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Dazai was not there. This was not an excuse. He was not there so they should not have done what they had done, ask what they had asked. Not of Chuuya, not without Dazai there.
And even though he was not there, he heard in the way he heard many things – whispers in corridors, hushed conversations in dusty corners, frustrations vented in the din of bars and poolhalls – and he rushed. He rushed the way Chuuya was prone to rushing to him, sprinting, flying, driving up walls, leaping from airplanes, tearing through dragons. There were no dragons this time, only bombs and hordes of creatures, large caliber bullets and a skill-user with an unknown ability. Unknown enough, disruptive enough, unprofitable enough that the boss ordered Chuuya to use Corruption. He didn’t even call Dazai first, as a lure to bring Dazai back, or as a courtesy to his second-youngest, smallest executive.
Dazai rushed and he ran, and he was late.
He was late.
He was late.
He was late.
The battlefield was pitted and smoking, reeking of things burned while in their prime, the churn of weapons, of blood and guts and whatever Chuuya had torn out of the creatures before they had pulled him out of the sky.
He lay now in the bottom of a crater, in the center of a web of cracks in the barren earth. Figures surrounded him, useless, useless things. They might as well have been grim reapers, for the part they had played in this. The Black Lizard spotted Dazai first, Hirotsu shoving down the barrel of a gun raised by his dyed-hair thug, Tachihara. Gin lowered her chin and turned away, letting him pass. Elise, golden and wet-eyed, watched him from where she leaned over Mori’s bent back. The boss’s sleeves were rolled up, his hands wet and bloody. The rest of his black suit was free of any marks but bits of freshly fallen ash. Verlaine, pale from years secure below mafia headquarters, hunched, doing nothing. His hands were also clean, his clothing impeccably pressed. None of them had fought. The only blood on their hands was Chuuya’s. None of them had protected him, not from the enemy and not from himself. Yet here they all stood, the best of them sacrificed so they could carry on, taking and using and breaking any who tried to stop them.
“Dazai-kun,” Mori began, his voice cracking.
“Get off him.”
“Dazai.”
Dazai raised his head, letting Mori see the depth of the cold inside of him.
“You don’t get to have him anymore. Get off him and go away.”
“There was no other choice,” Verlaine mumbled.
“There were a thousand other choices. But I’ll boil this down so that even such a feeble mind as yours can understand. There were a thousand other choices, but there were only two that mattered. You could have not ordered him to do this. You could have called me. But you wanted easy. You wanted superiority and you knew he’d give it to you. Because he’s the only valuable thing you have. You bet him against your comfort and you lost him. Go away.”
Mori’s hollow red gaze sharpened, and Dazai had a gun from Tachihara and another from Verlaine of all the idiots in his hands and aimed at the mafia boss before he could say a word or toss one of his poisoned scalpels. Elise nodded solemnly and blinked out of existence. Mori glanced at the space she had occupied, then grimaced.
He rose and the others flanked him as he walked away, a dark parade of failure.
Dazai sank down onto the hardpacked dirt. He splayed his fingers, then had to fight against the shudder of fear at what he would feel. His discomfort mattered even less than it usually did. This was about his partner. He settled his hand lightly in the center of Chuuya’s bare chest. His shirt had been sliced by Mori’s scalpel. God knows what kind of surgery the moron thought he was going to perform to save him from Corruption.
“Chuuya,” he began, struggling to keep his voice steady, to get the words out at all. The markings of Corruption were rough beneath his fingers, the ability having torn Chuuya up from both inside and out. “I cannot…I cannot believe what a stupid, stupid, stupid slug you’ve been.”
There was no indignant shout, no growling insult in response. No demand to know where he had been for the last two years, why he wasn’t here sooner. Beneath Dazai’s hand, there was no heartbeat, only a slim body slowly cooling. Dazai tilted his head back, watching motes of ash and dust swirl until they burned in his eyes and his throat. He did not let himself cough, did not let himself blink. He inclined his head to survey the damage. No flopping coat that he wore like a cloak. No ridiculous hat that never quite fit right if he wasn’t holding it in place with gravity. No gloves, just bare hands. He always went into Corruption like this, just Chuuya and the catastrophic damage that lived inside of him. Blackened blood under torn nails. Parallel slashes on his thigh had bled, deep enough they still held pools of red. The burn on Chuuya’s collarbone must have been from a shot below him that continued upwards. Just a graze, not enough to kill him. The ends of his hair, where he kept it longer on that side, were singed.
“You’ve lost part of that ridiculous love lock,” Dazai said. “You’d better not expect me to grow one to memorialize you because I’m not going to. Not that it would look bad, mind you. I’d look fabulous, even with that stupid quasi-mullet you pretend is a style.”
His other hand shook when he raised it. It shook when he tried to brush away the hair flopped over Chuuya’s eyes. The markings on his face bled sluggishly, or maybe that was just gravity dragging down the blood that had run from his nose and mouth, the corners of his eyes. Gravity he no longer controlled. The orange strands were mired in the sticky, coppery weight of it.
“This is the part where you tell me it’s not a mullet and call me a bowl-cut bastard,” Dazai whispered, carefully separating tangled strands and arranging them in as close a formation to Chuuya’s usual style as he could. “This is the part where you chastise me for being late then boast that you had it handled and didn’t need me anyway.”
Chuuya’s eyes were fixed straight ahead, staring straight up, and Dazai waved away the ash trying to land on those tiny, razored blue irises. He’d only seen Chuuya’s eyes up close like this for an instant at a time. It was so difficult to dodge his gravitrons and destruction and all the debris that came with them both to get close to them. He’d only ever had that glimpse, right before he touched his partner and the weight and warmth of Chuuya returned to his own body.
“This is the part where you try to sit up and I have to hold all your weight. This is the part where you get so mad that you can’t move that you pass out gnashing your teeth and I have to carry you. This is the part where you ask if you killed the enemy, if you got them.”
Dazai shifted, moving around until his knees were on either side of Chuuya’s legs, until both his hands pressed against his chest, until his face filled Chuuya’s view.
“This is the part where you admit you aren’t that strong, that you can’t do everything on your own, that you need my help, that you need me.”
The fixed, empty eyes staring through him weren’t even his partner’s, not really. Chuuya showed all his emotions on his face, in his body language, in his spontaneous leaps and kicks and slaps, in his unguarded laughter and vulnerable little questions and realizations. His eyes were never meant to be cold. He was never meant to be still. Dazai’s palm slid over Chuuya’s forehead and he pressed until those eyelids – stubborn as every other part of him – yielded and closed.
“This is the part where you remember you need air and take a breath, slug. This is the part where you recall you have a heart and it needs to beat.” Dazai slid down, clawing one hand through cracked dirt to encircle Chuuya’s waist, wrapping strands of tangled hair in his fingers. He laid his chest against Chuuya’s, turned his mouth to his ear. “There’s nothing strong enough to kill us, Chuuya. Not when we’re together. And you’re not allowed to do it. When we’re together, we can’t be killed. That’s the deal. Remember? And I’m here. I came. Now it’s your turn. This is the part where you come back. Come back to me.”
Ash fell until it covered them both in a fine veil. Maybe enough would fall they’d be entombed together, like the people of Pompeii. Asphyxiation wasn’t supposed to be painful, but it would probably take a while. Or he could starve to death. Dazai hadn’t ever feared that. It just seemed boring.
“I never wanted to die with you, Chuuya,” Dazai rasped. “Like, that’s the actual worst.”
“Then don’t.”
Dazai’s head shot up. His hands clamped down hard and, beneath him, Chuuya grunted. His eyes opened to the narrowest of slits, and blue gleamed inside of them, gem bright despite the bruise dark circles around them. The jagged crimson swirls faded, withdrew, returned to their rest as Chuuya came back. Slowly, so slowly.
“Did I get ‘em?”
Dazai collapsed back down, everything inside of him melting, only his grip keeping him in place.
“Yeah. Yeah, you got ‘em, partner.”