Chapter Text
Dazai Osamu’s past is an open secret among the Port Mafia. His present, known among the upper and older echelons of it. The former isn’t difficult to discern, considering the way he conducts himself and the morbid way he speaks, but most don’t dare say it aloud.
The knowledge of the latter, however, is present in the whispers that occur whenever he passes by wearing more bandages than normal, in Hirotsu’s refusal to look at the casts that adorn his arms and legs near constantly, in Kouyou’s sharp inhales whenever there are new bruises on his face and around his neck.
An open secret, meaning it’s not difficult at all to figure out what’s going on, but no one is willing to speak of or against it. There are consequences to loose lips, after all. And who would stand up for someone more weapon than human?
Chuuya doesn’t realize for a long while, which may or may not have been a purposeful manipulation on Dazai’s part. It takes 8 months of partnership to figure it out, which is over a year after they first meet, and means they are both 16 and Chuuya is still volatile and reeling from the Dragon Head Conflict.
At this point they’ve established what aren’t quite traditions but might be classified as easy habits. After certain missions, where they don’t get enough information or they wreck destruction a bit too obviously, the two write overlong debriefs together. Better to endure punishment and shame by each other’s sides than alone, no matter how they bicker. These are some of the few times Dazai will sit and do paperwork without complaining and pushing it on Chuuya, and his visible eye is always duller than usual. It lacks luster just as his complexion lacks life, riddled with darkness the same way his skin is riddled with yellow-greens and blue-blacks.
Mori drops in on them where they sit on the sterile beds of his clinic, one day. To retrieve some medicine, presumably, but the way he lingers around them means he’s really monitoring. He stands behind Dazai and rests a hand on his shoulder while he leans over to see the computer screen, and something in Dazai’s face shifts. Maybe it's the late night exhaustion that prevents him from covering up his expression thoroughly, but his jaw goes tight and his brows tilt up with exhaustion. He looks resigned, overwhelmed, and even a little scared.
Mori levers himself back up and Dazai’s expression drops blank again, but Chuuya can’t get the image of it out of his mind, aberration overlaid atop the one there is now.
The next day he asks Kouyou about it, in as hushed and delicate a tone as he can, and the way she doesn’t meet his eyes is answer enough. When she finally speaks, it does no more than further settle the stone of disgust and anger in his stomach.
The next week, Chuuya comes to a decision.
“Hey,” Chuuya says.
Dazai hums in acknowledgment. His fingers press to the pulse point of a clammy hand. He turns it over by the wrist and exams the nails for signs of struggle. It’s all procedural, something Chuuya always gladly lets slip to his partner. The stench of a corpse is strong, even more so in the heat, and Chuuya turns nauseous far easier than his partner, who on most days seemingly cannot be phased by anything.
At this little scene, of just the two of them in this alley interrogating a cadaver about its killer, the sun glares down at them like a watchdog. There are no mafia members within hearing distance, or even observing distance, but the words that haven’t left his throat still feel so scrutinized.
The pause is prominent enough that Dazai speaks again. “What, did you find something useful?” He twists his head around to lock eyes, folding one elbow over his knees and setting the other hand on the concrete for balance.
Chuuya stares at the new cotton pad taped under Dazai’s jaw, the dark circles under his visible eye, the dishevelment of his dark hair, and walks forward. His shadow casts Dazai in cooling darkness momentarily, turning everything about him gray, and it’s such an unsettlingly fitting look for someone who’s supposed to be his own age, that Chuuya lurches down to a crouch and lets the light wash over his partner again.
“Why the long face, shortstack; you lose something?”
They’re almost nose to nose, this way. The sun brings out the flecks of gold in Dazai’s brown-black eye.
Chuuya focuses on it again, reaches for the knee-deep pool of empathy and anger and lets it rise high enough to engulf him. It may not quite be protectiveness but— This isn’t right. This isn’t right.
He’s already lost so many friends during the conflict, the wounds from each and every loss still fresh, and he might have been helpless to do anything at the time but now the opportunity is staring him right in the face. To hell if he’s going to let it all go to waste.
“I’m leaving.”
“Oh?” Dazai raises his eyebrows. “So soon after we got here? As out of character as this is, I don’t think Mori- san finds you endearing enough to let you ignore a mission.”
“I’m leaving everything,” he clarifies, and it takes barely a second for understanding to unmask Dazai’s face.
“He’ll find you.”
“Only if he wants to. And even if he does, I can take care of anyone he sends.”
“But you can’t defect. Kouyou-nee would be heartbroken.”
“She wouldn’t, because she knows it’s for the better.”
“For the better?” Dazai asks. There’s almost a laugh in his voice. “And why, pray tell, would she think it makes this for the better?”
Chuuya takes a moment to inhale, and let the courage build in a wave before he lets it tide out over his tongue. “Because I’m taking you with me.”
The reaction is immediate. Dazai doesn’t even try to hide the surprise that overtakes his features. His shoulders and jaw go slack, like a puppet whose strings are cut, hands held loose and fingers held even looser. His lips part in unspoken words and his eyebrow rises up, up, up to the sky. There’s a ring of white around his iris, wide eye then framed by thick lashes.
“Why,” he asks finally, with so much quiet disbelief in the voice it actually hurts like a real, solid blade.
“Because you need to leave. This place is bad for you, so I’m getting you out.”
Dazai is stunned silent again, and this might be the most lost Chuuya’s ever seen him. Still lax, Dazai gathers himself enough to say, “It doesn’t matter if you think it's bad for me. Chuuya, it doesn’t matter if anyone thinks it’s bad for me, because I don’t care what it is for me.”
And doesn’t that just twist the blade in deeper? “Well, it matters to me, because I’m a regular fucking human being with emotions, so I’m getting you out of here.”
Dazai’s gaze finally falls away and to the ground. There’s what might even be frustration building in the lines of his eyebrows. “You can’t take me if I don’t care. Just drop this, and let’s finish the mission.”
Chuuya reaches out a hand. It hovers in the air under Dazai’s jaw, thumb a hair’s breadth away from the cotton pad there, fingertips skimmed by split ends. He grabs Dazai’s collar.
“I’m leaving, no matter what,” he says, trying to force understanding like a spike through Dazai’s head with his words. “I can’t fucking stay here any longer knowing what the person that I pledged my loyalty to does to you. So you should choose whether you want to be partnerless and left to him and all of the shit he puts you through constantly, or whether you want to take this lifeline and let me pull you up.”
Dazai’s eyes are dead again. There’s perspiration sliding down his neck, wetting his collar and Chuuya’s knuckles where they brush his skin.
Another painfully long moment, and then all the air leaves Dazai’s chest. He ducks his head and rests it on Chuuya’s shoulder, his brown hair tickling tendon, under-ear, sweeping against cheek and engulfing gaze when Chuuya turns to him.
“You’re more self-righteous than I thought, sheepdog. Do you think you’re some sort of savior? That you can just spit out some words and fix me, when I’ve always been like this? You’re horrid. A stubborn, loyal, fool.”
Chuuya tightens his grip on Dazai’s shirt collar and presses his knuckles into the other’s neck, hard enough to hurt. “Just tell me that’s a yes, jackass.”
Dazai sinks further into Chuuya. “I hate you. Do whatever you please.”
They’re gone by next week. It’s not bombastically, surprising enough for Double Black.
Chuuya leaves Kouyou a note, throws a few of his things into a backpack, and uses his ability to crush the lock of her safe and steal some cash. He knows she’ll understand, and it’s not comparable to the estate she inhabits anyway.
He swoops Dazai away from his room within the Port Mafia headquarters, who makes the task no easier by having prepared his own things or settled any of his own matters. They fly out and away, Chuuya holding Dazai aloft by carefully gripping the back of his coat without touching skin, and in a few hours they are settled at a hotel at the outskirts of Yokohama.
Dazai’s hands are shaking when they land. His skin has a deathly pallor, ghost white and cracked at the edges of his mouth, and Chuuya realizes he must have been nervous even in the days leading up to this.
“Do you need to throw up?” He asks, opening the door to the cramped bathroom.
Dazai shakes his head, just sits on the edge of one of the twin beds and laces his hands tightly together. Chuuya sits next to him through the whole night, unspeaking.
They rest in the morning.
Chuuya gets a part-time job at a family restaurant to make some money until they can figure out what to do. He poses as a high school student, makes small talk with the other employees, and brings to their temporary home the meals they give him as part of his pay. On the days that Dazai feels up to it, he’ll visit and bother him while he’s working.
On the days Dazai doesn't feel up to it, Chuuya will open the door to their hotel room of the week, to find him wrapping bandages around and around his arms and legs and torso. Sometimes, Chuuya helps.
“See,” Dazai says with a hint of bitterness. “Mori’s not here, and I’m still hurt. I told you that you can’t just say you’ll save me and have everything go your way.”
“I’m not delusional,” Chuuya mutters. He knows better than anyone how futile it is to expect to be able to save any number of people completely. First his failure with the Sheep, then his subordinates that died in vain during the Dragon Head Conflict. But Dazai isn’t an entire group of people for Chuuya to protect and be in charge of. He’s one person, and if all Chuuya can do is keep him fed and help stitch him back together every night, he’ll count that a success.
“You may not be able to stop this right now,” he says, and stares firmly at Dazai’s scarred arm while he works, rolling gauze over the ointment he’d just spread on. He remains unblinking for long enough that the air burns his eyes. “But I know it’s better now. No one’s breaking your fucking arms anymore, okay?”
“Okay.”
And there’s silence enough that Chuuya thinks that, in the yellow glow of the faulty hotel lamps and with the bustle of a not yet asleep city as background, the conversation has been cut short without conclusion on either side. Yet Dazai offers a confession into the space between them.
“It wasn’t just that. Or it was— mainly the scalpel. Easy to flick around and change the depth, depending on the punishment. But he always fixed me up afterward, so it was harder to tell.”
Chuuya stops what he’s doing for a second, determining what to say. “We could tell,” he decides on, quiet.
Dazai stiffens. “What do you mean ‘we’,” he asks, and Chuuya lets himself marvel at the sorrow that washes through him at the revelation that Dazai thought the abuse wasn’t noticeable.
“The upper ranking members, mainly.” He chooses his words carefully, slowly. “Ane-san and Hirotsu seemed like they knew, but the others had to too.”
Chuuya fastens the bandages at Dazai’s wrist and reaches for the other arm to wrap. Dazai’s skin is unusually warm to the touch.
“I suppose I should be grateful that the hat rack relocated me, before their pity became too great for even my conviction to ignorance,” Dazai finally says.
And he doesn’t say it’s better now, but he reaches a hand up and slips his fingers under the bandages around his head, and tugs. They sag loose across his face, features peeking out between strips of white. His other eye is brown too, the same hue as his first, with amber shot through, deep into the iris. It’s unexpectedly normal.
“Hey, you’re getting those bandages all tangled up with these,” Chuuya huffs, “put them away.”
“You’re as annoying as usual,” Dazai responds, but does as asked.
It’s a month and a half since thier escape when the underground comes calling. Or more specifically, knocking on their hotel door. Chuuya opens it up expecting to see a cleaning lady and is instead met with two shivering young women in the lobby. They’re drenched and dripping onto the floor from the rain outside, and before Chuuya can even say one word Dazai comes up behind him and lets them in.
“What the hell,” he asks, or more accurately hisses, in Dazai’s face when he turns back after tossing the women some towels and pointing them to the bathroom. “Who the fuck are they?”
“Debutantes on the run from their abusive, politician uncle. They found my email address and are willing to pay quite the hefty sum for an escort to the port.”
“And you worked all this out without telling me?”
Dazai shrugs, and it’s so casual it sends a wave of sharp irritation through Chuuya. “We need money,” he says.
“We can get money without getting on the government’s bad side.”
“One minor politician does not a government make,” Dazai responds, holding his finger up. He rolls his eyes like Chuuya’s the one being overdramatic, and Dazai’s not the one who compromised their position.
“Deactivate your email,” Chuuya says. “We’ll take this one job but that’s it. If we get tricked into some sort of ambush I might not be able to save you, and we can’t even go to the hospital like this.”
Dazai rolls his eyes again, and Chuuya kind of wants to strangle him. “If you fancy being broke, sure.” And when Chuuya does actually make the gesture, reaching out with gloved hands to Dazai’s neck, he says, “Fine, alright .”
That night does not end up being the last time.
At least it’s a better side hustle than handing out flyers for a cosplay cafe again.
It’s been three months and Chuuya has gotten a pretty good handle on grocery shopping, at this point. He’d never ran errands by himself before, with the Sheep, because they traveled in packs when they were younger and he’d been deemed too important for those sorts of things as he aged, but now he makes adjustments to the lists Dazai compiles and grabs easy, instant food from whichever convenience store is near their newest choice of motel.
He’s stuffing various flavors of boxed curry into a shopping basket when he turns the corner and bumps into someone. “Sorry,” he mutters. and when he glances up it's an older man with slicked-back hair and large glasses. Familiarity tickles the edges of Chuuya’s mind, but he pushes it aside in favor of focusing on keeping his curry boxes from spilling to the floor.
Well, that is until the man starts to say “Nakahara—” and Chuuya shoves them both down the aisle and grabs his knife from inside his jacket. The curry boxes drop. He angles the knife just out of sight from anyone that might walk by, and presses it against the suit jacket at the man’s side.
“Who are you with,” he asks, deadly quiet.
The man stares at him with wide eyes, but then bafflingly, they flatten immediately until he looks resigned. “Just like your partner, hm? And to think I was concerned about Dazai-kun for a while.”
Chuuya presses the knife in harder, and at least then the man starts to squirm. “How do you know Dazai? How did you find me?”
“I wasn’t looking for you,” the man says, and then gestures with his arm, which turns out to have a half-full basket looped around it. “Just a happy coincidence.”
“Oh, I’m sure you’re so happy to see me,” Chuuya says, and he’s already tired of this nonsensical conversation. “Who the hell even are you?”
The man sighs. He pushes his glasses up with the hand that the shopping basket is around, jangling it and all the items in it. “My name,” he says, and he sounds a bit disappointed. “Is Sakaguchi Ango, if you’ll recall having met me, Nakahara-san.”
Chuuya hands Sakaguchi’s number over to Dazai when he gets back, who then immediately dials it and gets sent to voicemail. One week later and they’re sitting at a cafe at the very edge of the city, Sakaguchi Ango and Oda Sakunosuke on one side of a circular, wrought table and Dazai and Chuuya on the other.
“It was chaos,” Sakaguchi huffs, stirring sugar into his coffee. “No one knew where Double Black was and the boss sent out teams in case you’d been kidnapped.”
“Oh, you have no idea,” Dazai nods readily. “The shrimp kidnapped me right in the middle of the night, could you believe it? I was minding my own business and there he was!”
Chuuya jabs his elbow into Dazai’s ribs. “Like I didn’t talk to you about it before, jackass. You knew what was gonna happen and didn’t even prepare.”
“Well,” Dazai says, “only a fool would have thought you were being serious.”
“In any case,” Sakaguchi says, bringing the conversation back around before it devolves into bickering. “It seems there wasn’t any reason to worry. The boss seems to have let it go at this point.”
“And you seem better, too,” Oda says. He has a deep, smooth voice and when he looks at Dazai his gaze is somehow both interrogative yet soft. “I know you can both take care of yourselves, but if you’re ever in any trouble, feel free to ask for help.”
“We’ll be fine, OdaSaku,” Dazai says, stretching the name out too long, and lands an elbow on the table and his chin on a hand. “It’d be mutually assured destruction to go after us when he has Corruption.”
Dazai jabs the thumb of his other hand to Chuuya, and even though from anyone else the words may have held admiration, from Dazai they sound mocking. Chuuya pointedly slurps his iced coffee loudly and steps on Dazai’s foot under the table, to hear him squeak. It’s the same old song and dance between them right now, even if they spend most of their days quietly comfortable with each other’s presence in make-shift homes.
Chuuya doesn’t know or care much about Oda and Sakaguchi, in all honesty; however he went through all this trouble for Dazai, in the end, so damn if he’s not going to make it worth his while by getting him to his friends as often as is safely possible.
It might only be because of that, Dazai’s now more lively mood at seeing Oda and Sakaguchi, that caused the former to say that he seemed better, but Chuuya will take what he can get.
He can see it too, in Dazai’s more carefree attitude, in the way he gets out of bed earlier in the days that follow, and in how his grins are like watching a 100-watt lightbulb burn. Chuuya takes those flashes of memory and hoards them.
Six months into their defection, Dazai finally gets a job.
He goes to the coffee shop a block from Chuuya’s own place of work, and gets hired all but immediately. His hours are suspiciously convenient, and he always brings back a paper bag with some pastry or the other, so Chuuya barely has to ponder to understand that he’s exploiting his infectious charisma to do whatever the hell he wants there.
He doesn’t want to visit, at all honestly, but Dazai convinces him to pick him up from his closing shift one day and Chuuya gets to witness the carnage in all its glory.
Dazai, stage right, flirting with customers and coworkers alike, dialing up the charm on his middle-aged shift manager who insists he looks just like her nephew back home, and isn’t Chuuya lucky to have a friend so sweet? And then adoring girls stage left, middle schoolers who don’t know better than to hit on older boys with mysterious backstories, giving him little gifts and parts of their pastries like he’s some sort of puppy— and Dazai calls Chuuya the dog.
“Want one?” Dazai asks, and unwraps a chocolate and presses it to Chuuya’s lips. He flinches and snatches it out of Dazai’s hands, eyes it suspiciously for a second before eating it in one bite. Fire bursts in his mouth and he breaks into a coughing fit, because even though he normally likes spicy food he didn’t expect a chocolate to burn this much, and because it tastes less like tabasco and more like wasabi.
One of the baristas grabs him a cold glass of milk and once he downs it, feeling less like his face is being set aflame from the inside out, he grabs Dazai’s collar and pulls him over the counter. “You’re an asshole,” Chuuya chokes out over the sound of a few gasping and squealing girls, and Dazai’s grin is blinding.
“Only to you, half-pint.” And then he winks.
Chuuya conceives after that day— that turns out to be Valentine’s Day and which he hadn’t actually known about at all, until Dazai mentioned it regarding all the bags of sweets they were lugging back on the train ride home— to never visit the coffee shop again.
He is mostly successful in that endeavor, except on the days where either Oda or Sakaguchi or both decide to visit and he resolves to stand guard there, because it’s far too easy to look at the group of those three as mafia traitors and have a random gang kick down a door or two.
As loathe as Chuuya is to step foot in that establishment, and as strange as he feels, standing around and trying not to listen in on the conversations of a tight-knit group of friends he isn’t quite a part of, it turns out that Dazai is happier now. He doesn’t say it, but Chuuya can see it in the way his gait is lighter than before, the way his eyes shine whenever his friends visit. It’s not often by any means, because even with Chuuya there as deterrent it’s still dangerous to meet, but Dazai always seems more alive then.
And the last thing that makes the job worth it— they can make rent now. They move into a one-bedroom apartment using fake papers when it’s clear that the cheap motels aren’t going to cut it for any longer, and buy futons to lay out. Dazai complains, because he prefers mattress beds and because he enjoys annoying Chuuya, but they make it work.
8 months into their defection from the mafia, just in time for Chuuya’s 17th birthday, they make a home.
A couple months after that, and the delicate, almost idyllic balance they’ve created gets thrown off-course in the form of a pair of too-bright eyes.