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Coming home to a front door with its lock picked, while small pools of water shine on the floor, courtesy of someone rudely trudging along without bothering to dry himself on the genkan—it’s normal enough that he doesn’t bother acknowledging it beyond a disgruntled curse. He hangs up his coat on the nearby rack, sets his umbrella outside so that it wouldn’t contribute to the puddles inside his apartment.
Today’s rain has been unforgiving enough that even his socks are wet. Nose wrinkled, he steps out of his waterlogged shoes, balls up his socks, before padding barefooted towards the inner parts of his home.
There’s takeout parked haphazardly near the edge of his table, like a Russian roulette playing with the possibility of food splattered on his floors. He drags it to the middle of the table, noting that they’re quite cold already. One window is left half-open, but it’s thankfully angled away from the direction of the downpour, so there’s only small scattered wetness on the sill. He thinks of it as the potted plants getting bonus watering.
With blatant disregard for his electricity bill, ambient light has been left open on the rest of his apartment. The brightest one seeps from under his bathroom door. He kicks it open—lightly, because it’s not its fault that it couldn’t keep away slimy fishes from infesting his house.
“If you get a cold from soaking too long,” he says to the mackerel splayed out languidly on his tub, “I’m not giving you any medicine. I’m also definitely not cooking soup for you.”
Dazai’s address on his ID cards is technically on a small dorm provided by his workplace. He is shameless enough to grow in his apartment, like some inextinguishable mold colony. In a feeble tone that is definitely faked, “Mm, welcome home, Chuuya.”
This would probably work as some coquettish roleplay of a kitten trying to appease his master. That is, if the person that he’s doing this to isn’t someone that has known him for more than two unfortunate decades.
As such, it only serves to make him roll his eyes, thwapping the other’s forehead, before removing the rest of his clothes so they could be delivered to his laundry hamper. He sits on the stool beside the tub and starts doing a quick shower to remove the sticky feel of raindrops that have begun to dry on his skin.
Dazai hums a medley of tunes, head lolling against the porcelain lip. It’s probably his favorite double suicide song’s lyrics transposed to whatever is the current darling of the ORICON charts.
Once he’s done showering, he ignores the giant fish in his tub and sits on the opposite side, stretching out his legs without care that he ends up kicking the other’s chest. Cool water splashes out to the tiles, a testament to how long the mackerel has soaked himself here.
He reaches out and grabs the other’s hands.
They don’t exchange further words; they don’t need to.
It’s already been embedded into their daily routines: Dazai doing a shitty mermaid impression whenever his mind is too busy with a thousand thoughts running all at once, wanting to be turned into a foam that will be washed away with the tides.
Like always, he checks the other’s hands and wrists for new wounds. Rubs the raised welts from previous attempts, a lot of the scars re-traced by the culprit himself.
A lot of times, he thinks about charging the mackerel for this in-house medical check-up. He sobers up immediately after, because charging Dazai is bound to boomerang back to him, as the fish would just slip away from such financial responsibilities and somehow make him cough up money instead.
In their closed bubble, Chuuya proceeds to check the rest of the bastard’s body. Dazai is a familiar demolition site—white bandages and gray scarlines acting as crisscrossed warning signs. It’s futile to look away, even when staring at him for a prolonged period is bound to make his nose stuffy, his throat clogged, his eyes red.
Since it’s impossible to look away, his compromise is to let his eyes drift shut. Just as they don’t need words, he also doesn’t need his eyes to map out each part of Dazai’s skin. There’s that understanding in his mind, affection in his heart.
Most times, he has no compunctions delivering the violence in his touch and blades in his words. But in these moments, those parts of him are tempered by seeing Dazai put away his barbs and trust him with his wellbeing. Especially since this suicidal bastard is the sort to actively prevent anyone from associating him with such a word as ‘wellbeing’.
“Our client earlier had a dog in her house,” Dazai says eventually, head bowed in cooperation when he whisks a towel vigorously all over his bird’s nest of a hair.
He clicks his tongue, waiting it out.
“Her relationship has fallen apart because her lover has decided to stay with his rich wife.” As someone who works in a detective agency in order to keep his mind busy, he’s seen a lot of different situations. “In order to hold on to that kind of love, she has let herself be surrounded by ruin.”
The way that he rubs the other’s hair has gentled a lot, his hands carding through the brown strands. For the most part of his day-to-day activities as a general practitioner, his fingers are enclosed in gloves. The feel of something that’s not latex against his bare skin is quite novel, so he relishes the sensation.
Dazai continues, a storyteller relating the things that he’s seen with a dull inflection in his voice. “Her home, her friends, her connections, her dog—they’ve all been cast aside so she could pursue an unattainable pipe dream.” A sigh against him, as the mackerel presses his damp forehead on his bellybutton. “Quite the human pursuit, all things considered.”
Their first meeting has him breaking up a group of bullies surrounding a bandaged boy, then getting insulted for play-acting as a prince when the shitty damsel-in-distress has actually orchestrated everything so that the bullies would throw him to the nearby river, just so he could have first-hand experience of how it feels to drown.
From a bystander wanting to save him, he ends up being roped into diving with him to the river, while earning the ire of the local group of bullies. His parents’ disapproval has been hefty, not wanting him to tarnish the family name by being associated with goons.
It should have been a glaring indicator that being involved with the other person is bound to give him so many headaches.
Instead, he ends up being the other’s classmate from elementary to high school. His dorm roommate during his pre-med course. Now, he hosts the giant mooch who pretty much has carved a place for himself in his home.
Even in his childhood, Dazai has always chased death. It’s a sword that hangs above their necks, the looming possibility that one day, the bastard would end up succeeding in his attempts. That one day, he’d end up coming home from a long shift at the clinic, and find a corpse in his bathroom.
Perhaps it could even be considered a futile chase, with him ending up following his family’s wishes to become a doctor. They’ve chosen that career path for the sake of carrying on with the family prestige. But no matter what he’s written down in his career aspirations worksheet, he knows deep-down that his primary reason to become a doctor is because he wants to be able to save this man.
Whether it’s through giving him first aid, or patching up his wounds, or providing him with this sanctuary.
He swallows hard. His voice ricochets all over his bathroom’s walls, “Is this story about to end with you saying that we’re going to adopt that dog?”
Dazai’s breath visibly hitches, the bones on his upper back trembling like a canary’s wings about to fly off somewhere far away. Slowly, he lifts his head. Disbelief is obvious in his gaze. Beyond that, the kind of hesitation that one has whenever it’s hard to believe the presented truth.
“Chuuya,” still with that disbelief, but transformed to something more teasing. “I can’t believe you’d ever think I’d want to adopt a dog. Has Mori-san been working you too hard? Your tiny brain becoming even stupider?”
He lightly pulls at the other’s fringes so he can expose the smooth forehead. With a critical look, “You claim to be smart, but is your brain just a decoration?” He knocks on it, before pulling away from the man who has recovered from his dark whirlpool of thoughts, to the point that he’s back to his usual annoying form. “If you’re not going to tell me there’s a dog involved, then why would you ever think that I’d want to listen to such a useless story?”
“Pfft, is this you being jealous that I’ve been in the home of one lonely woman wanting some comfort?”
He busies himself with toweling dry, keeping his face away from that dissecting gaze. “This is me being annoyed that you’d think I’d consider the things I did as futile and regrettable,” he says beyond the roar of his heartbeat in his ears.
Several long moments, until Dazai pads towards him, settling against his back like an oversized cape to hide him from the rest of the world. “If you really want, you can practice on how take good care of dogs with me first.”
“You just want me to buy you steak every day,” he accuses, but there’s not a lot of heat in it, given that he could feel a similar thrumming from behind him.
Lightly, as if it’s not a loaded statement coming from him, “A good life requires a good meal, right?”
He generously diagnoses himself as being struck with allergies, in order to explain the way that his entire body itches and feels warm. “If you really want a good meal, make yourself useful and reheat the takeout already, oi.”
“Tsk, you’re such a bossy chibi, this is why you’re stuck at that pitiful height.”
“My height has nothing to do with this?!”
It continues to rain outside, but his home is filled with ambient warmth.
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end