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The warehouse is drenched in the stench of the dead. It’s a bitter, acrid scent that stings Dazai’s nostrils as he crosses it, gun cocked and aimed at the last man standing at its opposite end.
“Please –,” the man starts, never to finish as Dazai sends another bullet flying, followed by two more, all of which cross the space between them with perfect accuracy to embed themselves into the man’s chest.
He falls on his back with a sickening grunt and Dazai continues his approach, unbothered even as he steps into the puddle of blood quickly spreading around the squirming man on the floor.
An excited smirk blossoms on Dazai’s lips as he considers the man’s pale face, the way the blood adds to the aromatic symphony of decay all around him.
It is not the smell of death, because death is sweet, it’s a summery blessing, it’s enticing, but the stench of blood and gore allude to it, announcing its approach – and Dazai welcomes it eagerly.
“Ah, it’s too late to save you now,” Dazai interrupts the man’s sobs, head tilting as he looks over his injuries “But like this, you’ll die slowly. There will be more than enough time to feel the pain.”
The man sobs something particularly pitiful, but the quiver in Dazai’s heart is nothing but excitement.
“I can speed it along though, if you want me to,” he offers, already raising the gun in his hand.
The corpses that are spread all around him seem to hold their absent breaths, the warehouse’s very air thickening in anticipation, quivering in preparation for a glimpse of the great beyond.
“Please,” the man repeats, this time in a desperate babble, and Dazai is happy to comply.
He pulls the trigger – once, twice, three times and more – timing the flexing of his finger with the pounding of his heart. He laughs, hears it spilling from his lips absently, the sound echoing in the warehouse that now has no other living being but himself, the breathy sound of life twisting itself around the deadly gunshots time and time again.
“Stop shooting dead bodies.”
Dazai does, finger freezing. A wide grin spreads on his lips, while his eyes, still crazed and wide open, snap up to meet Chuuya’s.
He’s standing over the corpse, not sparing a single glance to its mirrored ghostly image as he taps it and makes it go away, dissolving instantly in a shimmery fog.
His attention is instead on Dazai, glaring at him with lips twisted in disgust.
Dazai widens his smirk further, lets it sharpen to a cutting blade as he squeezes the trigger once more, letting a final bullet embed itself into the soulless body below him – same as a petulant child would, when confronted with someone telling them not to.
Chuuya sighs, looking up to the skies above as if questioning his very role in the universe.
He runs a hand through his hair, then glances around them, frown deepening.
“You’re too wasteful,” he declares and Dazai feels his lips twitch in response.
“I’m just setting the scene for you.”
Chuuya’s nose wrinkles and he walks to the next dead body and the ghostly spectrum floating over it without another word.
Dazai follows him excitedly, trailing behind him in silent awe as the grim reaper gets to work.
Not much belonging with the living, Dazai’s ability lets him connect to those beyond, lets him see and talk to the dead.
Being able to interact with Death himself had just been a side effect of it.
He’s met many grim reapers throughout his life, some gloomy and some straight up creepy. Chuuya, however, is the first one who has ever felt like living.
He has something about him, that very something that Dazai seems to be missing.
A spark of life, a breath of fresh air, a will to live, maybe.
“This one can still make it,” Chuuya says eventually, crouching next to a man Dazai’s shot straight through the chest “It’s not his time yet.”
Chuuya’s eyes are vacant, as if looking at the man, but seeing right through him, and Dazai squints down too, trying to find whatever Chuuya sees, trying to grasp that attachment to life and feel it.
As if on cue, the man gasps, coughing violently as he wheezes out a breath.
It’s one of those incredible brushes with death, Dazai bets he could even make a miraculous recovery if taken to a hospital fast enough.
“He can still live,” Chuuya tells him, gaze eerily lost between himself and the would-be corpse “If you help him.”
Dazai hums, considers Chuuya crouched down below him as he raises his eyes to meet Dazai’s, haze clearing to pin him down with bright blue.
“Right away!” Dazai grins, then aims right between the man’s eyebrows and shoots him dead.
Chuuya tsks in disapproval, but taps the ghostly spectrum to dismiss it before it can even manifest fully.
“Like I said,” Chuuya grumbles, “Wasteful.”
One by one, the ghosts dissolve in shimmery fog under Chuuya’s fingertips as they make their way around the warehouse.
At one more point, Chuuya tries to convince him to call for help for another gravely injured, but not yet dead body. Again, Dazai refuses and relishes in the liveliness of Chuuya’s aggravation.
Traditionally, Dazai would use his ability to question the spirits, to drag torture on even past the great beyond, but the tense line of Chuuya’s shoulders stop him this once. Dazai tends to go overboard to give him more work, tends to do his very best to keep Chuuya around longer, but he’s been noticing it get to him more than it used to, has been noticing him drained, more than annoyed lately, so Dazai trails behind him but out of his way, basking in his presence but not meddling with it.
Once he’s done, Chuuya glances around the carnage of the warehouse, gaze trailing over Dazai’s blood-splattered form lingeringly.
Dazai gives him a tentative smile and Chuuya looks away.
“I better not see you again too soon,” he warns, mouth tilting downwards “They’re gonna get you one of these days.”
Dazai shrugs, laughing softly.
“I wouldn’t be that lucky,” he says, leaning closer to whisper “Though I understand why Chuuya would be so eager to get his hands on me.”
Chuuya snorts something between a laugh and a groan.
“Please, getting my hands on you would be a nightmare.”
Dazai hums, disbelieving, and Chuuya’s odd smile falls.
“I meant it, Dazai,” he says, voice soft, yet more than enough to send Dazai’s heart splintering “Be careful, yeah?”
And then he’s gone, fading into the same misty look the souls he reaps take on.
Dazai offers a ghost of a smile to the empty space he’d been on.
“Till next time, Chuuya.”
They do, in fact, end up getting him.
It’s oddly comforting, the way Chuuya vaguely refers to every other human, having no clear recognition of anyone but Dazai.
It’s just him, in Chuuya’s eyes, because he has no other connection to humanity anymore, except for Dazai and the vague notion of the hundreds of faceless enemies Dazai has made through his years as a young mafioso.
So he clings to that, lets it soothe some of the pain of the stray bullet that went right through his stomach. It’s not life endangering, not unless he continues to bleed freely on an ally by himself, but fuck does it hurt.
And Dazai hates pain.
Chuuya, as much as Dazai hates to admit it, was right of course.
There’s only so much one can get away with while living in the shadows and pissing off everyone around him – and Dazai considers himself a master at both.
So while he doesn’t get as entertaining reactions out of anyone else as the ones he can coax out of Chuuya, he did manage to collect quite an impressive list of people out to get him.
And well, get him they did.
Or they will, if he passes out before Hirotsu manages to find him in the back alley he crawled to.
Dazai is going to die a lonely death, which was expected, but feels oddly painful now.
“Found you!” a fuckwad yells out as he runs into the alley, spotting Dazai slumped against the wall between two dumpsters.
Dazai manages a shaky smile, eyes wide and devoid of feeling. He’s too weak to talk, so while the unsubtle yelling was bad, because it makes them easier to follow, it was also helpful in getting Hirotsu some warning of where to find him.
Dazai has been bleeding freely and too weak to talk for a while now, but there are still things he’s better at than talking.
“I’ve got you now, you fucking – ”
The man doesn’t get to finish his sentence though, slumping down with a bullet hole between his eyebrows.
Dazai’s arm drops to his side, gun smoking and wound bleeding even more freely now that it’s been jostled by movement.
He groans, vision swimming and he wheezes out a painful whimper through his teeth.
Through the blurring darkness of his drooping eyelids though, he can still faintly make out the dead man’s ghostly form beginning to manifest.
“Open your fucking eyes.”
Dazai does, eyelids snapping open obediently at the familiar rough drawl.
“Hey, shithead,” Chuuya greets, crouching in front of him as he blindly slaps at the soul behind him to make it dissipate into the afterlife “Stay with me, yeah?”
Dazai blinks, squints at him and tries to press harder against the bullet hole in his stomach to try and contain the bleeding, though he suspects it’s doing more harm than good now.
“With you?” Dazai mumbles, raising a mocking eyebrow through the pain.
He’s sure he looks ghastly and sweaty by now, but Chuuya seems to get it enough to just stare at him deadpan.
“You know what I mean, shithead.”
Dazai does, and staying awake now, with Chuuya, greatly increases his chance of survival.
But staying alive means Chuuya vanishes eventually.
Dazai doesn’t get to keep him, not in life, anyway.
“Stop thinking nonsense,” Chuuya bites, hands clenching like he wants to strangle Dazai, but is too afraid of touching him.
Interesting , Dazai wonders if his lifeline is so thin now that Chuuya could ship him off to the great beyond with a touch alone.
If Chuuya’s touch could end him, Dazai would be more than happy to have that be the way he goes.
He wonders, if Chuuya could touch his soul, if they could find a way to make it linger, could grab that instant and hold on to it for eternity.
If Chuuya could, really, make Dazai stay with him – forever, for good.
He could be home, among the dead, like he never has been among the living.
“Oi,” Chuuya snarls, clenched fists shaking by his sides, “I said to quit thinking idiotic things!”
Chuuya is still right there though, lingering, which means Dazai is only hanging by a thread, and it’s thinning.
Chuuya could snap it in a heartbeat.
Dazai’s hands go lax, fingers slipping in sticky blood, as warm on his palms as he imagines Chuuya’s touch would be.
His vision falters again, Chuuya’s concerned expression going in and out of focus.
It makes him smile, a lazy thing that takes a sleepy edge as he stops feeling the pain quite as strongly.
“Hmmm,” Dazai hums around a smile, allowing his eyes to slip shut despite the wounded sound Chuuya makes in front of him “Didn’t know Chuuya cared so much.”
Chuuya doesn’t reap him, despite how easy it would have been for him to do it.
Hirotsu must have found him, though Dazai has no memory of it.
All he knows is that the embrace of death has evaded him and it plagues him as he slips in and out of consciousness in the back of a car, then later on a surgical table, and later even on a hospital bed.
It taunts him, like Chuuya’s grief stricken form, curled over himself with wide, panicked eyes as he flickers in and out of being on the backseat next to him, and then later hovering behind Mori as he stitches Dazai’s body back whole, and then later even on a corner of Dazai’s barren hospital room as he tries to think around the pain medication.
Chuuya didn’t take him, despite how easily he could have.
Death was right there for Dazai, yet it didn’t want him.
Chuuya could have held him, for an instant that would make eternity worth it.
It would have been enough, for Dazai, but from the looks of it, Chuuya thinks differently.
From the way his face twists into aggravated horror and desperation as he flickers in and out of being, mirroring Dazai’s glitching tether to the realm of the living, the thought of that fleeting touch doesn’t soothe him.
And there’s something unthinkable, about something as grand as Death brought to his knees by the thought of Dazai no longer living.
Chuuya wants him to live, wants Dazai to stay with him.
Dazai wants Chuuya with him forever, but the better he gets, the fainter Chuuya’s image is.
There’s an old myth about grim reapers.
It comes to Dazai like a dream, his painkiller numbed mind swirling around the fading edges of Chuuya’s form, clinging to the slumped curve of Chuuya’s shoulder, to the dejected bend of his head and the sadness in his eyes.
There’s an old myth about grim reapers, about people who tried to meet death too soon, who rushed the course of their own existence, and then ended up tangled with Death forever.
Dazai thinks about it, from the confines of his hospital room, watching Chuuya fade away from him more and more with each passing day.
He thinks about it as his bandages get changed and his wounds heal, he thinks about it as Chuuya refuses to talk to him and then is no longer around to be talked to.
He thinks about it as Chuuya disappears, no matter how much Dazai wishes to cling to him.
Dazai thinks about it and then he thinks about it more.
When Dazai gets discharged from the hospital, there’s only one place left for him to go.
Chuuya finds him there, perched at the very edge of the Port Mafia’s highest tower, overlooking Yokohama from the very same view that lines Mori’s office windows under the roof Dazai is now walking on.
Chuuya blinks into existence next to him, keeping a relatively safe distance from behind the railings. It’s ironic, because he doesn’t need its safety when he is already dead and therefore can never die.
Dazai cackles about it, as he balances his feet on top of that very same railing, not sharing any of Chuuya’s concern for life.
“Funny,” Dazai tells him, looking down at Chuuya with a grin “You’re already here and I’m not even dying yet!”
Chuuya’s eyes are wide, his fingers curled in a vice grip around the metal bars, but kept at a very measured distance away from Dazai’s shoes.
Dazai wonders if its blood stained leather is enough of a barrier, or if his soul would get reaped, were he to tap Chuuya’s knuckles with the sole of his shoes.
Regardless, Chuuya will have no choice but to take him, pretty soon.
“Get down,” Chuuya grits out at him, but it’s breathless, a last ditch hopeless effort.
It’s too late and he knows it too.
“Gladly!” Dazai beams, opening his arms wide enough that he wobbles on the thin railing, balance wavering so that he catches a glimpse of the sky high above and the ground down below.
Chuuya grits his teeth, brow furrowing as he looks away with an expression as pained as it is desperate.
“Please, just –”
Dazai cuts him off, leaning down into a crouch so that they’re almost at eye level.
The movement makes Chuuya’s hands detach from the railing, lingering up between them like he wants to try and steady Dazai, but it’s too afraid of touching him now.
Like he’d catch him, keep him safe, if only he could.
“It’s true isn’t it?” Dazai asks him, head tilted and wind whipping his hair into his eyes “About grim reapers, about death seekers, the things people say?”
Chuuya’s eyes are distinctly wet looking, but he holds his gaze, stubborn determination shining through to the end.
“I’m not fucking telling you that.”
Dazai’s grin widens and he stands back up to his feet.
“Ah, Chuuya!” he calls, cheers, celebrates “That’s enough of an answer, isn’t it?”
Chuuya looks like he wants to say something, a goodbye maybe, but Dazai won’t let him, not when he’d much rather say hello.
Dazai looks over his city and breathes it in, inhaling the life of it for a final time.
Then he jumps, and it’s surprisingly peaceful.