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Dazai’s head buzzes.
He walks out of Yosano sensei infirmary and doesn’t look back. Flicks his wrist up and stares at his watch, the obnoxious ticking sound trilling the loudest in the room. How many of these ticks does Chuuya have left?
Nobody talks to him as Dazai turns to leave, or perhaps they do. Dazai doesn’t remember much as he walks down the stairs of the building, the ticking sound of the watch in rhythm with the steady beat of his heart.
This isn’t his first visit to Yosano, and somehow both he and the doctor know that it won’t be the last either. Dazai isn’t a fool, neither is he a hopeful idiot, he’s simply painfully human after years of not being one.
Chuuya’s still at home – their home – alone. Dazai’s feet pick up pace.
And he stops.
Momentarily stunned.
Not that he has much of a choice either way. If he does take a step forward, he’ll simply be impaled by the sword that’s thrust near his face, seemingly appearing out of nowhere. A sword with a paper pinned on one end.
Oh.
Despite popular belief, Dazai has done his fair share of work at the agency. Granted, it’s not really work and more of ‘fucking around until something catches his fancy’ as Kunikida-kun so graciously puts it. Regardless, Dazai hasn’t exactly been…useless at his time away from the mafia. While he may not seem very progressive to one idealistic blonde, he’s a predominant researcher with the president.
And even if the following facts are not taken into account, Dazai has done a fair share of research about this particular sword at the Port Mafia as well.
Shintō Amenogozen
The blue hues burn brighter against the dull evening before the sword starts disappearing back to the void through which it travelled from. Dazai’s fingers twitch once, before he practically rips the paper from the sword.
It vanishes back to whichever hell it came from.
Dazai stares at the paper –
The door opens with a resounding click and Dazai expects to see Chuuya on the couch, as always.
“Chuuya I’m back –”
The wind is knocked out of Dazai, body whacking as Chuuya practically throws himself at Dazai with the practiced ease of a madman.
“Aww Chuuyaaa~ Did you miss me that much?” He teases, half expecting a mocking reply, and half dreading Chuuya pulling away.
What he doesn’t expect is Chuuya trembling like a leaf in the middle of autumn, frail and weak against Dazai’s chest.
“Chuuya?” Dazai lifts Chuuya’s face, perplexed. “What happened?”
Chuuya lets out a breath as shaky as the leaf dangling against his chest in the middle of a storm during autumn.
“Corruption…Dazai…Corruption…” Even his voice is frail. “Corruption’s standing right there. It’s just standing there without a word smiling. Dazai...Dazai..There’s….There’s so much blood drinking down from it. From its empty hollow eye sockets, its nose, its peeling skin revealing the rotting muscle beneath. Dazai-”
“Chuuya calm down.”
Chuuya shakes his head, still clinging onto Dazai as a dried leaf would a dangling branch. “Dazai…it…it looks terrifying.” His voice falls even lower. “Do I really look like that when I use it. Blood dripping down from my hands, eyes and mouth with just the whites of my teeth showing as my lips pull into an insane smile.”
His grip on Dazai tightens.
“Dazai…Dazai Corruption’s –”
Dazai forces his limbs to function, forces a bandaged hand to settle against Chuuya’s cheek, and forces his face to tilt to meet his eyes.
“Chuuya,” don’t think, don’t you dare cry right now – “Corruption isn’t here.”
“But Dazai –”
“Chuuya.” Dazai’s throat burns.
“Corruption isn’t here. My nullification ability leaves no room for error. You know that already.”
Chuuya wilts, still clinging to Dazai like a lifeline but now infinitely smaller and…and vulnerable. They remain like that, gripping each other for several minutes before separating. Chuuya stares off to a distance where Corruption was supposedly standing, a shy finger wrapping itself around Dazai’s and Dazai’s throat burns.
Dazai collects the both of them, dragging his feet and Chuuya to the bedroom. He doesn’t speak, the words from that sword thrust to his face jabbing against his heartstrings.
It’s when they’re both settled on bed and wrapped around each other again that Dazai does speak.
“I need to leave.”
Chuuya doesn’t even stir at first, his face sunken against the stark moonlight. It makes him look ancient, flimsy cords of Dazai’s imagination making up for all the years Chuuya will not have.
Then, softer than a whisper lost during a snowstorm – “Why?”
This is where he can’t fuck up. Dazai has lived most of his life leaving no room for error and he knows that at this moment he can’t let anything screw over his next words. Somewhere at the back of his mind he’s painfully aware of Mori’s voice chiding him for even considering failure but he’s so…so human right now, achingly so.
Fingers twisting, relaxing, then twitching against each other. Dazai exhales, slowly, dragging out the silence that keeps getting more and more heavy.
“I think-I think I know a cure.”
“Bullshit.”
Ah, there’s the venom that was lacking in his chibi’s voice.
Chuuya practically wretches himself away from Dazai and he’s not quivering like a lone, crisp leaf right now but Dazai still sees it all the same. A lone leaf quivering and twitching in autumn, a rainstorm dragging it back and forth.
“That’s bullshit and you know it,” he continues. “Fuck, even your agency’s magic doctor can’t fix this and you think your brilliant mind can? What, Mori’s medical lessons rubbed off on you or what?”
“It has more to do with an ability then it has to do with medics –”
“I thought we already settled it with what Akiko not being able to do anything.”
“This is different,” Dazai insists, every bone in his body fluttering and flinging like stale fireworks fizzing but not exploding. “I know it is.”
“Dazai, I –” Chuuya cuts himself off, teeth dragging against his lips. He looks so ancient even now, as if he’s already sixty-eight with all the wisdom of old age upon his shoulders.
“I think,” he begins, voice so very tired and fragile, “that there are some things even the great Dazai Osamu cannot fix.”
Dazai rises to the bait. “Doesn’t mean I won’t try.”
“Even if it’s in vain?”
Dazai winces, “Gee, what’s with that pessimistic thought process.”
“Answer the question, Dazai.”
A slow exhale. Twist, relax, twitch.
“I will never be able to live with myself knowing that there was a sliver of possibility which I didn’t take.”
Chuuya’s eyes narrow and he rakes his eyes over Dazai’s face. Dazai feels exposed, raw, as if for the tainted sorrow is clawing at his skin and revealing mafia black bones.
Giving a pathetic excuse for a grin, Chuuya flops down on bed.
“You bastard,” he laughs, “can’t accept failure even now, can you?”
Dazai doesn’t correct him, doesn’t stop him either. Maybe it’s all in vain. He’s willing to take that chance.
What he’s not willing for is Chuuya leaving him without a goodbye.
But he’s willing for it. Willing if it means that there’s a sliver of chance.
When the interrogation squad at the mafia failed, they called in Dazai; when Mori found himself conflicted due to government alliances, he called for Dazai; when Ranpo ran out of deductions, he called Dazai.
And this might even be a stretch for all Dazai knows, but when medics fail him, Dazai is willing to bet everything in order to prove fate wrong.
Destiny wants to take Nakahara Chuuya away from him well too fucking bad.
That night Chuuya doesn’t sleep, but that is to be expected, he stares out the window at rain which he claims is snow, and pokes and prods at Dazai’s non-sleeping form. When it’s about 4:36 a.m. he turns to Dazai and looms over him, brushing a bony hand against his cheek.
“Happy birthday Dazai.” His voice is hoarse from all the screaming.
***
Dazai has already made prior arrangements, something that Chuuya only laughs mockingly at.
“So eager to leave me again?” He asks teasingly but his eyes are hollow even beyond the disease.
Kouyou gives them a moment of privacy at their farewell, although Dazai doesn’t consider it as such. It’s not a goodbye because he’ll come back to Chuuya. A Chuuya that is alive and okay and isn’t fucking dying.
“Tell you what,” Dazai spins, lips stretching on a smirk. “You see that tree over there?”
He points towards a tree outside the window that’s barely visible, lush and green with summer heat and cackle of rainfall. Chuuya returns his gaze back to Dazai.
“What about it?”
“I’ll come back when the last leaf falls.”
Chuuya scoffs. He’s leaning against the wall right now, huffing and clutching his thinning frame.
“You can lie to whoever you want, shitty mackerel, you’re not fooling me.” His burning eyes pierce a hole through Dazai’s being. “I know you’re not certain. You might not even come back.”
You might not come back on time.
Dazai sticks on a plastic smile. “It would help if you’re optimistic once in a while chibi. I know you’re closer to hell with that height issue of yours, but seriously, it’s not that hard.”
Chuuya only looks at him, tracing angles of his face. Dazai does the same thing.
He might not come back before that last leaf falls.
He might not come back before –
***
“Well, I could say this comes off as a surprise, but does it really?” Fyodor Dostoevsky’s eyes glitter, a cheshire grin splitting his face in two halves.
Dazai tips his head forward, “Glad to see you haven’t changed.”
“Ah, but life’s not being very kind to you now days, isn’t that right, Dazai-kun?”
Dazai’s teeth ache from clenching against each other painfully. “Oh?” his voice is light, airily so.
Fyodor hums, his nonchalant shrug of shoulders doing nothing to justify Dazai breaking the devil out of prison. “I’ve heard a thing or two.”
“And what may that be, Fyodor-kun?”
Slender fingers clasp beneath his chin, Fyodor tips forward, hair covering parts of his face and making him look eerily familiar to Mori. “A little medical problem, if I’m not mistaken. And as far as my expertise go, fatal familial insomnia, unfortunately, does not bend to my rules.”
Dazai scoffs, loud.
“I just broke you out of the most secure prison anyone has the capability to create, you can give me more than that.”
That cheshire grin splits across the foreigner’s face again, eyes gleaming and narrowed wryly. “I don’t seem to grasp why I should help you,” he says, eyes blown wide in pretense innocence. “Afterall, me saving your precious Chuuya doesn’t exactly benefit me now, does it?”
“I can grant you a pardon.”
“Nonsense,” Fyodor waves his hand around as if knocking the words away. “You know as well as I do that crime and punishment cannot be contained by such trivial matters.”
One day Dazai is going to run out of his favor pot of luck with Ango.
“Fine,” he grits out through clenched teeth. Summer is almost kissing goodbye and there isn’t enough time. Dazai closes his eyes and sees that one leaf, dangling against a snowstorm during winter, quivering.
“I’ll let you write whatever you want to write, if I get to save Chuuya.”
In less than a second, Fyodor’s eyes blink and narrow, gleaming like that of a viper sizing up its prey. Dazai doesn’t like the feeling of being the prey.
He tilts his head to the side, violet eyes burning a placid red. “While we are both honorable men, what makes you think I’ll believe such a statement?”
“I don’t have anything better than my words –”
“It seems to me that you’ve simply forgotten who here has no choice but to seek help, Dazai-kun, let me remind you, yes?” Fyodor tips forward, the lone table in the middle of the lone room in the middle of nowhere now his circus. “Your dear friend got diagnosed a while ago, didn’t he? If I’m right he has already started seeing things and cannot sleep at all during the night. In all that time you’ve been away he has also maybe stopped speaking properly, stuttering every word or so. Come winter he will be silent and once summer strikes, he won’t be there to look at the snow melting alongside you. That gives you…what? Months at best?”
Bile rises in his throat and Dazai’s eyes burn. He looks away.
“What do you propose?”
Fyodor grins.
“I write on the page. Me and my subordinates acquire the page. There will be no inconvenience created by you or your precious Yokohama citizens, mafia or not. We will do this by my rules, agreed?”
Dazai knows he shouldn’t, that he should be repulsed by what he’s agreeing to but –
“I accept as long as you make sure Chuuya is well.”
***
Fyodor’s subordinates are a crazed clown who claims that he’s sane, and one-half of a vampire who wants to die. Dazai isn’t allowed to see whatever it is that’s written on the page, on the page that the leader of the Decay of Angels kept to dearly hidden, along with that sword of his.
Dazai supposes he should thank him for that morning, all those months ago.
“My Chuuya is dead. Find the Page to save yours.”
It’s nearing the end of Autumn now. Dazai gets daily updates from Kouyou but they do nothing to ease his worries. Chuuya is still insomniac. Worse, he has stopped talking altogether sometime after the first snow.
Fyodor is playing mind games with Fukuchi, that much is clear to Dazai. There isn’t even prominent evidence to the foreigner sticking to his words and saving Chuuya but Dazai is out of options. It’s either blind trust on the rat or Chuuya’s life.
It’s the end of Autumn now, the leaves have already almost withered away.
***
It’s when the page is written that Dazai isn’t allowed to even fucking see and Fyodor and he are standing next to a very alarmed (and also a still very sick) Chuuya, that Dazai finally snaps. He turns and drags a grinning Fyodor out the room, away from Chuuya’s sunken eyes and broken throat that cannot even speak.
“You said he’ll be okay, that you will write that down on the page,” Dazai growls against the foreigner.
Fyodor only smiles wider. “And I did write it down. Although, the space was less and things had to be crammed up on one side, technicalities, you know how it is –”
Dazai rattles him against the wall like a ragdoll, patience wearing thin.
“Okay-okay, Dazai-kun. Like I said, I’m an honorable man. You can save your precious Chuuya still if you get him to the Sky Casino in time and convince Sigma to help.”
“Sigma’s ability does nothing to –”
“And it didn’t. But that’s the best chance you have now.”
Fyodor tilts his head to the side, hair falling to cover one of his eyes. “From what I gather, Nakahara-kun doesn’t have much time. Don’t waste seconds making empty threats and who knows, you might even be able to save him.”
***
Sometimes Dazai is glad that he was raised by Mori, that he attained what he did in the mafia. No one can pull strings like he can, not that many people have those many strings to begin with. That is to say, no one could’ve managed to reach this sky casino as early as Dazai did with Chuuya in tow.
The mafia doesn’t own private jets, it never did. But what’s one more favor in Ango’s plate after his brutal betrayal.
Dazai carries Chuuya through the casino, dragging his withering body in between the piles of snobby, drunk, rich people that Chuuya would’ve loved to talk with. He can barely move his limbs, much less walk. Hell, he can’t even speak. He only stares at Dazai with his panicked-blank stare.
The mafia has taken care of the security. Really, Akutagawa was alone capable of doing that, but more firepower meant more men ready to take on whatever monstrosity Fyodor had created.
And Dazai is not disappointed at all to find Sigma to be so…docile. Something so contrary to Fyodor and his clown.
“What are you –” Sigma behind but Gin’s dagger has already been launched, lodging itself between the man and his table. She doesn’t miss.
Dazai rushes towards him, Chuuya in his arms quivering like the last leaf of autumn.
“I need you to help him.”
Sigma panics at the sight of a barely alive man being deposited to his table. “Wait, what do you –”
“I think you misunderstand our positions right now,” Dazai snaps, nodding to Akutagawa who rushes Rashomon to Sigma at once, standing an inch before his eyes, “I wasn’t asking.”
Sigma stares at Chuuya for a while, fluttering around his body with Rashomon at his heel. He checks Chuuya’s pulses, his irises, his temperature. Then, turns to Dazai.
“What’s his diagnosis again?”
“FFI, fatal familial insomnia. Can you fix him?”
Sigma stares at Dazai, then at Chuuya. He turns to his desk to clutter around with the objects kept in ten different drawers.
“I’m not sure why I decided to make something like this.” Sigma blabbers on. “I’m not a medical expert or anything, neither am I interested in engineering. But I do have possession of what might be helpful. But it’s just a last resort thing I came up with when a highly esteemed guest at this establishment was on the verge of death due to this same disease. I don’t understand the odds of that but at the same rate if it helps it helps.”
Dazai’s hand stays clutching at Chuuya. He looks at him, mentally noting down all the changes that he has undergone all alone. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.
Sigma turns to them, a metallic box in his hand. “It would help best if you stepped away.”
Dazai takes four measured steps back, two more once Sigma urges him to.
There is a flash of light bright enough to burn off anyone’s retinas. Rashomon cackles then fuses away at the brightness, Akutagawa coughs, blood spilling from his lips.
Dazai’s eyes burn.
“That was officially the shittiest year of my entire life,” is the first thing Chuuya says.
The weight of the entire fucking world falls off his shoulders finally and Dazai can breathe again. He greedily takes in Chuuya’s sight and his throat fucking burns. His eyes burn, his mouth burns, his head burns, he’s burning up. Fuck.
A sob wretches itself out of Dazai’s throat and before he knows it he’s already clutching Chuuya. Holding him as one would an ancient artifact of unknown age. He can’t breathe as the weight of Chuuya’s death lifts off of his head and mind and fucking leaves him alone.
Dazai sobs as he does everything else, it’s not loud but silent and that silence is already loud enough for his subordinates to understand and leave the room. Tears leak one after another and Chuuya’s fingers – that are not bony and resembling corpses any longer – wipe off his eyes, tangle in his hair, so fucking alive Dazai could laugh.
So he does.
He laughs as he sobs and the tears don’t stop but he fucking did it.
Let it be known that Dazai doesn’t lose.
“Bastard,” Chuuya says, fondness dripping from every syllable of the word. “Guess I shouldn’t have been so pessimistic after all. Should’ve known you’d never fail when you set your heart to something.”
Oh, but he had.
The aching reminder burns like acid against his gut. He had failed. There is a future where he lives without Chuuya. Where destiny fucked up and took the one thing that mattered most to him. There is a world Chuuya isn’t there with Dazai to see the snow melt, to see the carving of ‘petite mafia’ on the cherry blossom tree.
There was a world where Nakahara Chuuya died.
But not this one. Not this one.
And as Dazai clasps his fingers around Chuuya’s cheeks, nimble, small fingers running through his wild, unkept hair, the final leaf of autumn bleeds away at the beginning of winter.