine.

Minutes stretch, but his flow never breaks, fingers dancing, mind skipping along Rimbaud’s life like stones across water. He pauses, head cocking. Then types again, slower this time.

The machine clicks. The desktop unfolds.

Chuuya blinks, leaning forward. “...You actually did it.”

“May I remind you, dear Chuuya, I was once an executive of the Port Mafia. I’ve made worse things than firewalls cry.”

“Huh.”

Together they navigate through the machine, pulling up a program that controls the CCTV. The screen divides into grainy quadrants, each one showing a different angle of the villa. Dazai wiggles his fingers theatrically over the mouse. “Shall I erase our beautiful faces from history?”

“Not yet,” Chuuya says quickly, sharp, already leaning in. He clicks through the past activity logs, his eyes narrowing as footage plays in fast-forward. Time collapses into blurs of figures entering, leaving, shadows stretching. Until—

“There.” Chuuya freezes the frame. Rimbaud, his posture taut, slipping toward the far wall. He lifts something heavy, sets it behind the gaudy plastic brilliance of a framed painting. Sleek, geometric, an optical illusion designed to make the eyes ache.

They exchange a glance. No words needed.

They cross to the painting, and up close it’s worse—squares and angles that don’t sit still, as though mocking them for trying to pin truth down. Dazai raises a hand, adjusts one tile, then another. His movements are fluid, precise, until the whole thing clicks softly like a satisfied lock.

Chuuya kneels, presses in a code at the base. There’s a muted whirr, a hiss, and the hidden panel swings open.

Inside is a single binder. Black, thick, heavy with the weight of every secret they weren’t meant to touch.

They stare at it in silence.

Dazai’s smile twitches at the corners, more grim than amused. “Huh.” His tone is too even, too light. Too easy.

Because men like Rimbaud don’t leave their gods in boxes behind paintings without laying traps around the altar.

“Don’t you think,” he murmurs, half to himself, “this feels a little like bait?”

The binder still sits there, fat and ominous, but neither of them so much as breathes on it. And then—of course, because the gods hate them both—faint footsteps approach. 

Chuuya stiffens; Dazai tilts his head. They both hear it. They both know there’s no time.

The painting is shoved back with a sharp clack, its optical hellscape locked into place just as the door handle turns. Dazai, quick as a cockroach, slides under Rimbaud’s desk—legs folding, spine twisting, graceless but fast. Chuuya doesn’t get the luxury. He’s still mid-movement when the door opens.

“Chuuya?”

Chuuya’s lips twitch into something caught between smirk and grimace. “Ane-san.”

Kouyou Ozaki, elegant as always, steps inside. The click of her heels feels like a metronome to Dazai’s heartbeat under the desk. He holds his breath.

Silence. Thick, awkward. The kind of silence where you can hear people thinking.

“What are you doing here?”

Chuuya scratches the back of his neck, smile crooked, too casual. “Uh. Just looking for my… tablet. Dad confiscated it.”

A hum, low, skeptical. Kouyou drifts further in, skirts brushing as she moves. “For a good reason, presumably?”

Chuuya shrugs, wide-shouldered, pretending like it doesn’t matter. “Yeah, probably.”

“And you?” he shoots back quickly, voice too brisk, “what’re you doing here?”

“Files,” she answers simply, pulling open a drawer. “Your father asked for them.”

Dazai, under the desk, is listening like his life depends on it. Which it does. He lets his eyes wander, because anything’s better than staring at Chuuya’s legs above him. Then he notices it. Wires. Thin black cords tangled like veins beneath the desk. Oh, how convenient.

He shifts slightly, preparing to signal Chuuya—wrap it up, cut the chit-chat, time’s running—when his foot snags one. The cord jerks, taut.

Scrape.

The noise is small but distinct, like something dragging across the floor.

Dazai freezes. Chuuya’s head snaps, eyes widening—then he laughs. Too loudly. Way, way too loudly.

“Hah! …Sorry. Uh. I just remembered something.” He rubs the back of his neck again, fingers twitching against the skin. “Tablet case—kinda scratched the floor the other day. Guess I left the mark.”

The laugh dies awkwardly in his throat.

Kouyou narrows her eyes. “...Is that so?”

“Heh. Yeah.” It’s not a laugh anymore, it’s some desperate noise clawing its way out of his mouth. He’s leaning into the performance like it’ll save him, shoulders stiff, grin half-deranged.

Under the desk, Dazai has both hands pressed over his mouth, shoulders shaking—not with fear, but with the unbearable urge to laugh. Because Chuuya’s flailing, Chuuya’s sweating, and Dazai’s one wrong exhale away from betraying them both.

“Chuuya… do you have someone with you?”

Oh, this is delicious. Absolutely delicious. He can hear the mortification dripping off Chuuya’s silence—the widening eyes, the instant flush creeping up his neck. Poor boy’s practically screaming his guilt without saying a word. 

It’s perfect.

He scans the floor, eyes darting quick and hungry. There has to be a prop. A trick. Something to shove this scene into theater before Kouyou’s sharp eyes strip Chuuya bare. His fingers close around a small cylinder—ah, lipstick, abandoned like a gift from fate itself. He grins. Right timing.

Hair theory. He believes in it the way priests believe in god. A tweak here, a pin there, and you can summon whole illusions. He plucks the hairpin Chuuya gave him earlier—so sweet, the irony—and slides it into his own hair, pulling back the messy strands into something suspiciously neat, suspiciously feminine. His bangs fall just right, veiling half his face. If Kouyou catches only a glimpse, that’s all she’ll need to buy the lie.

He tucks his shirt in swiftly, fabric cinching tight to highlight his waist, and hikes his slacks higher, exaggerated just enough to elongate his figure. Slim hips, narrow waistline—he angles his body so even in the shadows, his silhouette whispers girlish.

The lipstick cap clicks. He smears it on with rough, practiced confidence; a sweep across the mouth, a dab high on his cheekbones, a careless streak across his eyelids. It looks smudged, rushed—exactly the sort of mess a flustered girl would make sneaking around with a boy in his father’s office.

Footsteps. He hears her approach. He barely has time to admire his masterpiece before he tilts his head toward the desk’s edge, bumps it with a soft thunk, and lets a very pretty, slightly higher-pitched “Ow…” slip from his mouth. 

He almost laughs at the way the air shifts. He can feel Kouyou’s suspicion sharpening, but redirected, bent toward a conclusion he’s spoon-feeding her. He can practically hear her mind slotting pieces together; the silence, the blush, the lipstick smell—ah, of course, Chuuya brought someone.

Praise be to femininity. 

He straightens. Slowly. Like a thief caught in a lantern beam. Shoulders tilted inward, chin ducked down, lashes fluttering just enough to feign embarrassment. His body language melts into something soft, hesitant. It’s instinct, muscle memory from all the personas he’s ever worn—but here, oh, here it’s theater.

And then he looks up. Meets Kouyou’s eyes. He lets a small, uncertain smile slip, a faint curve of lips that doesn’t belong to Dazai Osamu, strategist, prodigy, weapon. No—it belongs to some poor girl who definitely shouldn’t be here but couldn’t resist her boyfriend’s invitation. A blush tinges his cheeks (thank you, lipstick smear), and Kouyou’s eyes actually flicker. Just a fraction. Surprise, then interest. The corner of her mouth tightens like she’s swallowing something unsaid.

Her throat clears sharply. She pivots on Chuuya with the kind of authority that makes even Dazai want to sit up straighter. “Chuuya. You didn’t think to introduce us? You bring your… girlfriend into your father’s office, and say nothing?”

Girlfriend. Dazai’s heart nearly bursts with laughter. Girlfriend! Oh, he’ll be replaying this for months.

Chuuya looks panicked, like a cornered animal weighing which limb to gnaw off first. His eyes cut sideways, screaming play along, and Dazai beams back, utterly delighted.

“W-wait, Ane-san, I—” Chuuya starts, but Kouyou doesn’t let him breathe.

“Really, Chuuya? A pretty one at that, and you hide her like a shameful secret? Honestly. Irresponsible. Shameless.”

Every word is a scolding lash. Dazai drinks it in like wine. But then—oh, but then—Chuuya makes a move. His hand reaches out, hesitant, stiff. Fingers brush against Dazai’s. And when Chuuya actually takes his hand, Dazai feels it. 

A shock. Not metaphorical, not poetic. A literal static snap that runs through his skin, straight into his nerves. He jolts slightly. Electricity. Oh, he thinks, how fitting.

He tilts his head, lets his lips part just a little, as though flustered by the touch. Meanwhile, his mind is racing with ideas. Names, backstories, whole invented worlds. He could spin this until dawn.

“I… I’m sorry, Ane-san,” Chuuya mutters.

Dazai pitches his voice soft, shy, feminine. “It’s really my fault. I—I didn’t mean to cause trouble.” He bows his head slightly, hair slipping over his face, letting the lipstick on his cheeks catch the light like nervous flush.

Kouyou softens a fraction, though her glare pins Chuuya. “Still. To sneak her in like this. What is her name?”

Dazai nearly purrs. A test. How fun. He lets the silence stretch just to tighten Chuuya’s panic before he speaks, “Aya.” Sweet, short, common. Harmless enough. He even lets his tongue trip lightly on the syllable, like someone unused to formal introductions.

Kouyou nods once, still suspicious, but not dismissive. “Aya. And your family?”

Ah, background check. Of course. He lowers his lashes, fingers brushing nervously at the hem of his tucked shirt. “My father… he works with exports. We move a lot, so… it’s hard to explain.” A vague truth, pliable, unprovable.

Kouyou narrows her eyes. “Exports. And your mother?”

“Gone.” Final enough to shut down further questions, tragic enough to deflect pity. He lets his voice waver just slightly, a tremor of vulnerability.

Dazai doesn’t miss the way Kouyou glances at Chuuya then—evaluating, suspicious still, but less on him now, more on Chuuya’s judgment. Perfect.

Chuuya squeezes his hand harder, the pressure awkward, almost bruising. Do not ruin me here.

Well, well, well. Isn’t this just the sweetest leash to be holding.

“So, Aya. Where did you and my brother meet?”

Ah. The blade slips between the ribs.

Dazai keeps his smile small, his posture folded inward, but his mind is already spinning at two hundred miles per hour. He hears Chuuya suck in a breath beside him—oh, the poor thing hasn’t even realized how much he gives away by panicking. Dazai decides instantly that he’ll use that.

He tilts his head, chews at his lower lip (a little lipstick smudge, perfect touch). “We met… at school.” A pause, like he’s embarrassed. “He… helped me. With math.”

Chuuya actually chokes. The look he gives him is half-murder, half-bafflement, but Kouyou? Kouyou softens a millimeter, the corners of her mouth twitching like she’s fighting a smile. “Math?”

Dazai shrugs, lowering his lashes. “He’s very patient.”

Chuuya coughs into his fist, mutters something inaudible that sounds dangerously like, “The fuck I am.” But his ears are pink. His panic—real, raw—gives the whole lie that extra shine.

“And how long have you been together?”

Oh, now she’s poking at bones. Dazai doesn’t hesitate. “Two months.” 

Chuuya blurts at the same time. “Three weeks.”

The silence that follows is exquisite. Dazai bites the inside of his cheek to keep from laughing outright. He quickly drops his eyes to the floor, twisting the hem of his shirt nervously. “Sorry… I… I wasn’t keeping track.”

Kouyou’s gaze flicks between them, sharp but considering. And oh, she’s buying it. She’s actually buying it.

But then—oh, but then—she drops the bomb.

“Well. If this is serious…” Her voice hardens with authority. “…then Aya should have dinner with the family. Tonight.”

Chuuya stiffens like someone just jammed a rod of ice down his spine. Dazai, for once, almost loses his composure. Dinner? With the family? Verlaine, who has seen his face? Rimbaud, who would peel apart any mask of his in seconds? That’s not dinner—that’s suicide, politely plated.

He forces a laugh, light, girlish. “O-oh, that’s… that’s very kind, but I wouldn’t want to intrude—”

“Nonsense. It’s decided. Father will want to meet you.”

Father. Rimbaud. Wonderful. Absolutely wonderful.

Chuuya blurts, too quickly, “She can’t! She’s—uh—she’s busy.”

“Busy?” Kouyou arches a brow.

“Yes,” Dazai jumps in smoothly, “I… I have a shift tonight. At the café.”

“The café?” 

Chuuya grabs on desperately. “Yeah, the café. She works there. Lots of shifts. No breaks. It’s… brutal.”

He’s rambling, panicked, but the panic makes it sound real. Dazai lets his fake blush deepen, tucks a strand of hair behind his ear like he’s embarrassed to be discussed. Kouyou studies them, lips pressed thin.

“A shame,” she finally says. “Father will be disappointed. Tomorrow night, then.”

Dazai almost, almost hisses aloud. Tomorrow. Tomorrow is worse. He can feel sweat prickling at the back of his neck under the lipstick.

“I—I really can’t,” he says, forcing a breathless laugh. “My schedule’s… so full. Customers… need me.”

Kouyou tilts her head. “What’s the name of this café?”

The knife is twisting now. Chuuya is glaring at him like fix this or we die, and Dazai’s lips curve faintly. Oh, this is fun.

“Moonlight Roastery,” he says, without missing a beat. A name so bland it could exist anywhere. “It’s… on the corner.”

Chuuya coughs violently, like he’s choking on his own spit, which—deliciously—makes it sound true. Kouyou eyes him, but he glares back with forced bravado, like yeah, what of it?

The silence stretches again. Then Kouyou hums. “I’ll ask Verlaine if he knows it.”

Dazai’s heart stutters, just a fraction. Verlaine. Oh, that wolf will tear this mask to ribbons.

“I-it’s new. They… he wouldn’t know it yet.”

Kouyou studies him for a beat too long.. And for now—for now—she seems satisfied.

Ha! Dinner with the family? No. Impossible. He’ll burn this whole villa down before he sits at that table.

Still—he can’t help but savor the absurdity. Girlfriend. Aya. Chuuya holding his hand. This is, by far, the most fun he had ever since he infested this body.

Kouyou snaps the folder shut, tucks it under her arm. She glances between them one last time, her eyes glinting, the corner of her mouth tilted into a smile that is not kind.

“Careful where you take her, Chuuya. Girls who fall for boys like you… well, they tend not to last long.”

IA sibling’s threat. But dressed in innuendo so sharp that both of them choke. Chuuya hacks into his fist, face flaming, while Dazai lets out the world’s least convincing cough, his voice pitching absurdly high in panic.

Kouyou smirks, satisfied, and strides out the door with her prize. The silence she leaves behind is so heavy it lasts all of three seconds—before it collapses under the sheer ridiculousness of it all.

Dazai folds over himself, wheezing, clutching his stomach. “Oh—oh god—did she just—she did—” He’s laughing so hard he’s crying, actually crying, tugging his glasses off to wipe at his eyes with the back of his hand. His voice breaks on every other syllable. “Chuuya, she thinks—you brought me in here to—pff—” He can’t even finish.

Chuuya’s grin is wide, helpless, laughter tearing out of his chest. “Holy shit,” he gasps, shaking his head. “I can’t believe we—” He’s laughing too hard to breathe, doubling over beside him. “I seriously didn’t think we’d pull that off—”

They’re a mess. Both of them, sprawled in an office they shouldn’t be in, cackling like children who just got away with a murder. The air is light, stupid, their stomachs aching, their throats raw.

“Ah, stop—” Dazai wheezes, fumbling his glasses back on, his cheeks aching from the grin still plastered across his face. “My—face—hurts—”

And then, without thinking, Chuuya reaches over. “Here,” he mutters, almost absent-minded, adjusting the frames for him, nudging them so they sit straighter on his nose. His thumb lingers, though. Just for a second too long. 

“You’ve got—” Chuuya’s voice dips, instinctive, his thumb brushing over the faint streak of lipstick at the corner of Dazai’s mouth. He wipes it away—gentle, almost tender—without thinking.

The laughter cuts out like a guillotine. 

They freeze. Chuuya’s thumb still hovering too close, Dazai’s lips parted slightly, both of them caught in the afterglow of hilarity that curdled into something else entirely. 

Chuuya’s expression hardens first, something flickering in his eyes. He clears his throat sharply, retracts his hand as if burned. Turns away, shoulders tight. “…You did well,” he mutters, brusque now. Back to business.

Dazai exhales, slow, swallowing the ache in his throat. He nods, slipping back into composure like a second skin. “Mm. We make a good team.”

Annoyingly, his cheek still burns where Chuuya touched it.

They recover fast—because they have to. No time to linger in the strange silence Kouyou left, no time to stare at each other like fools pretending the air didn’t just crackle.

Dazai drags himself up first, wiping the last trace of laughter off his face as though pulling a mask back on. He straightens, adjusts his glasses, smooths his shirt. Chuuya, ever practical, clears his throat again, jerking his chin toward the painting.

They cross the office, every footstep heavier now. Dazai eases the frame aside, fingers deft against the illusionary puzzle until it slides open again with a neat little click. The binder stares back at them like something too easy, too perfectly placed.

He pulls it free, flipping it once in his hand. “You sure he even checks this anymore?” 

Chuuya shakes his head. “Not really. He’s buried in some new project. Spends more time in the lab than anywhere else.”

“Mm. That’s reassuring.” Dazai hums, though his smile doesn’t reach his eyes. “But just in case…”

He moves quickly, almost without thinking, gathering a stack of old files from the bottom shelf. Useless scraps, papers stiff with dust. He tucks them into an empty binder and slides it into place where the NASA file had been, arranging it just so. A decoy. Nothing elegant, but enough to fool a distracted man.

When he’s satisfied, he steps back, watching the painting lock back into its false serenity. “Good as new. No one the wiser.”

For a moment, there’s just silence again. Dazai glances sideways, noting how Chuuya fiddles absently with the hairpin he’d given him. Ah—of course. He takes it back, twirling it once in his fingers, before extending it to its rightful owner.

Chuuya accepts it without a word, slipping it back into his hair. The strands fall looser now, framing his face in a way that makes Dazai’s stomach feel… inconvenient. He doesn’t linger.

“Thanks,” Chuuya mutters.

Dazai only inclines his head in response. He untucks his shirt, as if shedding the remnants of that little masquerade, and swipes a sleeve across his mouth, wiping away the last stain of lipstick. Back to neutral. Back to faceless.

They don’t speak much as they leave. Just the soft shuffle of shoes against polished floor, down the stairs, back toward the ground floor where voices still hum from the villa. From the outside, they look like two boys returning from nothing more scandalous than a smoke break. But Dazai knows better. His pulse hasn’t quite slowed.

God, perfect timing. Chuuya’s about to sound almost responsible—“we should lie low, too many disappearances, maybe we’ll figure out how to get you back—” but then he just stops mid-sentence. The kind of stop that means something ugly is brewing.

Dazai follows his line of sight, expecting… who knows. A facilitator? Maybe Rimbaud catching them?

Instead, well. 

Shit.

It’s the kind of shit that makes his stomach lurch in ways he refuses to call organic. It’s not him—it’s Osamu. That dumb boy’s heart does a skip, a stutter, a pathetic teenage lurch. Dazai almost wants to sneer at himself in the third person.

Because standing there, framed by sterile villa lighting, is a man with violet eyes as violent as it looks like, and an expression that’s all too familiar. Fyodor Dostoevsky. His black hair is pulled back into a neat bun, and somehow that’s worse, because apparently Osamu’s body thinks buns are devastating. His pulse spikes for no reason other than muscle memory of liking him once. Disgusting.

And then Fyodor smiles. That slow, soft curve that never meant what it pretended to mean. It shouldn’t feel familiar, but it does, and it makes Dazai’s stomach do another one of those unwelcome flips. He hates it. He hates that Osamu’s nerves still spark in recognition, as if they’re saying; look, look, danger, but also… warmth once lived here.

“Hi,” Fyodor says, directed at him—him, with the softness of an ex who thinks the door’s still cracked open.

But when those same lips tilt toward Chuuya, the warmth sours. His tone sharpens, a barbed passive-aggressive lilt.

“Chuuya.”

And Chuuya, bless his unsubtle soul, doesn’t bother sanding down his own reply. “Fyodor.” 

Dazai could almost kiss him for that.

But then all eyes are back on him, because of course they are. His mouth moves before his brain does, blurting the one thing that tastes equal parts dread and annoyance.

“…What are you doing here?”

And God, he means it. What is he doing here? Please let this not be another one of those long, exhausting episodes of Fyodor deciding to stalk Osamu for the sheer pleasure of twisting a knife. Poor Osamu—he really did suffer through this maniac, didn’t he? No wonder his nervous system is throwing fits.

“I’m a volunteer here,” he says, like it’s the most natural thing to be said. “Given the mess of the past few years, I thought it was time to grow. Emotionally. Heal. You know… all that.” His eyes gleam faintly. “And imagine my happiness at finding you here as well.”

The words are syrup. They drip, they cling, they rot sweet.

Dazai forces a smile, the kind that doesn’t reach, the kind that hurts his cheeks. Inside, his brain is just one long scream.

Oh, this is so Osamu’s fault. Dazai feels it the second that breathy, humiliating laugh leaks out of his throat—unbidden, involuntary, like his whole ribcage collapses just from Fyodor’s stupid violet eyes. And ew. Absolutely ew. Osamu, really? This was your type? A stringy rat in a turtleneck with smug cheekbones and a voice like an axe? He wants to gag. Or scratch his skin off. Or both.

And yet, Dazai’s mouth betrays him again, lips parting like Fyodor’s smile is oxygen. “Fyodor—”

“Don’t.” Chuuya cuts him off. He steps forward, instinctive, protective, and Dazai almost wants to laugh because Osamu? Osamu never had a knight in shining armor. Yet here’s Chuuya, bristling like a streetcat, staring Fyodor down with murder in his eyes. “If you even breathe wrong in his direction, I’ll personally crush your ribs one by one. You got that?”

For once, Fyodor’s smile twitches—an almost imperceptible crack, like the mask slipped half a millimeter. “And you are…?” His tone drips condescension. “His guard dog? How quaint. Do you even know who you’re speaking to?”

And—dammit. Dammit, Dazai thinks, because the rat’s got a point. Who even is Chuuya to Osamu? The two of them aren’t publicly tied together. No contracts, no record, no “official” whatever-they-are. Not that Dazai himself even knows the full scope of it. Hell, sometimes he can’t tell if Chuuya’s babysitting Osamu, partnered with him, or just stuck in orbit around him by accident.

Fyodor’s eyes linger on Chuuya, then slide back to Dazai. “Perhaps we should talk later. Properly. Over dinner, maybe.” His voice softens in a parody of warmth. “We could request an alumni sponsor—there are still plenty who would give us permission. Just two old friends catching up. It’s been so long since I’ve seen you, Osamu. Not since… well. Your incident.”

Dazai freezes. Osamu’s incident. He hates how casually Fyodor says it, like dropping a stone into a lake just to watch the ripples. Like he knows exactly which bruise to prod.

“No,” Chuuya snaps, before Dazai can open his mouth. “He’s not going anywhere with you.”

“No?” Fyodor tilts his head, mock-curious. “Surely Osamu can speak for himself?”

And there it is again—that boyish lurch in Dazai’s stomach, the one that isn’t his. Osamu’s heart reacts, betrays, wants. Wants something awful and nostalgic. Wants, maybe, to forgive. And Dazai’s stuck in the crossfire, wearing a body that remembers things he’d rather drown.

So he laughs. That same brittle, breathless sound. “I’ll think about it.”

Chuuya rounds on him, scandalized, like he’s just announced he’d consider snorting arsenic. “You’ll what?”

“I’ll think about it.” Dazai’s smile is light, nonchalant, but his head is spinning with calculations. Maybe—just maybe—this dinner could be useful. Maybe Fyodor knows pieces of Osamu’s history that even Chuuya doesn’t. Maybe there are cracks in the story he can pry open. And as much as he loathes the idea, he needs that leverage.

Chuuya mutters something murderous under his breath. Fyodor beams like he’s already won.

Dazai just keeps smiling, even as Osamu’s heart squeezes like it wants to rip itself out of his chest.

“Well—we should get going. Wouldn’t want to take up too much of your time. You’re busy, after all.”

Fyodor—god, the bastard—gives that little bow of the head, the one that makes his hair shift against his collar just so, and murmurs, “Yes, yes, of course. I won’t keep you…Goodbye, Osamu.”

And Dazai smiles back. Actually smiles back. Automatic, involuntary, traitorous. “Bye.”

Ew. He wants to bite his own tongue clean off. He wants bleach for his mouth, for his throat, for this entire hijacked body. What the hell was that? Who smiles at Fyodor Dostoevsky? Apparently Osamu does. Apparently Osamu’s nerves and memories are so hardwired that even Dazai, the intruder, gets yanked into the mess.

Chuuya catches the slip—of course he does. His eyes narrow like he wants to rip the smile off Dazai’s face himself.

But there’s no time. They move. Fast. Down the hall, up the stairs, straight to their dorm. Chuuya’s boots hit the ground with clipped, furious rhythm, while Dazai’s brain keeps replaying that stupid bye in an echo chamber. By the time they reach the door, he’s sweating like Fyodor’s smile is stitched into the back of his eyelids.

He pushes the door shut behind them, turning the lock with a flick of his wrist. He barely has time to exhale before Chuuya’s voice detonates in the room.

“The fuck was that?” Chuuya’s pacing already, hands clenching and unclenching, hair falling into his eyes. “Do you seriously not remember what he did to you? How he treated you like—like you weren’t even human? You told me yourself, Osamu. You said he made you feel suffocated, like you were being smothered alive every time he smiled. And now—” His voice spikes. “Now you’re standing there grinning at him like some lovesick idiot—!”

“Chuuya.” He doesn’t raise his voice, but the way he says it makes Chuuya falter mid-step. “Did you forget something?”

Chuuya blinks at him, caught off guard.

“I’m not Osamu,” Dazai continues, voice harder now. “Not right now. You keep yelling at me like I should remember his feelings, his suffocation, his trauma—but I can’t. Because it’s not mine. I’m not him.”

Silence slams into the room like a second door closing. Chuuya stares at him, jaw tightening, breath sharp through his nose. Then he sneers.

“Right. Because you stole it,” he spits. “You stole his body, and now what? You think you get to play house in it? Toy around with all his unfinished business, mess with all the shit he never asked you to touch? Osamu isn’t some experiment you can pick apart just because you’re curious!”

Dazai’s expression darkens, glasses catching the dim light as he leans forward. “You think I want this? You think I enjoy walking around in someone else’s skin, smiling when I don’t mean to, choking on feelings that aren’t mine? No. But if I don’t lean into this, if I don’t use it, then I’ll never figure out what the hell is happening around here. And you—” He jabs a finger at Chuuya. “You’re not exactly eager to hand me Osamu’s memories on a silver platter, are you? That’d be too convenient.”

Chuuya’s shoulders stiffen. “Because they’re his. Not yours.”

“And that’s supposed to help me how? What good are these borrowed eyes, this borrowed body, if I can’t even understand the mess I’m caught in? Do you want me to stumble around blind until it kills me?”

“And what—dinner with him is supposed to fix that? Letting that bastard reel you back in—tell me how the fuck that helps anything, Dazai.”

Dazai inhales, and for once the breath is work, not performance. 

“Maybe the reason I can’t go back isn’t some cosmic bureaucratic joke. Maybe it’s that his soul and whatever I used to be are knotted together. Not neat, not heroic—tangled. Like two threads someone threw into a mixer and forgot to untangle before the machine started.”

He watches Chuuya through the blur at the edges of his voice, searching for the tiny betrayals of expression—the flinch that tells him when to stop, the softening that tells him when to keep going. “We don’t have answers. Not enough. You won’t hand over the memories, and I don’t blame you. You’re protecting him. You’re protecting whatever was left of Osamu before I crawled in. Fine. Keep them. Lock them. Put them on a chain and drown the key.” He tilts his head, the old grin trying to assemble itself out of the ruins. It doesn’t quite fit, and he lets it fall apart.

“But I can’t stay here forever,” he says softer, the words losing shape and becoming more honest than he had intended. “As much as I joke about wanting to die—and I’ve been around death so often it’s practically an old acquaintance—I don’t want to rot in a life that isn’t mine without one thing.” He swallows. “I want to die knowing Chuuya—my Chuuya—hate me enough to let me go.”

It stings to say, but he has to. Give and take. Give Chuuya vulnerability, take his trust.

“If he spits me out, then the knot loosens. Until then, you’re stuck with me, and I’m stuck with you.”

Silence.

Finally, Chuuya exhales like he’s been dragging the weight of ten different grudges behind his ribs, then mutters, “Fine. Okay. Whatever the hell this is, I’ll help.”

There it is. That single syllable—okay. The crack in the armor.

Dazai doesn’t grin too wide, doesn’t dare, but oh, the satisfaction is heightening. He tilts his head, feigning innocence, when really he’s already filing this away under “victories.” A thread looped around Chuuya’s wrist, knotted neatly in Dazai’s hand.

He lets his gaze linger on him, soft enough to pass for gratitude. In truth, he’s cataloguing the slump of Chuuya’s shoulders, the faint roughness in his voice, the way reluctant compliance looks when it finally drags itself out of him. Beautiful, Dazai thinks, in that sick, cerebral way he thinks most things are.

“See?” he hums, as though this were always inevitable. “We make such a good team. You say no, I twist, you say okay, and suddenly we’re aligned. Destiny, Chuuya. We are destined.”

Chuuya groans, pinching the bridge of his nose. Dazai only smiles at him thinly. He doesn’t need all of Chuuya’s trust. Just enough. Enough to keep him close. Enough to maneuver. Enough to get out of this body.

Enough to see his Chuuya crawl back to him, in an attempt to save him from something inevitable. Again. Like he always does.