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Chuuya has taken to walking as much as he’s taken to running. Gets him out of an apartment that’s too full of memories, lets him clear his head of them and pretend they don’t exist.
But they’re too loud today.
It feels like no matter how long he walks, they still follow him.
He starts running, not caring that he’s in a suit, that he can’t get sweaty, and speeds up every time Dazai crawls into his thoughts and his face flashes behind Chuuya’s eyes.
Hoping, begging the world, for the remembering to stop.
It's beautiful out today
I wish you could take me upstate
To the little place you would tell me about
When you'd sense that I want to escape
Chuuya finds himself at the harbor.
It’s right by Dazai’s wasteland, and it would be so easy to walk there, to see if he’s still alive.
Dazai often visits here, playing video games on his gameboy, taking his shoes off to let his legs dangle over the edge of the docks, feet submerged in water.
Chuuya can practically see him cheering in victory as he finally beats a difficult level.
He’d sometimes go to Chuuya’s apartment right after, stinking of fish and salt water, and play footsie with him as they eat whatever dinner Chuuya cooked for them, trying to rub the stench onto a protesting Chuuya.
That’s the thing with missing someone. You start to miss their annoying sides too.
Texas is a landlocked state
It's a little bit far away
From the water, from the home
That I've wanted to make
It's somehow in the city
You make it there
And you make it anywhere, anywhere
Sometimes, Chuuya misses Suribachi city. He misses the ramshackle houses, pieced together with scrap metal and lingering, barely alive but still kicking dreams. He misses the Sheep. The family he made with them, the life he led. He hated Dazai for taking him away from them. But someway, somehow, he became family to him, right along with the Flags.
The thought reminds him, he’s really lost everything hasn’t he? First the first several years of his life, his biological family, stolen by living in the lab, then the Sheep, then the Young Bloods, Adam, Murase, and finally Dazai. Nothing ever stays. Everything and everyone he loves is inevitably destroyed.
But even after all he lost, before losing him too, Dazai and the Flags made a home with him. Dazai at least barely treated him nicely, rough around the edges, but Chuuya clung to that. Because it felt real. It felt right.
It felt like home, something he thought he would never have after losing the Sheep. But then piece by piece, that home was torn away, until only echoes of it were left. Echos he desperately clung to as he willed himself to believe that the mafia was his family just as much as the Sheep, the Young Bloods, and Dazai were.
He missed Suribachi city, but Dazai and the Flags made the mafia home, and Chuuya will never have the strength to leave it now because of that.
Yet, home followed them. Chuuya felt out of place in the mafia without them there, and was never able to fully move on. He was rarely able to visit the graves, literal in the Young Blood’s case, and metaphorical in Dazai’s case. He couldn’t visit the graves, the places he went with them that carried their remnants, without breaking down.
And if he broke down now, he would never be able to keep going afterward.
So he avoided anything to do with them like the plague, and hoped to whoever was out there that he would eventually feel at home again.
That he could feel at home without them at all.
But I've been anywhere
And it's not what I want
And I wanna be still with you
Do, do-do-do, do
Dazai’s rejection hurt. It hurt because he didn’t expect it.
He thought his feelings were returned. That Dazai loved him back. But his response made it clear, even if he did love him, he would never be able to face that fact, never be able to truly love Chuuya back the way he wanted.
If Chuuya could shove that confession back into his throat, and seal it off so it could never crawl its way out again, he would. He would make sure his feelings for Dazai stayed silent. That even if there was love, it would be quiet, the kind that didn’t need any expression. Because that was what they had, or at least, what he hoped they had.
And he ruined it by opening his big mouth. For that, he would never forgive himself.
You keep your socks on in bed
Keep our hearts warm
See the tree shadows lie in black the pools in the lawns
He even misses feeling the fabric on Dazai's feet at night while playing footsie, him still wearing the dirty socks from the day. Chuuya has tried desperately numerous times to get him to at least change into new socks, but Dazai is adamant he sleeps better like that.
He misses their arms tangled together, sharing heat on cold nights.
He misses lying on their backs on a rooftop he used gravity to get them both up to, relishing the feeling of Dazai pressed up against his chest and gripping his sides like a vice. Watching the sky go dark and the trees get trimmed.
Chuuya looks around and realizes he has no idea where he is. The trees are unfamiliar and messier than on your typical street, and their shadows are so dark you could drown in them trying to figure out what was underneath. Like a tar pit sucking the life out of you. The sun setting fire to the horizon turns the leaves into an ugly, empty shade of grey.
You're the breeze in my Austin nights
You're the breeze in my Austin nights
You're the breeze in my Austin nights
He heads back to his apartment, to shower off the sweat he built up while running, to scrub himself of his traitorous thoughts. He hangs the suit up in the casing he uses to take it to the dry cleaner’s, deciding he’ll bring it there the next morning.
As he turns the heat up in the shower to the point of boiling, he thinks of Dazai. Of massaging shampoo into his scalp, of cleaning his body and relishing in the trust Dazai put in him. Relishing how Dazai started to smell like him, how he left his mark on him.
He hopes Dazai still smells of him. He hopes he reeks of his scent, hopes Dazai is forced to breathe in Chuuya with every breath in the same way he’s forced to breathe in Dazai.
He hopes that it refuses to let Dazai forget him, in the same way he’ll never forget Dazai.
Because Dazai was different from the Flags. He left him by choice. And Chuuya will never not resent him for that.