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What is Nakahara Chuuya to you?
Dazai turned the question over in his mind, flipping it on its side and examining it from the bottom, as if he was taking up a magnifying glass and expecting to find an engraving in wood that would lead him to the answer, or at least carve a path for him to find one. Most days, he felt as if he was blindly feeling his way through a maze, with nothing except the clothes on his back and the roughness of his hands. Chuuya, he thought, was like a way out.
He sank into bed next to his partner, who was sleeping soundly, eyelashes fluttering every other second, gentle huffs of air leaving his mouth. Dazai lifted a gentle hand to place softly over Chuuya’s eyelids, the way people did to the dead just after they had died—like a sign of respect, or a prayer. A way of laying someone to rest.
What is Nakahara Chuuya to you? Like his right hand to his left. Like vacancy to an empty room.
What was Nakahara Chuuya to him? A bitter taste in his mouth, a litany of curses spilling from his chest, a crater in the middle where his heart should be. He removed his hand from Chuuya’s eyes and let it drop back down on the bed next to him. There was a brief moment in which silence seemed to swallow the world whole, Chuuya’s breath snagging in his throat as if snatched by a fairytale forest branch, ripping away from him like a piece of flimsy fabric. It was the moment on your tiptoes just before you lose your balance, where you feel weightless and unafraid of the landing. The storm before Chuuya’s eyes drifted open, tempest eyes still blurred with sleep staring up at Dazai groggily. Dazai managed a slight smile.
“Were you watching me sleep?” Chuuya’s voice was apprehensive, suspicious, and rasped.
“No,” Dazai mused.
“Liar.”
“Hmm. Without a doubt.”
Chuuya yawned and sat up, leaning backwards on his elbows. Dazai twisted to see him, and reached out a hand again, this time finding the crooks of his partner’s fingers.
“What’s with you?” Chuuya asked, pensive. He curled his own fingers around Dazai’s anyway.
What is Nakahara Chuuya to you? A chess maneuver, a broken piece. The moment before gravity returns. The moment after.
“I’m,” said Dazai, “sleep deprived and afflicted.”
Chuuya raised an eyebrow, giving him a knowing look, as if to say, It’s too late for your bullshit. Which it was. Which it always was. “If you aren’t going to elaborate,” said Chuuya, fighting back another yawn, “then will you let me go back to sleep?”
“You were always free to go back to sleep.”
Chuuya groaned. There was a certain state that he didn’t exactly feel comfortable leaving Dazai in, though for what reason he could never be sure. It wasn’t that he felt uncomfortable, really—it was just a simmering feeling below his heart, a slight jump interrupting the casual beat of his heart.
“Liar.”
Dazai pursed his lips, swinging his legs up onto the bed, and folding his calves under his thighs, all the while still hanging on to Chuuya’s hand. “Yes, I think we’ve established that I’m really quite good at lying.”
Frustrating—that was really the best word that Chuuya could use to describe Dazai. Frustrating, in the way he moved and spoke and behaved. Frustrating, in the way he could never quite tell what he was thinking. Frustrating, in the way he became more elusive the more Chuuya leaned into him. His fleeting nature, and how he inched further and further away the closer Chuuya got.
“Sometimes,” Dazai remarked, as if he could read Chuuya’s mind, “you get so close to someone, you end up not really seeing them.”
You give and you take, and you push and you pull, and in the end no one wins, except the ghost in the corner of our room watching us tear each other apart. If you are the left hand to my right, I might have just lost an arm.
Chuuya regarded him with careful attention through half-lidded eyes. “Can you see me?”
“Yes. I'm not blind.”
A heavy sigh. “You’re infuriating, you know that? Honestly, if you really have to know about things, Dazai, there is a certain thing called need. It’s a shitty thing, but it’s real.”
He raised an eyebrow. “Are you sure you didn’t practice this speech?”
“Go die.”
“Oh, gladly.”
“What I mean is,” continued Chuuya, “that you can need. You can ask for things.”
Dazai considered this, eyes leaving Chuuya’s to drift up to the ceiling in quiet thought. Ask for things? Ask for what? What did he need from Chuuya? It was a thing he never thought about, not because he was actively trying not to, but because it had simply never crossed his mind. Did he need anything more than what he had been given?
In some ways, he was okay with what he had. He was content with the presence of his partner, even the simple ability to stand next to him. He wasn’t sure if he was supposed to want more, or ask for more, or what Chuuya wanted to hear. He didn’t even really know what he wanted to say. So, after a long moment, he simply settled for, “If you mean what I want, I have to tell you that I’m slightly uncomfortable voicing my own desires.”
“You weren’t so uncomfortable about it last night.”
Dazai tipped his head back to laugh loudly, a sound to break the tension. If there was one thing he could identify, perhaps it was the light feeling in his chest when he was around Chuuya, like the awkward gravity that so often settled around his heart was simply disappearing. What is Nakahara Chuuya to you?
“The way lungs need air,” Dazai mused, voice dipping low and jumping high in a singsong tone. He lifted his hand to Chuuya’s face to touch a finger on his cheek and tuck a stray piece of hair behind his ear. “Or like a vein to a wrist.”
Chuuya tilted his head slowly. “What are you on about?”
What is Nakahara Chuuya to you?
He dropped his hand again. “Nothing.”
Like human touch to a human being. I know you by the shape of your mouth.