Chapter Text
A closed case opened the door for several extemporaneous work tasks. There were debriefings to be had and reports to be written. High-priority stuff, which Chuuya sidestepped to pursue his own priorities, seeking out his favourite mad scientist.
With his hands neatly folded behind his back and a subtle sway to his stance, Dazai looked like he had been waiting to be found for a long time.
They exchanged a look, spoke without saying anything.
“I know,” said Dazai, “I have a lot to explain.”
He led the way back to his apartment, saying something about ‘privacy’. It sounded very reasonable, so Chuuya followed. Then again, he would have followed Dazai anywhere, even if it had sounded unreasonable.
—
The day darkened into twilight. From Dazai’s un-lived-in living room, the cityscape stretched into the horizon, a palette of neon lights rising into a sky dotted by flying objects. Birds, drones, satellites. Chuuya couldn't see the stars, but he hoped they were somewhere up there, winking at him.
“So,” Chuuya said. It was one of those moments where he didn’t know what to do with his hands, so he tucked them under his damp armpits, arms crossed. He was sure he looked tense as all fuck. At least the outsides matched the insides. “Explain.”
“So,” Dazai parroted, looking a little forlorn like he had said too much when really he hadn’t said enough. At a tilted angle, he searched Chuuya’s face, squinting. “Do you remember?” he asked. He made it sound easy, like recollection was just a matter of reaching into a mental cabinet and thumbing through well-organised old files.
Inside Chuuya’s head, the slide show of his life replayed. Some parts were vivid while others were low-resolution flickers that resembled daydreams. None of them provided the full picture of who he was or how he had ended up here. “Yes. I mean, no. I mean, what exactly am I supposed to remember?”
In a very serious tone, Dazai said, “For starters, you’re supposed to remember to brush your teeth twice a day.”
Chuuya huffed a laugh. “You’re lucky you’re pretty because your sense of humour is atrocious.”
Outdoing himself, Dazai’s next statement was even less funny. “You were sick.”
There it was, the truth delivered in no uncertain terms, the ripping of a bandage from a wound.
“I know,” Chuuya said. He remembered the sickness, if not in detail, then in concept. Pain, hope, more pain, stubbornness, more pain, anger, more pain… It was all so fucking heavy that he had to make light of it, “Come on, doc. Tell me something I don’t know.”
Dazai’s mannerisms were much tighter than usual, his loose limbs mantled into a mechanical composure. In conclusion, he was nervous, and despite the horrors, Chuuya spared a moment to feel endeared by this fact.
“Darling,” Dazai said, “sometimes you have to allow me to tell you things you already know. For example, I would like to point out that contrary to popular belief, I’m not omniscient. I’m sure you know this because I’ve told you, but you still made the wrongful assumption that I could, would and should know what you know about what there is to know about you, which—” Dazai reproduced falling musical cadence of a buzzer impressively accurately, a sweet, “Nu-oh.”
The furtive melodrama inspired great fondness in Chuuya, an old feeling that lived in his chest and unfurled whenever Dazai pulled out his Dazai-isms.
Chuuya figured that the best way to grant some momentum to the conservation was to change the template. It was his turn to test Dazai’s memory. “Remember when I asked you if we knew each other before I lost my memories?”
“Yes, about that—”
“I won’t ask again because I know we did.”
The strange man that he was, Dazai lightened up at having been caught giving false testimony. He didn’t gasp, but it was a near thing. His eyes looked a little wet.
“I remember you,” Chuuya said. “I remember us.”
Information overload came with equal parts ache and relief. Chuuya had more memories than he could remember, so he latched on to one and let it fissure out: Days spent in the company of a bandaged boy, heads craned back to look past tall buildings into an open sky, wondering how far the universe stretched.
It was a collection of fuzzy flashbacks. They were far-gone, but they were Chuuya’s. Like a constellation of stars spelling his name. Looking in, he found past versions of himself, and he found Dazai too. Right there by his side. Then and now. At one point, he had assumed that every returning memory would feel monumental. A life before and after kind of deal, that he would spend the rest of his life adjusting to. But remembering was as natural as breathing. As natural as looking at Dazai and wanting to kiss him.
“What I will ask is this,” Chuuya said, “you knew all along, so why didn’t you tell me?"
“See, here’s the thing. You asked me—and I remember the precise wording because I like to write down our conversations in my personal journal so I can analyse them in detail later—”
“You—what?”
“You said, and I quote, ‘“Did you know me before I lost my memories?’”—Dazai pitched down his voice and spoke in a slow drawl that was undoubtedly supposed to pass as a Chuuya imitation while making exaggerated inverted commas in the air—“and then I said ‘I would have remembered your face’.”
“Okay.” Chuuya could tell that he was supposed to understand something that he didn’t yet understand. “And?”
“When we first met, I didn’t recognise you immediately because I hadn't seen your handsome face before,” Dazai said in a well-duh sort of tone. “So technically I never lied.”
It was typical of Dazai to get hung up on technicalities. Chuuya found himself hung up on something more relevant. “Wait,” he said. “I used to look different?”
“Oh, you don’t remember that part. Right, okay, that’s fine. Memories tend to return in an uneven fashion.” Dazai pouted. He looked up, and his eyes were wheeling, full of forecasts and computations. “Well, you seem to be handling this information very well.”
Chuuya wasn’t sure he felt well, but he nodded. Dazai took Chuuya’s hand and held it like something precious. Fingers twining and wrist aligning. Pulse to pulse.
“Do stop me if at any point raking up the past causes too great discomfort—we don’t want to overload your system—but yes, I didn’t recognise you immediately because your physical appearance has changed.” Dazai held up a finger as though making a grand academic statement. “The point is that I didn’t know all along. I only knew most of the way along.”
That wasn’t the point at all, but Chuuya would let him have it nonetheless.
“When did you realise?” Chuuya asked.
“When I hypnotised you.”
Chuuya had waited so long for answers. Now that they lined up in front of him, he found himself flirting with the idea of prolonging his ignorance. He swallowed his doubts along with the lump in his throat and asked, “What happened?”
“You repeated the last words I said to you before we were separated.”
It all came back to Chuuya, suddenly and cataclysmically. It was inevitable; his memories were an oil spill, and the reminder was a lit match. He knew exactly what Dazai was referencing, so he fit his lips around those words, a reverent repetition, “It’s going to be okay. I love you, Chuuya.”
Yokohama
Ten years ago
When Chuuya first met Dazai, he met a mystery.
Few facts were known about Dazai. He was raised by money. Presumably, he had parents as well but they seemed to have been less formative for his personality. He wrapped himself in bandages from top to toe like a mummy, but when asked if he was injured, he answered in the negative.
Dazai made a fool of school with his intellect, but despite his smarts, he had a way of missing the mark on exams. He was an alchemical cocktail of unmixable qualities. An unfriendly social butterfly, a gifted kid set on convincing the world he was a loser, a sweet smile and a sharp tongue.
Dazai was a lot of different people, but the one relatively stable trait across his shifting personas was being a real know-it-all, always interrupting conversations to go ‘well, actually’ or ‘allow me to tell you why you’re wrong’, finishing off his opinionated rigmaroles with ‘of course, you’re allowed to disagree, but empirical evidence suggests that people who disagree with me are likely to be stupid and ugly’.
Since Dazai was under the impression that he knew everything, Chuuya set out to ask him an unanswerable question. Just to humble him a little. The universe was full of secrets, but there was one in particular that bothered Chuuya, and he wanted it to bother Dazai too.
On an abandoned playground that was more rust than play, he found Dazai.
A few years ago, the country had been swept by an inroll of mass-produced domestic robots. The adults in Chuuya’s life said that robots were designed to assist with household chores, providing convenience and efficiency in daily tasks. Chuuya supposed that was pretty neat. He liked doing the dishes just as much as the next person, which wasn’t very much at all, so he wasn’t going to refuse a helping robot hand. Still, he had his reservations about the ways things around him changed to cater to the continuous influx of better, stronger and faster machines.
Now that everything from work to play had become automated and optimised for maximal performance, no one wanted to go to playgrounds like these anymore, where everything required manual work. Swings, slides, spring riders, climbers, sand pits. The equipment’s peeled paint told a story of bygone glory days.
Dazai sat on a swing. His feet dragged against the ground, legs too long to allow him to kick them back and forth. Not quite a kid anymore.
Chuuya went up to Dazai and gave his back a push, setting the swing in motion. The hinges creaked miserably, threatening to give up.
After a while, Chuuya asked, “What happens when we die?”
On the cusp of adolescence, he had already lived a life of loss beyond his years. He had lost his parents before he got to know them. He had no memories of them, but his mother had left him a heart-shaped silver locket designed to hold pictures inside. Chuuya kept it empty. That way, his imagination could fill in the blanks, imagining a happy family portrait where there was none.
Most heavy on his heart was a recent loss: the dog that had lived in the orphanage where he was raised. The dog died of old age. It had lived a good life, but that didn’t make it any less sad that it was over.
“What happens when we die?” Dazai repeated. His eyes glittered when he turned his head to look at Chuuya and say, “No one knows, but I have a theory.”
Due to being annoying, Dazai always had a theory about everything. To make matters worse, his theories tended to be right. He proceeded to tell his personal philosophy of life and sentience, of energy constants and entropy. “Nothing ever disappears. It just changes form.”
The initial plan of gotcha-ing Dazai with an impossible question was swiftly abandoned. Chuuya was no longer annoyed with Dazai for acting like he knew it all—he wanted Dazai to be right because Dazai’s mind was beautiful. He read like a closed book, an encyclopaedia of secrets, but once he opened up, the most wonderful things poured out of him.
Since Chuuya could never keep his feelings to himself, he told Dazai about the dog. He bared his bleeding heart and the fears that squeezed it like barbed wire. Loss. Death. Being forgotten.
And Dazai, despite his sharp edges, held it gently. He said, “I think that life is just one way to live.”
“What?”
“You and I, we’re alive. Right here, right now,” Dazai said, “as we develop, we organise into patterns, we require the privilege of a personality, we become who we are, distinct from everyone else, but really, we’re just parts of the universe trapped in our skin suits.”
Lightly, almost as though he was soaring through the air, Dazai jumped off the swing. He folded his long stick legs under himself, sitting down on the rubber mulch that made up the playground flooring, patting a spot beside him for Chuuya to join.
“Before we were born, we weren’t nothing—we were everything,” Dazai said. He sounded so sure, speaking with a weight akin to personal experience. Maybe it was just arrogance. “And when we die, we stop being us, and we return to being everything.”
“Everything is everything,” Chuuya concluded. When he flattened his hand against the ground, the ruby texture caressed his fingertips and made his mind go quiet. It was like a valve; he touched the world, and it released some of his inner pressure. It spoke to him, the idea of being connected to everything around him. “I like the way you’re thinking.”
Dazai smiled like he had never been praised for having a thought before, which was ridiculous. He was brilliant, and he could have the educational system kissing his dirty shoes if he cared to.
Leaning back on his elbows, Chuuya looked up into the clouds. One of them vaguely resembled a dog until it dissolved, and the wind carried it away.
And there it was again, that stupid feeling of being scooped out from the inside. Loss. He refused to cry in front of anyone, so he turned his upper body away from Dazai.
“Wait. Did—? I did it again, didn’t I?” Dazai’s voice was small, which seemed uncharacteristic, but then again, he was hard to read. He could get away with just about anything without anyone telling him, ‘you’re not acting like yourself’. “I said the wrong thing.”
“No,” Chuuya pushed his palms into his eye sockets and dragged them down his cheeks to erase all evidence. “You said the right thing. I just got something in my eye—eyes. Both of them.”
In a swift move, Chuuya whirled back around. He reached into his pocket and closed his fist around the locket he inherited from his mother. One thing he knew for sure was that as long as he lived, he wanted to leave an impression. The only thing more fatal than dying, was being forgotten.
Feeling brave and stupid and utterly unstoppable, he pressed the locket into one of Dazai’s cold hands. “This is important to me, but I’m giving it to you because I want you to have a part of me.”
Dazai’s eyes went wide. He probably received gifts as often as he received praise and was at a loss for how to react to either.
“I want to be your friend,” Chuuya said. He didn’t pose it as a question. He declared his unyielding intent, and Dazai would simply have to deal with it.
After blinking a few times as if expecting to wake up from a dream, Dazai shrugged. “Do whatever you want,” he huffed like it was all the same to him, but he smiled like it meant the world—no, the whole universe—to him.
One year ago and-then-some ago
Centre for Rare Diseases, Yokohama University Hospital
A very aggressive and rare multiple-systems degenerative disease, that was the diagnosis. Chuuya had carried it with grace, or he had tried to, but the last months had been bad, had been bedridden, had been coughing blood. At this point, his skeletal muscles had almost completely dystrohied. Organ failures were imminent.
Two specialists tended to Chuuya, Gin and Ryu. They were good people who possessed good-people-qualities. Gin was kind and Ryu was honest.
Earlier that day, while making their rounds they had delivered bad news to Chuuya. The life-prolonging treatment he was under wasn’t working any longer. It was dire. Gin, the kind one, had given Chuuya another month to live, while Ryu, the honest one, had given him a couple of days.
Chuuya wasn’t surprised. The prognosis had worsened with every physical exam. Death was a gradual process; every day it took a bite of Chuuya, and at this point all he was left with, was crumbs of who he used to be. He could feel its maw around his throat. Could smell its breath, clinging to the walls.
Time was running out, Chuuya could hear it with every beep of the heart monitor attached to his finger.
Everything hurt. There were over thirty trillion cells in the human body. Chuuya had learned this from Dazai, who was full of facts for all occasions.
Thirty trillion cells and Chuuya was acutely aware of every single one, hurting, holding on by a thread. Not even the idea of a cup of coffee appealed to him anymore. His digestive system was too fragile to handle any degree of acid. These days, all his nutrition came through tubes.
The overhead operating room lights glared at him day and night. He was tired of feeling so seen—tired in general. It would be so easy to close his eyes. Forever. But the easy way out was an emergency exit Chuuya never planned on having to take.
He waited, and he ached for Dazai.
Dazai split his time, half spent by Chuuya’s side, the other half spent in a famous researcher’s lab, trying to do the impossible—to save Chuuya from a terminal illness in its last stages. Dazai gave daily memoranda of his genius plan and its progress.
Illness had stuffed Chuuya’s head with fog, so he hadn’t retained the specifics, but he understood the premise: The sense of self was a distributed system within the human organism. Dazai was in the process of creating a device that could extract Chuuya’s essence (Dazai called it a soul. Apparently, it was an acronym for some sort of concept that was more scientific than spiritual) and transfer it from one body to another.
Bodies.
Bodies produced back pain, they decided to fart at inopportune moments, they required regular grooming, they got sick... They were hard to live with but harder (impossible, even) to live without. According to Dazai, souls required a corporeal medium to become fully sentient in the human sense.
A creaking door signalled company. It had become Chuuya’s favourite sound.
“Dazai?” It took everything in Chuuya to speak. The grate in his voice scratched the air and left an impression of sickness hanging in the room—the kind that would make most people want to slide on a surgical mask or put some healthy distance between themselves and Chuuya.
But Dazai wasn’t most people. He stepped up to Chuuya’s sick bed like there was no place he would rather be.
“Yes, peach. It’s me, your friend, your lover, your favourite person in the world.” Dazai leaned down to kiss Chuuya’s chapped lips, tasting so full of life. “I missed you all day. Did you miss me?”
Chuuya tried to nod, but he had lost control of the muscles required to do so. Instead, he produced a gurgling sound that he hoped passed as an affirmative but feared evoked images of drowning.
Dazai’s eyes wandered from the medical chart attached to the side of the bed to the monitors stationed around Chuuya. Dazai wasn’t always easy to read. Often, his tells were in all the things he didn’t say. He had been quiet lately, and he was quiet now. His brain never shut up, and when it kept its panic to itself instead of letting it slip from his mouth, it was usually a bad sign.
“I talked to Dr Gin and Ryu.” Even though it hurt, Chuuya had to swallow a lump before he could continue. It went down his throat like a knife. “They said—”
“No bad news, I don't want to hear it,” Dazai interrupted. “Today is supposed to be a good one. Professor Natsume and I put the last touches on the soul extractor. I brought it with me. I wanted to show you.”
Out of one of Dazai’s pockets emerged a little round box of some metallic material. It changed colour as he rocked it in his hand, and the light hit its surface from different angles. Rows of buttons and switches covered the surface, and the sides were lined with little indents. It looked like something that belonged in a dream, far away from the harsh logic of reality.
Next, Dazai pulled out something that, at first glance, looked to be a handful of noodles but, on closer expectation, proved to be a knot of thin cables. He started plugging them into the box, one by one, as he explained. “The electrodes capture the wave signature of your neuronal activity along with other biorhythms, and feed them into the extractor.”
Hope bloomed in Chuuya’s chest but was extinguished the moment Dazai said, “We’re almost there.”
‘Almost’ was not enough, Chuuya knew it.
“You have to hold on just a little longer.” Dazai’s encouragement was gentle and reliable like the sun rising every morning to nudge the world into action.
Chuuya’s inner monologue was more of a drill sergeant, spitting at him to keep going. He gritted his teeth until he tasted blood and asked, “How much longer?”
“Hard to say,” Dazai hedged, picking aggressively at his nails as he so often did. Sometimes, he did it to the point of blood. (The hospital staff had commented on it on more than one occasion. “Why are there always ripped-off fingernails around your bed, Mr Chuuya?” Chuuya made his excuses, and then he worried. Dazai had a bad habit of hurting himself). “The soul extractor is a transplantation tool, but without a donor, it’s useless. To perform the operation, we need an exanimate body to transfer your soul into. The problem is that those are hard to create in vitro. Cloning technology is out of the question, as it would just produce another version of you with its own soul-code. What we need is an uninhabited body generated from organic tissue—your soul won’t respond to a vessel in a non-human form. It has been configured such that its entire signature is a reflection of the human experience, your experience. It would be like trying to get incompatible software and hardware systems to cooperate.
Chuuya cringed, he didn’t enjoy being compared to a computer.
“I’m working on it. It takes longer than I thought, or rather, than I hoped. A while ago, I asked another member of the alchemical society—someone who specialises in bio-compatible tissue engineering. His name is Fyodor Do- you know what, it doesn't matter. The point is that I asked for access to his data, which he declined. This has set back the schedule slightly, but don’t worry. I’ll figure it out. I'll fix you a new body in no time. Easy,” Dazai announced, his optimism bordered on delusion.
It didn’t sound easy. It sounded like the kind of thing that could potentially take forever. Chuuya didn’t have the heart to say that out loud, though. He barely had the heart to keep blood pumping through his body. “So tired,” he admitted, although it pained him. As though he wasn’t in enough pain already.
“Are you?” Dazai hummed, “But you look fresh as a daisy.”
Too withered to even blush at a compliment, Chuuya sighed.
“Rest, love. Close your eyes. I’ll watch you while you sleep.” Dazai wiped a hand over Chuuya’s forehead. The touch was a miracle. Dazai nullified pain.
Chuuya found all the strength he had and choked out, “I’ve been trying to tell you… I don’t have much time left. And if I—dammit—if I close my eyes, now, I’m not sure I’ll open them again.”
All the colour drained from Dazai’s face. He was pale with overwork already, but now he looked like a ghost. “It’s ready. The soul extractor—it’s ready,” he said as if he hadn’t just delineated all the ways in which it was not ready for use.
Chuuya could tell Dazai was rambling—was lying, not only to Chuuya, but to himself.
Many times, Chuuya had thought his life would be easier if he loved Dazai less. Here he was, realising that his death, too, would be easier if he loved Dazai less.
Even at his weakest, he had to stay strong. “Dazai,” he said as patiently as he could.
“Shh,” Dazai cut in, pressing a finger to Chuuya’s lips. “The soul extractor is ready. It will work, I know it will. It’s just—it was meant as a transferring instrument only. I’ve been working under the assumption that the soul will fracture without the perceptual restraints and organising influence of a body, but don’t worry. I’m sure I can store your soul inside this thing.” He waved the extraction device aggressively, its spindly cables flopping around. Then, with trembling fingers, he pressed multiple buttons at once. “No problem.”
It sounded like a problem.
“You won’t be conscious like you are now until we get you into a body, but who's to say that life as a disembodied blurb isn’t perfectly fabulous? Everything is going to be fine.”
Chuuya felt sick. He was sick. Sick and dying, and while Dazai could take his soul, he probably couldn’t keep it. It sounded impossible, but If anyone could do the impossible, it was Dazai.
Chuuya said what needed to be said before it was too late, “Do it then. Take my soul, now. I believe in you, but—”
“No buts.”
“Just in case it doesn’t work—”
“It will work.”
“I want you to find someone new to love when I'm gone.”
The words landed like a terminal diagnosis. Dazai stopped his nervous preparations, nearly dropping the soul extractor along with his jaw. “How could you say that to me?”
Then, shaking off his shock, Dazai started fiddling with his invention again, tongue sticking out as he inspected it. “It’s fine. Chuuya doesn't know what he’s saying,” he mumbled, a hysterical edge to his self-talk.
“Oi,” Chuuya hissed, “remember, life is just one way to live. Everything is everything, so if this is goodby—”
“Don’t,” Dazai snapped. “This is no goodbye. You can’t leave me. I won’t let you.”
The only person Chuuya knew who could rival his own stubbornness was Dazai. Arguing was a futile effort.
“Almost ready. Just need to attach the electrodes.” Dazai tried to open Chuuya’s hospital gown, cursing the zippers that kept getting stuck before finally deciding that the most time-efficient option was to tear it.
The electrodes were put in place. Most of them were on Chuuya’s head, but some were scattered in a ritualistic aesthetic across his body, painting a symmetric pattern down both his sides.
“Okay, I’m going to start sending a current through the electrodes now,” Dazai said, flicking a switch. A rattling sound that gradually turned into a high-pitched whistling filled the room. “When we get a clean signal, I’ll turn on the extractor.”
Chuuya closed his eyes. Finally, he could loosen his grip on wakefulness. He was in competent hands, so terrified that he wasn’t scared at all.
“It’s going to work,” Dazai murmured, “A body. I just need to make you a body.”
A body, Chuuya’s thoughts repeated again and again, until he forgot the world around him. He was left with a clean distilled intention: ‘I just need a body.’
The pain he had gotten so used to faded into the background, sensations dulling. He felt weightless, untethered. Distant and close all at once, he heard Dazai’s voice, “It’s going to be okay. I love you, Chuuya.”
Present
Chuuya was stretched thin across time, but there was one constant he returned to when all the clocks stopped ticking, and he faced the past to move forward. Dazai.
His memory, living in Dazai’s mind, was what had kept him alive.
Action had always served Chuuya better than words, so he leaned in and was captured—commemorated—in a hug. It was a shy thing, just a tangle of limbs that belied the hunger caught between them.
“I remember,” Chuuya whispered into Dazai’s hair. “You said you loved me.”
When Chuuya took a step back, there was an anxious second where he thought the ground was shifting underneath him until he realised that it was just his knees wobbling, his foundations being reorganised. “It worked. You kept my soul in the soul extractor? And, you— it must have worked because I’m—”
“It didn’t work.”
There was a pit in Chuuya’s stomach, and it threatened to turn him inside out.
“But I was—” Chuuya gestured with flailing arms. “And you were—” He didn't have the words for any of what he was trying to say, not for the science and not for the feelings.
“Trying to invent a method of keeping you alive, yes. It didn’t work, at least not as intended.” Dazai spoke in a way that left room for interpretation, so confrontationally aloof when he did what he did, simplifying the complex and complicating the simple. “I wanted to extract your soul and preserve it until I figured out how to put together a new living body for you. The extractor uprooted your cognitive signature and withdrew it. But,” he paused. Every syllable dragged on an emotion, and it was clear that this was a story he didn’t want to tell, didn’t want to relive. “Your soul dissolved. The extraction device couldn’t hold onto it. You were gone—instant brain death the second I turned on the extractor—and there was nothing left of you. I thought I had killed you.”
Taking a hold of Dazai’s wrist, Chuuya lifted it to press his lips against it, a wild pulse tapping against his lips. He never wanted to let go again.
“But you were too stubborn to die,” Dazai said and smiled. It was a small smile, angled to hide, the sort that didn’t look to be admired. Chuuya admired it nonetheless. He even felt brave enough to poke the dimple it carved into Dazai’s cheek.
“You’ve always been an enterprising individual,” Dazai said, leaning into the touch, “and impatient. Very impatient.”
“Yeah yeah.” Usually, Chuuya didn’t like having his personality recounted to him, but when Dazai did it, it felt flattering. There was something so appealing about the idea of being known.
“So,” Dazai said, “here’s what I think really happened: You weren’t going to let yourself be trapped inside some device, waiting for me to read up on current frontiers in bioengineering to clumsily fudge together a body for you. You took matters into your own hands.”
“What hands? I thought I was a disembodied soul.”
Dazai got caught up in a half-laugh-half-cry situation, punching his chest to regain a steady breath, wheezing, “That was brutal. And Chuuya has the audacity to disparage my sense of humour.”
Lending a helping hand, Chuuya gave Dazai’s back a few flat-palmed claps while reassuring him, “I’ll try to tone it down if you can’t handle it.”
“Oh no, never hold back on my account,” Dazai said, flashing an innuendo-laced grin. He regained his usual composure and continued, “Something peculiar happens when the soul separates from the body. Its sensorium is no longer limited to the medium of its material form, so it can extend backwards and forwards and contrawise.”
Chuuya nodded. This extra sensory response had been explained to him on one occasion previously as a lingering side effect of amnesia-related disintegration.
“I think you went on a soul search and found an opportunity in Dostoevsky’s facility,” said Dazai.
It made sense. In a horrible way. In a beautiful way. “I beamed myself into one of the organic tissue samples he uses to generate bio-machines?”
“I can’t know for sure that’s what happened but that’s my theory, yes, and my theories tend—”
“To be right, yes, of course they do. Fuck.”
The second Chuuya had set foot in Dostoevsky’s facility, he knew he had been there before. Splintered memories of being suspended in blue liquid made his head swim. Once, his entire existence had been contained by an isolation tub in a mad scientist’s lab. “I think I remember escaping… vaguely. At least I had a dream about trying to break out through a window at one point. But when I woke up in a shipping container in a back alley, I had no recollections of how I’d gotten there.”
“Stands to reason,” said Dazai, nodding to himself. Reasons were often clearer to Dazai than they were to other people. “You probably did escape through a window, hit your head and got a concussion when you fell. That’s why the memory of your time in the facility is hazy.”
“So I have amnesia within amnesia. That’s grand. It’s no wonder I feel a little woozy now that it’s all coming back. Fuck. I can’t believe I let it get to me, all that talk about whether or not I’m human.” Here Chuuya was, fully human with the psychological needs of a dog—he desperately wanted a head pat and to be told he was a good boy. “All that stress just because some anaemic son of a bitch said my sense of self was just a programme.”
“Dostoevsky mistook his failure of imagination for insight. I’m sorry, you ever doubted your humanity. I wish I could have told you everything sooner,” Dazai said, sounding so painfully sincere that it was easy to forget that he had reason to be sorry.
“Why didn’t you?”
“I did tell you that I couldn’t tell you.” Sometimes Dazai had to talk in circles to reach a point. “I told you that you had to figure it out on your own, that you had to take it slow. Memories are fickle. They’re subject to retrieval-induced forgetting and distortions. I’m sure you’ll be fascinated to learn that studies have been conducted in human-artificial intelligence interfaces, attempting to recreate the coding of a learning algorithm within living brains.”
“Fascinated,” Chuuya repeated. “That is an extravagant way of saying horrified.” Not everything that could be studied should be studied, that was his opinion on that matter. Being a person was hard enough without the existential threat of having to share brain-space with a comatose machine.
“The test subjects had their consciousnesses switched off during the procedure. Once it was over and their brains recalibrated, some of them experienced shock reactions and temporary rejection of personal memories.” Dazai talked fast, pitch climbing and putting a certain edge in his voice.
For a moment, Chuuya catalogued it as a new variation in an impressive range of expression. Then his memories caught up to him, and he remembered all the times he had heard that particular edge before—remembered being sick and thinking that it hurt Dazai much more than it hurt himself, remembered thinking that dying was a pain in the neck but dying first was a mercy.
“You’ve undergone a full soul transplant,” Dazai said, “which is much more extreme than just a temporary blackout. I was afraid that forced recall would overburden your system, and you’d end up completely rejecting your memories.”
“I wasn’t ready until now,” Chuuya concluded. Hindsight was so clear, it was almost blinding. Looking back, Dazai had shared a precise confusion of clues. Every clever evasion he had thrown at Chuuya had been an attempt to stir him in the right direction, not to lead him astray.
“I have been planting gentle reminders all along, though,” Dazai said, “giving you little souvenirs.”
“Peach,” Chuuya said, except it was more of a hiccup. “It was our thing.”
He remembered a hot summer spent by Dazai’s side, eating ripe peaches, juice dripping down their chins. Dazai had said he liked them because they were sweet and soft, just like Chuuya, and Chuuya had said that he didn’t see himself reflected in that description. On any given day, he was much more likely to be called a spitfire or a slug than he was to be called soft or sweet. The argument had died, but a new nickname had been born.
From that day on, Chuuya responded to ‘peach’ if Dazai was the one calling.
“It’s still our thing, peach,” Dazai said, reaching into a pocket and pulling out the locket that Chuuya recognised from his dream—from his memories— dangling it by its silver chain like a pendulum, a hypnotic back and forth.
“It was mine once. I gave it to you,” Chuuya said softly. A gift he had once received, then re-gifted, now coming back to him. Closure was a sweet rush that went straight to his head like caffeine.
“And I kept a photo of you inside it to always have you with me.” Dazai dropped the locket into Chuuya’s waiting hands, asking, “You still don’t remember that you used to look different?”
“No, it’s strange,” Chuuya said. There were different types of memories. Some were just the daily struggle to recall where the hell he put his coffee cup down, not finding it until the coffee had gone cold. And then there was a deeper unease, straight from some indefinable core, the gnawing sense of there being nothing where there should be something. “In my memories, I look the way I do now.”
“Look inside,” Dazai made a little nod towards the locket.
Chuuya opened it, knowing what he would find. It was a dream coming true, literally. A picture of himself. Except it wasn’t. The Chuuya in the photo had much softer features than he did. His lips were made for smiling, but the smile didn’t reach his sunken eyes or the dark circles beneath. Life was a spectrum, and when that photo was taken, Chuuya was more dead than alive.
Chuuya felt utterly beside himself. Vaguely, he remembered looking in the mirror and seeing that face gazing back at him, he just wasn’t sure he had ever identified with it.
So he asked a stupid question—stupid because he knew the answer, and he wasn’t sure he wanted to hear it. “Who’s that?”
“You.”
“Right. Yes. Of course. Dostoevsky said I developed a unique appearance. I overrode the genetic programming—that’s how he put it—through sheer force of will.”
“Typical Chuuya,” Dazai said in a way so fond and melodic.
“Why didn’t I make myself look the same as before?” Chuuya had come to expect Dazai to have all the answers, hiding them behind a smug smile.
It came as a surprise when Dazai said, “I don’t know. Maybe you tried but couldn’t. I don’t know how this works exactly. Maybe this”—he reached out and gave Chuuya’s arm a squeeze, muscles flexing under his touch—“is how you always viewed yourself. Nice well-proportioned biceps and all. Strong. Illness got the better of you once, so you recreated yourself in the image of a survivor?”
Heat crawled up Chuuya’s neck. To be seen was to let go of power, but he liked the way he looked in Dazai’s eyes. “So you like my new looks better than the old ones?” he asked.
“Chuuya.” Dazai wasn’t the chiding kind (how could he be with how chidable he was himself) but he did sound mildly exasperated. “Wrong question.”
“What’s the right question?” Chuuya wanted to know.
“Some questions are better left unasked and unanswered,” Dazai said in his infinite wisdom.
Chuuya wouldn’t be Chuuya, though, if he knew how to leave well enough alone. Comparison was a curse, but it was a way of relating as well. He looked at the old photo again and suspected that the reason he had such a hard time remembering this version of himself was because a part of him was actively repressing a time when he felt less comfortable in his own skin.
Bodies, he reckoned, were a lot like clothes.
Chuuya cared about clothes a normal amount. He knew someone who cared an abnormal amount: Kouyou. She would frequently talk about feeling bad for the dresses in the back of her closet, the ones she never wore. “That’s a non-problem. Wear them, then,” Chuuya had said once, to which the answer had been: “They don’t fit.” When he suggested giving them away, he had received a glare. “No, they’re special to me,” Kouyou had answered. She loved her dresses. Some of them were the wrong size, some were the wrong style, but she still kept them and treasured them.
Chuuya felt a similar way about his old appearance. It was his, it just didn’t fit as well as the one he had now.
This realisation should make Chuuya feel better. It did make him feel better. And yet. He was just a small part of the universe trapped in a skin suit. The confines of his skin didn’t define him.
With his excellent timing and nose for existential crises, Dazai asked, “Everything alright there, peach?”
“It’s just—“ Chuuya started. He looked down at his hands, and they seemed miles away. He looked up at Dazai, who seemed so close. “Who am I?”
“You’re you,” Dazai answered cleverly. He made it sound as self-evident as it was.
“But…” Chuuya’s feelings were bigger than his vocabulary, a stuttering obsession swelling. Was he still the person he once was if the connection was only by memory, not by flesh? “What if I can’t be the person I remember?” He looked at Dazai, not for answers but for comfort—a strategy that backfired when a new anxiety squeezed his gut. “Wait, what if I can’t be the person you remember?”
“Don’t worry,” Dazai said. It was a horrible habit of his.
“I think I will, though.”
Dazai sighed, but it wasn't a sound of exhaustion. “Who is anyone, really? You lost your memories, but they’re coming back, and they’re still yours. Your body isn’t the one you were born into, but it’s still yours. Besides, we all change. Millions of cells in my body have regenerated since we parted, so in a way, I have a new body too.”
When it came to scientific facts, trying to prove Dazai wrong was an ill-conceived plan of action. Instead, Chuuya raised an eyebrow in the universal sign of 'go on'.
“Truth be told, I never really knew who I was either,” Dazai said, “I’ve been a lot of different people since the day I thought I lost you, all of them miserable. I was a lot of different people when we were together too. When we first met, I was, by objective standards, a bit of a loser.”
“Those sound like subjective standards.” Chuuya knew that Dazai engaged in hard-core impression management. ‘Loser’ may have been one of the masks he once wore, but it had never been who he was.
“It’s true,” Dazai insisted, “you loved a loser, and I lost a lover, but look at us now.” He wore a grin that made him look a little insane, which he probably was. (As far as Chuuya was concerned, all the best people, including himself, were a little insane). He made grand statements and punctuated them by lightly bopping a finger against Chuuya’s nose. “The intricate physics of our inner and outer world is our medium, and despite the entropy gradient we’re embedded in, it’s malleable to our life-craving sentiments. All of that to say, you lost parts of your narrative for a while, but you never stopped being the narrator. You’re Chuuya. You get to decide what that means to you. To me, it means that you’re my peach, my darling. The sum of that mathematically, according to my calculations, is this—” Dazai wrapped himself around Chuuya as if he was a life vest. The conclusion was dropped into Chuuya’s ear on a tickling breath, “I adore you. It’s that simple.”
Despite everything, Chuuya found himself believing in something as fantastical as simplicity.
If Chuuya opened his mouth, he was sure some horrid sob would escape, so instead of saying that he felt the same, he tried to show it, finding Dazai’s hand and linking their fingers.
When Dazai pulled back, he nimbly slid Chuuya’s ring off in the process, holding it up. “I don’t think you need this anymore.”
The ring had been presented to Chuuya as a calibrator, a brain wave therapy of sorts, to support brain integration and memory retrieval. Somewhere along the way, Chuuya had gotten attached to it. Without it, his ring finger felt naked. Maybe he liked what it represented; it had taught him to allow his memories to return on their own terms. When they were ready—when he was ready. Maybe, though, he just liked the idea of wearing a ring that Dazai had gifted him.
“You never needed it. It’s just a flashy accessory,” Dazai said, throwing the ring up in the air and catching it in his palm again.
“What,” Chuuya said, thoughts scrambling in his head, “the fuck?” If he wasn’t so terminally enamoured by Dazai and all his nonsense, he would threaten violence. As it were, he settled for a glower.
“Everything I told you about your gift for extrasensory perception and how it interferes with memory recovery was true. This ring just didn’t do anything to facilitate the process of healing your brain. That was all you.”
“That can’t be right. I felt the ring do its weird brain-calibration-science-thing multiple times,” Chuuya said. “You were there when it zapped me. You even gave me some kind of green sludge to alleviate the weirdness.”
“Your mind can be a powerful healing tool when given the chance. It can convince your body that a sham treatment is the real thing and make it react accordingly.” Dazai slid the ring into a pocket and clapped his hands as though he had just performed a magnificent trick. “It never had any effect on your brain, but the story I told you about its purported purpose and function did. You internalised those messages. You opened your mind to me when you allowed me to hypnotise you. It’s a practice of trust. In the immediate aftermath of having just gone under, you were highly susceptible and primed to accept my suggestions. I took the opportunity to introduce the idea of neuronal integration to you. The ring was simply a contrivance of symbolic value that I pulled out of my sleeve.
“That’s quite the scheme you came up with,” Chuuya said. He couldn't decide if he meant it as a jab or a compliment.
“When I told you that you had to stop using your gift, you said you couldn’t control it and seemed firm in that belief. I ran the mental maths and concluded that having the argument would only risk perturbing your inner balance, which was already unsettled by the hypnotic procedure, so in the service of speeding up your recovery, I decided to speak to your subconscious instead.” Dazai talked about science in a way that made it sound like magic. He had cast a spell on Chuuya, and it had worked. “Oh, and that green cocktail? Just an effervescent multivitamin.”
“You’re so fucking—” Chuuya gestured with flailing arms. He was a little horrified to discover the power Dazai’s words had over him, a little aroused too.
“I know,” Dazai said, and it sounded a little like ‘I’m sorry’, face tilting in a contrite manner, “but this was the best way of getting you to regulate yourself. You’re not mad at me, are you?”
One annoying thing about Dazai, and there were many annoying things about Dazai, was that despite how difficult he was, he was easy to forgive.
Someone less observant than Chuuya might describe Dazai’s personality as contrarian, but really, he was a freethinker, which was very different and very in line with Chuuya’s tastes. Dazai was so clever, and Chuuya was so stupidly besotted with him.
Just because he could, Chuuya said, “Maybe I am. Maybe you should start thinking of ways to make it up to me.” He could feel a smile trying to crack his face.
“Oh, I may have some ideas,” Dazai answered sweetly, licking his lips.
Entirely on their own accord, Chuuya's eyes followed the action. His stomach twisted. It was a feeling that reminded him of hunger. A primal need that could only go unfulfilled for so long before it would kill him, and only Dazai could satisfy it. Dazai was everything. He was the meal and the table and the utensils.
Chuuya leaned in, but then the lips that he was about to take a bite off moved.
“That’s not all,” Dazai murmured. “Another reason I wanted you to have the ring was because of its tracking feature.”
Before he could fall, Chuuya managed to steady himself with a hand on Dazai’s waist where it fit so perfectly. The point of contact drew all of his attention, and he stared helplessly at the way the fabric of Dazai’s stupid lab coat ruffled and bunched under his touch.
“Chuuya? Are you listening?”
“Yes. Of course.” Chuuya dropped his hand and looked up. “You were saying? The tracker, right.” In a flash, Chuuya made a connection he hadn’t before. It slammed into his mind, a spike to the base of the skull. “Wait, So that time I visited you, and you said you were expecting me?”
“Oh. Oh no, that was just a hunch. I respect your privacy, peach. I didn't turn on the tracker until you called me yesterday. You always used to do that, remember?—Seek me out before doing something stupid, almost like you wanted my permission to go and get yourself into trouble.”
“No,” Chuuya answered. He had no recollection of engaging in such a ritual. “I don’t do stupid things.”
“Of course not, darling, you would never,” Dazai said, sounding scandalised as though he hadn’t been the one to bring the matter up to start with, “but in either case, that was how I knew it was time to keep an eye on the tracker to see where you were going. You came back to me. I wasn’t going to allow anyone to take you from me again.”
Those words spoke to something that lived beneath Chuuya’s ribs, a possessive urge that surpassed exasperation, self-demise and even death. He had lived and died for Dazai, and he still had so much more to give.
One thing led to the next. The world was wet mouths and a crush-bone embrace. It was lateral then it was horisontal. Chuuya was on the floor, Dazai pinned under him, looking like a dream come true. Lips glistening, eyes blown, face flushed. They kissed, and when he broke away for air, they were connected by the same breath and a thin string of saliva that Dazai went all cross eyes staring at. It was ridiculous and Chuuya had never felt this happy. “Wow,” he said, profoundly.
“Best kiss you ever had?” Dazai asked playfully.
“One of many best ones,” Chuuya returned with a wink. And then he stole another best kiss, straight from Dazai’s mouth.
The purr of possession sang in Chuuya’s veins and he let it out on Dazai’s neck, dragging bandages aside with his teeth to nip at sensitive skin, tasting salt and the beat of a pulse on his tongue. He had missed Dazai before he had even remembered him. Finally all that longing had found a release.
There were hands in his hair, nails scratching all the way down his nape. His pants were getting tight. Bursting with pent-up energy, he could easily find his release, rutting like a dog against Dazai’s thigh.
It took every ounce of self-control Chuuya possessed, to break off and sit back, “Wait. I don’t want it to be over so soon.”
“How sweet,” Dazai said, reaching out and dragging a thumb over the side of Chuuya’s mouth. “We’ll take it slow. Come on, take me to bed.”
—
In a graceless dance of incoordination and wandering touches, Chuuya made his way to the bedroom with Dazai piggy-back clinging to his back, laughter passing between them like a vibrating wire.
What Chuuya lacked in poise, he made up for in efficiency, stripping himself of clothes and leaving a pile of his earthly belongings on the floor. He stood there the way science and the universe had created him, gloriously naked. His physique was the kind that attracted admiring glances, even from himself, when he happened to pass a mirror. Nothing, though, compared to the weight of Dazai’s attention—it could crush with just a look.
Chuuya wiped the prison of sweat off his forehead. Getting clothes off was the easy part, he realised, despite Dazai wearing multiple layers.
Now that Dazai was down to just his underwear and the strips of bandages that ribboned his body, Chuuya got a little lost in his stop-and-stare beauty. (A beauty that was a little on the thin side in a way that Chuuya’s detective senses clogged as a lack of self-care. He wanted to do unspeakable things to Dazai, like making him eat three meals a day).
Damp-palms eager, Chuuya had no idea what to do next besides waiting for instructions like some common machine.
“So,” said Dazai, tilting his head as he played with a tucked-in edge of a strip of bandage around his wrist, undoing it to reveal the pale skin underneath, painted in pink and puckered lines.
He showed his scars with an almost defiant flair, an ‘if I bare myself first, you can’t expose me’ sort of deal. Some of the scars were old, while others had joined the canvas later, probably in an attempt to trace the shape of the grief he had endured during his time apart from Chuuya
Scars, like memories, were the deep cuts of life. Every second Chuuya wasn’t touching Dazai was a wasted moment. He couldn’t change what had happened, but he could still patch it up. His nerve endings were frayed by the urge to reach out. To touch and to soothe. The fear of putting his hands in the wrong place or doing it in the wrong way, though, had him handcuffed.
“You’re very beautiful.” It was a truist’s turn of phrase that did little to capture the enormity of the sentiment Chuuya sought to convey, but it was the truest thing he could think to say.
Some things didn’t change. Dazai was as useless at receiving a compliment as he had been ten years ago. He deflected the attention right back to Chuuya, looking him up and down, gaze lingering around the crotch area. “That’s… I mean, if we’re rating each other’s physical attributes—”
“We really don’t have to, I just—”
“I must say that I find your dimensions exceedingly lovely. Lots of bulk lots of—” Dazai reached out and poked at Chuuya’s pecs, “solidity.”
It was a flattering statement, even though Chuuya couldn't quite shake the impression that he was being crammed into a taxonomy more suited for describing geologic formations. “I’m alright.” He waved a hand, feeling confident, or at least eager to exude confidence.
“Is this the first time you’re naked in front of anyone in your new body?” Dazai asked.
Strictly speaking, Dostoevsky had seen Chuuya naked, but what he had seen was never intended for his eyes, and therefore he didn’t count. Chuuya nodded.
“So in a way,” Dazai said in a conversational tone, “you’re a virgin.”
The comment pulled an undignified splutter out of Chuuya.
“But in more ways,” Dazai continued, “you’re very experienced, so don’t worry. We’ve done this before, and I assure you, our teamwork has always been excellent.” A shiver danced along his arms. Maybe he was cold without his layers. Maybe he was reliving a moment of excellent teamwork.
“I’ve been dreaming about it, but the real thing is…” Chuuya trailed off, distracted. How was he supposed to keep his thoughts straight when the curve of Dazai’s waist was so devastating? Some types of pining could only be expressed in shapes and feelings; Dazai’s body was one of them.
“Better?” Dazai supplied. His smile curled like a fractal. “Tell me what you want.”
The problem was that Chuuya wanted everything all at once, mind short-circuiting under the monumental load of his desires, rendering him utterly incapable of formulating any of it beyond, “You.”
“Can you be more specific?”
Chuuya shook his head and felt a little dizzy.
“Ah. It’s fortunate, then,” Dazai said, voice striking just shy of a purr, “that I know what you want.” He took a step back, sitting down on the edge of the bed, spreading his legs so Chuuya could fit in between.
When Dazai beckoned, Chuuya followed as though he had been preprogrammed to do so. He stepped closer, placing a hand where Dazai’s neck met his shoulder, a collarbone so sharp it could cut. Chuuya would happily bleed for this.
Looking up through his lashes, Dazai said, “You want me to tell you what to want. Am I right?”
The second Chuuya had the option presented to him it became everything he had ever wanted. He had lived by his own rules for long enough to recognise the appeal of following orders, at least if they came from Dazai’s mouth. “Please.”
“Whatever you want, dear,” Dazai said, but then he said no more, either unwilling or unable to speak to his own wants. The blood spilt in his journal was proof that he could articulate his pain, but pain and pleasure were often at odds, a high tolerance of one coming at the expense of the other.
If Chuuya’s memory served him right, and for once he reckoned that it did, past experience suggested that Dazai needed to be in control in order to dose and contain pleasure.
“I think we want the same thing,” Chuuya said. It was a point drawn from complementary rather than similarity. He slid down to the floor, offering himself. It was a natural thing to do, getting on his knees to worship Dazai’s beautiful body and mind. He grazed his lips against the soft skin of Dazai’s inner thigh. He was certain he could survive only on this, food and water and oxygen be damned. This was familiar, an old new favourite—he cherished those thighs.
“You’re so good for me,” Dazai said, hand curling around the back of Chuuya’s neck like a necklace. “Come here.”
In one quick move, Chuuya stood up and slung an arm around Dazai’s core, hauling him up and back to rest flat against the mattress.
Melting into the sheets, Dazai threw his head back to bare his neck as he said, “Show me how bad you want me.”
It was an invitation Chuuya couldn’t deny. This was how he reclaimed both Dazai and himself. By tooth and nail. He scratched his mark along Dazai’s side while latching his mouth to a clavicle, biting and sucking it like peach pulp.
Friction grew between their rutting bodies, Chuuya’s mind emptying as his cock filled out. Hitched breaths rained down on him, making heat sizzle along his spine. He was sure that if he were to have an x-ray image taken at this moment, it would reveal that his insides were on fire.
Dazai slithered out from under Chuuya, pushing a hand against his chest.
“You’re very eager.” Dazai’s expression was bashful, but his cock spoke explicitly of desire, a hard line straining against his underwear.
Chuuya leaned in and licked over a nipple. He wanted to map Dazai’s entire body with his tongue. Every scar, every protruding bone.
“Ah-ah,” Dazai lilted. He pushed against Chuuya’s chest once more, forcing him to sit back—to keep his hands and mouth to himself.
“Entertain yourself while I prepare myself real quick,” Dazai said, waving a bottle that he had magically materialised while Chuuya had been otherwise distracted. He uncapped it and lathered his fingers in shimmering oil, as he said pensively. “It has been a while. Hope this stuff doesn’t expire.”
Clinically, methodically, doctorly, he disposed of his last piece of clothing. He sat back on his heels and reached a hand back behind himself.
Chuuya watched, dick aching and mouth watering. “I could help.”
“You don’t have to,” Dazai said. There was a wispy quality to his voice but it wasn’t pleasure, it was focus. The cerebral creature that he was, physicality put him slightly on edge, and he appeared to regain his balance by tightening his composure. What was his love of science and his endless theorising if not an attempt to understand the world and thereby control it? This was Dazai at his most unfiltered, adamant on asserting dominance over everyone and everything, most of all himself.
“I think you’ve gotten too used to being alone and doing everything on your own,” Chuuya said, inching closer. “I’m here. I want to help.”
The answer came in the form of a kiss to Chuuya’s nose, the bottle of lube pressed into his hand as a token of trust.
The very next moment, Dazai lugged himself into Chuuya’s lap. They were facing one another, sharing the same broken breath.
The position was perfect. Chuuya could reach a hand behind Dazai and press against his rim, stretching him open one finger at a time, until he was loose and flushed. It was like relearning how to play an instrument once mastered, fingers tracing a tactile memory like an old favourite song, listening to the staccato of Dazai’s breath.
Dazai rocked forward, riding Chuuya’s fingers one last time. “That’s enough,” he said, lifting up on his knees and seizing Chuuya’s cock in a fist.
The spike of arousal punched the breath out of Chuuya’s lungs. Little fireflies dotted his vision as he watched Dazai lining up so Chuuya’s cock teased against his entrance.
For a moment, it seemed that he was still too tight to allow the intrusion, but then the head of Chuuya’s cock breached that ring of muscle, dipping into slick heat.
Pleasure was a soundless gasp from Dazai’s mouth. Chuuya bit back the moan that scratched at his throat so as to not disturb the moment. That was the difference between them; for Dazai there was power in being quiet, being heard without having to say anything. For Chuuya, being quiet meant willingly yielding power.
Chuuya grabbed Dazai’s waist for something to hold onto. “Fuck,” he whispered. It wasn’t very eloquent but he was positively surprised he managed to speak at all.
Dazai’s thighs trembled. His eyes were all pupils, were black fucking holes that sucked Chuuya right in. “Indeed,” he answered. Slowly—not just slowly, but torturously slowly—he sank down, swallowing Chuuya’s cock.
It was too good. Chuuya feared that his soul might leave his body and ascend to the endless sky. Dazai shook all over as he dropped fully onto Chuuya’s cock, burying it deep inside him. He collapsed forward, seeking contact, teeth first.
A loving bite landed on Chuuya’s shoulder, sensation blooming. This was happiness—sharp points digging into his tender flesh and the soft warmth of Dazai’s lips dragging along, words slithering across heated skin, “You’re disgustingly perfect.”
Exposed as a raw nerve, Chuuya twitched. Every point of contact was a livewire. He gathered his strength. If he wasn’t careful, he’d come just from this, having his cock warmed.
With all the grace of experience and the tremor of the first time, Dazai surged forward. He found a slow rhythm, more back and forth than up and down, hips rolling and grinding.
Taking full advantage of the little leverage he had, Chuuya arched up, pursuing a single-minded goal to keep Dazai as stuffed full as possible at all times.
Dazai squirmed. A barely audible whine fell from his kiss-swollen lips.
It was the loveliest sound Chuuya had ever heard, and he knew just which buttons to push to reproduce it. This intuition for intimacy ran deep; it moved him on a cellular plane. He hoisted Dazai up as though he weighed nothing, guiding his movements with hands spread wide against his ass. Dazai’s legs curled around Chuuya’s hips, possessiveness a whetted reflex.
At the same time as Dazai settled back, Chuuya thrust up into his tight heat.
“Chuu-ya,” Dazai sighed sweetly, syllables melting in his mouth like sugar.
Energised by the praise, Chuuya touched the head of Dazai’s cock, which stood pretty and pink between them, tracing the length of his shaft. Dazai’s whole body jerked.
“Too much?”
“Just sensitive. Feeling a little rusty. Haven’t done this since before you got too sick to—” Dazai cut himself off and started again, “Never thought I’d do this again. Never wanted to if it wasn’t with you. Never wanted anyone else.” He said it the same way he might say 'two plus two is four', presenting a love confession as an indisputable fact.
“Never? You’d be celibate for the rest of your life?” Chuuya was flattered to think he had the power to ruin Dazai for anyone else.
“I haven’t even touched myself while we’ve been apart.” Dazai’s voice dripped like candle wax, “You’re the only one who knows how to make me feel good.”
At that, Chuuya’s vision whited out. He couldn’t think, couldn’t breathe. He was human, but inside him lived a creature so ancient and so primal, pure hunger. It rushed through his veins like an electric current, imploring him to move. He crashed into Dazai, knocking him back against the mattress.
The air felt thin as Chuuya inhaled through parted lips, beholding the vision beneath him: Dazai splayed out like a glittering fallen star—like every wish Chuuya had ever made.
His hands slid under Dazai’s thigh, lifting a leg off the bed, propping it over his shoulder and prying the other open. “Can I?” he asked. If the answer was no, he would probably forsake his dignity completely and start crying. He felt that his life depended on this, feeling Dazai from the inside.
“You don’t even have to ask.”
Chuuya sank in smoothly, a slow and slick drag against Dazai’s inner walls. He tried to hold still, but he was acutely aware of the world moving around him. The planet was hurtling through space on a faithfully curved trajectory, and Chuuya went along because he trusted that every path would lead him back to Dazai. They had spent a revolution and-then-some around the sun apart, but now they were in orbit, never to be separated again.
“Move,” Dazai said, a command offered in a pleading tone.
Doing as told, Chuuya pulled all the way out and thrust back in, setting a steady pace. A flare of passion sent shockwaves through his body and pooled at the floor of his gut. Harder, faster. Pleasure picked him apart but he stitched himself back together to fit perfectly on top of Dazai.
Although Dazai remained quiet as he was fucked, his body answered to every touch, speaking in shivers of pleasure. It was a secret language shared between them.
Chuuya leaned in, reaching a hand around Dazai’s nape to angle his head right and pry his mouth open.
They tangled and merged. The boundary of the body was far less important than the expansion of the kiss. Chuuya felt it in his molars, in his gut, in his soul.
Like a conduit of pleasure, Dazai arched his back and swerved his hips to meet Chuuya’s thrusts, clenching so good around his cock. “I missed you so much, you have no idea,” he panted into Chuuya’s open mouth, “and I couldn’t tell you.”
“I missed you too. I missed you before I even knew who you were.” Chuuya touched Dazai all over, hands everywhere. It felt like touching lightning.
Upon their first meeting, Dazai had announced that he was a collector of favours. Chuuya wouldn’t be here if not for Dazai and his genius brain. He owed, not just a favour, but his life to Dazai.
“I’m yours,” Chuuya said. He wanted to give Dazai everything. He’d be good, the best. Dazai had waited for him, so he was going to make sure the wait was worth it.
He lost his flow but continued moving his hips in sharp jerks, powered only by raw need. It was messy, it was perfect. “Please.”He hardly knew what he was asking for. Anything, everything. “Please, please,” he begged again and again like it was the password to everything he had ever wanted. He gathered Dazai up in his arms, drooled all over him, held him tight.
“Take anything you need from me,” Dazai whispered.
So Chuuya reached between their bodies. Just a single touch, his hand loosely fitting around Dazai’s cock, and that was it. Dazai looked beautiful when he came. His mouth dropped open, his whole body lurched and then sagged bonelessly against Chuuya, trembling as he spilt hot and sticky between them. He clenched hard around Chuuya’s cock. Chuuya’s orgasm struck like a nuclear reaction, starting at the base of his spine.
Waves of pleasure washed over him. His grip on reality slipped multiple gears, and when he caught up to his own mind, he was utterly spent. He collapsed, buried his head in the crook of Dazai's neck.
Through it all, Dazai clung tightly, arms and legs wrapped around Chuuya, like he was trying to perform alchemy—like they were metals and if they melted and combined, they’d turn into liquid gold.
There was something so feline about Dazai’s joy. He stretched like a cat lounging in a sun-stripe. “Sweet peach,” he said, patting the top of Chuuya’s head.
Chuuya looked up. He held Dazai like he’d hold water or memories, something he feared would get away from him. It was moments like these that memories were made to form around, little snapshots of experiences that deserved to live forever.
Distance was a relative term. Once, Chuuya measured it by how far he’d go for a decent cup of coffee. Now, it was the space between him and Dazai. He closed the gap between them. This hardwon kiss wasn’t the first they had shared, and it wouldn’t be the last. It was everything in between, a moment of unforgettable joy where Chuuya pressed his lips to his past, his future, his Dazai.