#I will always love the fact that Dazai is canonically extremely weird about Chuuya

[sensitiveheartless]

Though I just realised after the whole skk FINALLY mutually confess, but uhh how did Dazai knew Chuuya was at the supermarket??? Did he have Chuuya's schedule memorized???

I’m so glad you noticed this, because I couldn’t figure out how to work it into their dialogue in the comic, but YUP—

My thoughts for this particular comic series were that Chuuya is a creature of habit, and Dazai is a weirdo(affectionate) who memorized all Chuuya’s weekly scheduling habits back when they were in the mafia (for strategic purposes, he will insist) and Chuuya hasn’t really deviated from those habits since, so Dazai will periodically have moments like this throughout his day:

…so yeah, after Ranpo convinced Dazai to go clear things up with Chuuya, Dazai ran across the city while doing intense internal calculations to take all known variables into account, and finally decided that Chuuya had to be shopping at that particular grocery store :0

[goddamnitdazai]

Survival is a Process {1}

Characters: Oda Sakunosuke/Mafia!Dazai Osamu (platonic), Port Mafia, Armed Detective Agency, Ango. Rating: Teen and Up Genre: Angst, canon-divergence  Pairing: (platonic) Odazai Warnings/Tags: Mentions of suicide, suicide attempts, alcoholism, depictions of violence, canon violence, language.  (AO3 link)

Hospital 01               There are little pieces of him everywhere. Carmine splatters clinging to Dazai’s pants and shirt sleeves. The tips of his hair are dip-dyed scarlet, crusted to the back of his neck. His coat, beige and smelling like gunpowder and smoke, sits draped over Dazai’s knees. Two holes frayed at the edges where the sash ties to his waist like two blossoming flowers. Dazai’s hands feel warm from the scrubbing and his bandages are still wet from the sink over flowing.                 It’s been eight hours now, nine if you count the screaming on the phone and the car ride and the twenty-two minutes Dazai spent with his gun down a doctor’s throat. The blinds are drawn shut but sunlight finds its way through and scatters over the off-white tiles. It’s too bright for him, Dazai thinks, but Dazai can’t move. There’s safety in this miniscule space by the bed. He’s been here since the start and nothing terrible had happened. The thought pushes a sarcastic snort through his chapped lips.               Except everything was terrible.

               Seconds drag by. The edges of his teeth grind on his bottom lip until it begins to bleed. Hours become unrelenting demons taunting him with deafening silence. Pale fingertips scrape the tattered fabric burnt onyx by two bullets; Dazai can hear metal tearing through the air as his thumb slides over a single burnt thread. Automated machines click in patterns; Dazai has them memorized. Dripping IV fluids become environmental reminders that Odasaku is still breathing. Plastic tubes stretch from his dry, spit caked mouth down to a mess of wires and lines hardwired into boxed machinery. Up and down and up and down the life line of luminescent green bounces to the drumbeat of a broken heart (still alive). Dazai loses control of his breathing and gags on oxygen. Trembling lips fight to inhale; the memory of smoke and charred flesh returns like a reel of an old horror film stuck on a loop.                  Dazai’s fingers curl to his palm at the sound of his cell phone ringing for the tenth time in half an hour. The garbage can rattles against the floor as the phone drops, he should have crushed the thing. Yet the consistent ringing battering against his over-sensitive ears poses as a miniscule distraction. Moments slip away too quickly; within a minute the quiet beeping of medical devices consumes the air. Dazai fidgets and switches his left leg with his right. The ball of his foot bounces over the tile. Exhaustion tugs at him to close his eyes just for a minute.                   But what if he dies while I’m sleeping?                   He can’t hold on to air. Fervency causes his fingers to shake as he pulls the black tie from his neck. Dazai counts the tiles on the floor, but his heart refuses to fall back to a natural rhythm. He can feel the overstrained muscle pounding in his ears. Bloodshot eyes flit from corner to corner; Dazai tries to laugh at himself—his throat is too dry. Anxiety crawls on him, leeches. He can feel them holding on to his skin, scurrying beneath his bandages, making his heart beat louder. It’s a war drum pounding in his head. The taste of blood fills his mouth, his bottom lip is throbbing. The muscles in his legs squeeze as he eyes the corner of the bathroom.                   If he moves the world will end.                   Bile rumbles in his stomach. It’s been twelve hours; he can’t feel his entire body. The edges of the world start to shimmer. He counts the spots of colors rapidly changing in front of him. Part of him, a quiet part that used to rule the forefront of his mind, tells him to breathe—there’s no oxygen going to your brain, you’re going to pass out. Dazai tries to pull the voice forward. Reality has become unrecognizable. He reaches for Odasaku’s hand as his head falls to the fluffy white blanket covering his friend’s lower half. Odasaku’s fingers twitch under the touch.                  Dazai counts to five, exhale.                  The mattress groans but Dazai can no longer hold himself upright. There is a weight resting on Dazai’s chest trying to drag him down like quicksand. Immovable, untouchable, unrelenting. A hand reaches to touch the back of his neck. Instinct screams at him to move, but there is no strength left in his legs. Half-heartedly he reaches for the gun at his side. The nurse backs away at the sight of metal. Dazai smirks a bit as his hand falls to his side, empty.                  “You should rest s-“                 “I don’t want to hear your voice unless you have information on why he hasn’t woken up yet.” Dazai says coldly.                                                              ______________________                   He counts the tiles again, but by twos this time. Then four, and then he counts backwards from the bathroom towards the front of the room. The door shuts quietly; nothing has changed. He shifts his knees up to his chest as he counts. He’s far too tall to fit comfortably like this, but he can’t stand the way the cold hospital floor feels under his feet. Brilliant orange fills the window as violet trickles down from the highest part of the sky.                  Odasaku once mentioned he loved this time of day, the combination of remaining daylight and growing twilight. Brilliant swirls of dark blue contrasting through puffy cotton-candy clouds—Dazai couldn’t understand his fascination with it. Odasaku was never one to prattle on about the vitality of a sunset (he mentioned it once but Dazai changed the subject), yet his nature to stare in awe at the swirling hues did not leave him. Silently as they walked Odasaku would glance up every few minutes at the sky until the moon hung lover over the city. Dazai always thought it was the alcohol that fueled Odasaku’s child-like lust for a painted sky of oranges and blues.                   But now he wondered if his friend just enjoyed something brilliantly simple, and Dazai was not a good enough friend to listen.                   Dazai was the mouth piece, that fact he knew, but it never occurred to him the bulk of conversations revolved around Dazai’s subject of choice. Relentlessly picking on Chuuya, over-dramatizing situations where he nearly died (he waited and waited but it never happened), the affections of a woman he met at a bar the previous night. There was an endless list of things forever growing in the back of Dazai’s mind, but he couldn’t pinpoint when that list first formulated. He could recall the first time he bothered Chuuya about his hat when they were younger, and it made the boy turn red instantly. Chuuya punched him hard in the stomach (Kouyou made him apologize right after).                   It had been the first time Chuuya talked to him on his own volition. He was shy, quiet, and always hiding behind Kouyou especially when Mori was around. At times Chuuya would wander through the hallways but never spark conversation, and he called Dazai weird one time under his breath. He liked the way Chuuya’s face strained when he was angry; he could understand it. And so he kept going and going and going. So much that now Dazai could map out the way Chuuya’s eyes narrow when he’s really angry, or how one brow twitches when he’s trying not to let Dazai get under his skin.                                       At least it was something—he was a person to Chuuya; even if Chuuya hated the person he was. Forced partners, but it was okay sometimes.                     Mori never showed the slightest bit of emotion on his features regardless of what happened; except once. The knife in his hand glimmered beneath the moonlight, and his eyes had grown just as wide as the source of the light. Dazai watched his face contort to a man who had finally found the grasp of power he’d been searching for. His motive, his movements, they were calculated down to the finest detail. Mori knew Dazai would never speak of this, yet he found it necessary to mention it aloud. His voice was cold iron against Dazai’s skin. It had been the first and last time Mori made his skin crawl.                    There was nothing left after that—Mori and himself weren’t people, to each other, to most. Prodigy and master, as expected from Dazai (the demon). That was okay, he supposed.                     Odasaku—he was simple; but Dazai still found him puzzling. The sheer blasé words that came from his mouth sounded incredibly strange given his background. A man in the Port Mafia, a killer who chose to stop, to adopt orphans, to be good. But, he still rested on the side of darkness. He drank with the prodigy of Yokohama’s criminal elite, but spilled no blood. An oddity of the Port Mafia, like Dazai, perhaps this is what fused them. But, Dazai could never understand the motives behind pure selflessness. What it felt like to breathe life for someone else, for anything else, was not something Dazai bothered to miss. For as long as he could remember he never had a thing in the world to hold close to his heart. What would he even want?                     Humans were endlessly selfish, and that he understood. The logistics of self-elevating, self-serving. Of winning. Dazai always won—he was good at it. Perhaps Odasaku’s simplicity allowed him to choose the manner in which he lived, or maybe he was too good at hiding from people who would have taken him in. Would Mori have brought him to the Port Mafia if he’d found Odasaku at that age?  Dazai shivers at the thought of a young Odasaku covered in blood with empty eyes staring back at him. Would he have seen past Dazai’s demonic reputation? Doubtful. Their encounter was chance, or fate, because fate was always an incredibly cruel beast.                    Weakness is not a familiarity. The waning strength in his shoulders and ache in his back do nothing but irritate him even more. As the clock ticks forward Dazai’s mind continues to dwindle down to a blank canvas. The simplest of movements take extreme amount of energy to even put forth minimal effort. Heavy ink-colored bags hang below his eyes. It’s close to ten pm. He fights the urge to glance towards the garbage where he’d thrown his phone earlier. Surprisingly it had remained eerily silent, and none of Mori’s subordinates had stopped to talk to Dazai or tell him to leave.                      Nobody had come by at all.                      It was better this way. Just the two of them suspended in time; waiting and waiting and waiting. Dazai’s arms cross over each other as he leans his cheek onto his left wrist, elbows expanded over Odasaku’s stomach. For a man who’d been sleeping for over a day, Odasaku looks overly exhausted. Even from a distance Dazai can see the drooping beneath his eyes like someone had come and tugged the skin hard enough to permanently alter its elasticity, leaving behind saggy darkened bags. Instead of his usual soft expression there is a hardened furl of his bottom lip that drags wrinkles across his chin. The look he wore, a man with anger and with guilt, when he left Dazai in the parking lot of the restaurant remains etched in his features even as he sleeps.                        Fragile moonlight streaks over Dazai’s back illuminating the gentle rise and fall of Odasaku’s chest. The warmth from his skin begins to lull Dazai into a half-sleep, but something inside him snaps. A siren, a rush of fear sweeping him up like a tidal wave pulling him to the blackest part of the ocean. Air is sucked from his lungs leaving him gasping with trembling shoulders and enclosed hands. Nails dig crescent moons into his palm; get a fucking grip. Dazai counts the ticking of the clock by twos until his vision levels out and the fog clogging his mind dissipates. He matches every miniscule inhale with Odasaku’s until their heartbeats syncopate.                        Memories fade in and out like ghosts. Dazai’s state wavers on the line of conscious dreaming and exhaustion. He can hear the music playing softly through the worn speakers. Low hanging lights casting a halcyon glow over the amber liquid swirling in his glass. Ango’s blood-red tomato juice filling the cup; Odasaku’s genuine interest in Dazai’s experience with a machinegun mounted truck. The picture they took resides in his pocket still; he can hear it crinkle as he slumps further on to Odasaku’s stomach. Haunting him. Fueling him to burn the entire city to the ground.                          The scent of death mixes with whisky. Ango’s office felt musty and dark. Rows and rows of books neatly organized on shelves with far too much dust collecting on the edges. Odasaku let Dazai prattle on about Ango’s odd habits without rolling his eyes or telling him to quit. Ango’s nose scrunched up the closer Dazai got to his desk. Immediately Ango furled back into his chair shouting that he smelled terrible and how could he go to a bar with all this work? But what if he smelled like us? Odasaku played Dazai’s game happily (even if it was childish).  Their tab was enormous and the night was warm. Summer had sprawled over the city and Dazai had thrown his jacket in Odasaku’s fridge before passing out on the couch.                            “Because he is my friend.”                            Mori’s eyes narrow but every other detail remains upright. He can see through Dazai’s bandages and skin and façade of childlike antics as the cogs in his mind start churning. Problem solving was something Mori enjoyed unfolding. Like a paper crane deconstructed back to its original form. Dazai worked backwards from the simple words Mori spoke to the events from days and days before.                            Sunlight burns red over Yokohama. Dazai’s men drive too slowly for his liking. His heart pounds as his shoes smack against blood soaked tile. The scent of metal and burning flesh overtakes the natural musk of the forest. Heat scorches up his back and constricts his throat; a ball of smoke lodges itself in his lungs. Door after door there are bodies littered on the floor wailing in pain, calling out to him, to Gide, to death. Shards of glass decorate the floor in shimmering glitter as the moonlight gleams in from the cracked skylight.                             “He is my friend.”                              Dazai jolts upright. Panicked hands crawl to Odasaku’s stomach and his chest, eyes strained and blurry from fighting against relenting darkness. His lips tremble, the name falling from them as though the mere utterance of it would send the entire world crashing down on him. The resonating beep from the monitor does little to satiate Dazai’s blossoming anxiousness. He only recoils his hands after counting Odasaku’s heartbeat twelve times. Two am and there is no more light peeking through the blinds. Shadows overlap as Dazai’s eyes adjust to the darkness. He buries his head on Odasaku’s stomach once more. Cheek turned slightly to feel muscle twitches and radiating thumps of his heart pumping blood through his organs. His eyes retrace Odasaku’s wearied expression.                             A good man forgives, and Odasaku was a good man. Better than Dazai could ever hope to be. There would be no situation in the entire world where Odasaku would not have stopped Dazai from chasing revenge. He would have stalled him, stopped him, helped him. Dazai was not a man of righteousness or selfless acts of kindness. He was not the type to see pain and reach out to help. Instead he allowed his friends to blindly go and rely on their own skill, much like Dazai relied on his own skill to keep him alive (ironic).                           Dazai was not a good friend to Odasaku. He was not a good man; he was not a good person (or a person at all). Bred into darkness with sadism threaded in his blood. Their friendship was neither fate nor chance it was a fluke in every way possible. Blossoming only to wither and die on the vine. Had he chosen to follow instead of retreat they could have ended their lives together, but even the thought of lying with Odasaku in death’s grip did not sit well in his stomach. Self-sacrifice was not in Dazai’s nature either. Born to play puppet master in a devil’s playground. What else could he possibly offer Odasaku?                             He was never bothered by it all. By the radiating sadistic nature in which Dazai performed. The Spartan-like training Dazai heaved at his subordinates and their casual disposal when their talents never came to fruition. Friendship was unethical, but the truest form of care. Or, what Dazai presumed was the care from one human to another. A gentle breeze following a storm; a radiant glow of new life forming after a fire destroys an entire acre of land. Perhaps this mixture of the two of them sought to balance out the roles of their paths; but all that seemed entirely too simple of an explanation. No, Dazai thinks, there is nothing deeper than the random encounter of two men finding themselves in the same place at the same time.                           Then why did it feel like a hundred knives were plummeting into Dazai’s chest at the thought of never meeting Odasaku? The image of him writing Dazai off as an annoying, pessimistic devil built for nothing but destruction? King of death, ruler of Yokohama’s underworld. He did not rightfully merit Odasaku’s unfathomable devotion. Wandering aimlessly to the void of nothing, searching for any retched sliver of something to grasp, only for it to be pulled from him the moment he discovers its worth. This was the end he’d always seen, always experience. He deserved it; but Odasaku did not deserve this ending.                           Pained sobs clog up his chest. Teeth burrow to the bottom of his lip and tear open old scars from hours before. A mess of exhaustion and turmoil Dazai flattens his face against the blanket and bites at his lip. His toes curl inside his shoes as every muscle contracts. Exhaustion tapers off to vehemence. Teeth grind hard enough to crack. The barrel of his gun is beginning to look extremely appetizing.                         Odasaku begins to cough. The tube down his throat chokes him; Dazai freezes. A world stuck in slow motion abruptly speeds up. Dazai feels dizzy as he stumbles from the chair to press the button to call a nurse. They swarm him. Without realizing Dazai walks backwards towards the window, the chair he’d been residing in for a day left on its side near the doorway. Saliva drips from the clear tube as it’s pulled from Odasaku’s throat. Silence is broken by questions and strained coughs. Nurses move like ethereal beings leaving trails of their existence like blurred starlight.                          Dazai sinks to his knees. The door shuts behind the last nurse as she reminds Odasaku to rest. Bandages cover his upper half and wrap lazily down his right arm. A new scar buried under stitches sits on his left cheek. Odasaku’s eyes are hauntingly empty. For once Dazai is hyperaware of the sound of his own breathing. Like a child discovering movement Odasaku experimentally wiggles his fingers. His eyes roam over his legs; Dazai swallows a lump in his throat and averts his eyes to the clock hanging on the wall. Four am.                          Odasaku peers at Dazai as if he’s trying to reconstruct him from the ground up. Piece by piece memories reconnect like building blocks. Dazai watches the way his eyes grow from grey, hollowed ashes to burning whips of emotion. Odasaku’s back straightens. Dazai can’t figure out how to move back to his feet. Hidden instinct forces Dazai to reach his hand forward though the distance between them leaves nothing but space for his fingers to touch. Shadows blindly run over Odasaku’s face leaving slivers of fading moonlight striped down his torso from the blinds. His eyes bore into Dazai’s but he’s looking passed him, at something, at nothing. His voice is heavy and raw, it scrapes over Dazai’s ears.                       “You should have let me die.”