Chapter Text
If this is what it means to be a person and do all the things people do, it may not be worth it.
He’s heard good enough things about this movie, but his need to see it himself diminishes with each passing second spent in this line. He typically doesn’t see things in old artsy theaters like this anyway. Honestly, he prefers movies that require less analysis, ones he can watch while eating popcorn and not worry about missing some detail that carries the whole story’s comprehensibility on its back. But it’s been a while since he attended an event . A real, planned gathering of people. And he needs to spend more time with people.
It’s a documentary, something about organized crime. The director is here to give a presentation afterward, and Chuuya will sit in the theater and watch the movie and listen to the talk and look around and see strangers. People. If he can survive the line. The advertisement on the theater’s website stressed arriving early, but all it’s done is create an awkward wait and probably a bottleneck near the double doors into the auditorium.
“Quite a line, isn’t it?”
The voice is too close, just a few centimeters from his left ear. He turns around, trying not to hit the person leaning over his shoulder (though not trying too hard) and finds he has to crane his neck to meet the stranger’s eyes.
Brown eyes, not deep or rich or warm or any other clichéd description. Sort of flat, painted with a touch of mischief, but not much else. “I didn’t expect so many people,” he says.
“Me neither,” Chuuya responds, not sure whether he’s supposed to keep the conversation going past that point. He lets the silence drag on just a beat too long and figures it’s already over.
Apparently not, though. The stranger’s a bit more determined to hold on. “You a big true crime fan?”
He bristles, not used to such persistence. “Why, do I look like one?”
The guy laughs, but it doesn’t really reach his eyes. “I’m just asking. It’s a crime doc.”
“I know it’s a crime doc, I’m in line for it.”
“Go to things like this often? It doesn’t seem like you do.” Before Chuuya is even able to answer, he adds, hands up, “That’s not a bad thing, by the way.”
“Why doesn’t it seem like I do this often?” He normally doesn’t try to seem like a perfectly natural fit to other people, always ends up settling for just good enough, but he really is a bit out of his element here. Wonders what’s giving him away.
He shrugs, and the wisps of hair Chuuya can just barely see at the back of his neck nearly graze his shoulders. “You’re a bit hostile to conversation,” he smiles, eyes narrowed, and gestures to the portion of the line behind them. Chuuya steps out to the side to see what he means, and there isn’t a single person behind them who isn’t talking to someone else, either the people they came with or the strangers next to them.
Huffing, a bit abashed, he says, “Okay, I guess.” Lets it hang for a moment and then offers, “I’m Chuuya. I don’t usually go to things like this.”
He doesn’t press for a family name or any more hospitality, just looks down at him with that same annoying expression and says, “Well I do. You can stick with me.”
“What makes you think I wanna stick with you? You didn’t even tell me your name.”
“Dazai.” He smiles again, the most genuine-feeling one so far, and says, “The line is about to start moving. I tend to sit in the back.”
“I prefer the middle.” He isn’t even sure why he’s telling him. It isn’t as if they agreed to sit together.
“I’ll make an exception for you. So you can see the screen.”
Chuuya doesn’t have the time to defend himself and insist that he’s never had an issue with seeing the screen in a movie theater in his life before Dazai reaches out to tap his shoulder and points toward the front of the line, now moving.
“Doors are open, Chuuya. Let’s get some nice seats in the middle.”
He doesn’t have anyone else to sit with, and he was planning on finding somewhere right in the center of everything anyway. If Dazai wants to follow him around, he figures that’s his prerogative. Maybe he’s just a weird guy. Maybe Chuuya should actually be on his guard around him; he’d hate to end up as a smiling photo on the morning news.
He slides into a seat and pulls his arm in toward his chest, making sure it doesn’t touch Dazai as he sits down beside him. The theater is old and the seats don’t have cupholders between them to create a bubble of personal space. They’re much closer now than they were in line, and Chuuya consciously avoids looking up at his face from so close; he would see it and probably say something.
“They say he killed over two hundred people.”
“Huh?”
Dazai doesn’t seem to feel the same reluctance as Chuuya, turning in his seat to look down at him. “The boss this movie is about.”
“By himself?” he asks, deliberately looking elsewhere, skeptical.
“Some. But most were just ordered.”
“Does that really count as him killing them, then?”
Dazai cocks his head to the side, widening his eyes just a touch. “I think most would say so. He pulled the metaphorical trigger.”
“Is that as real as the physical one, though?” He doesn’t know why he’s pressing the point. Before now, he’s never given any real thought to the guilt of people who order killings, never thought about organized crime much at all. He doesn’t kill people, so the details of it all don’t concern him.
“So you’d say the only person at fault is the one doing the work.”
“That’s not what I said.”
“I think that’s an interesting perspective, Chuuya.”
He expects Dazai to look sort of mean, to physically match the way he’s pressing Chuuya’s buttons, but when he looks up at him, there’s nothing malicious at all, just a sort of amicable smile and the small talk look people get in their eyes. Maybe not even that, maybe genuine interest.
“I don’t really have an opinion on it. I don’t think about shit like this in my free time.”
“I didn’t mean to annoy you,” Dazai says, not sounding sincerely apologetic. “Hopefully tonight will be a fun exercise in ethical thought.”
Chuuya doesn’t have anything to say to that, but it’s okay because the lights are beginning to dim anyway.
He doesn’t know what compels him to do it, but just before the movie starts, he glances up at the side of Dazai’s face. He looks straight ahead at the screen, mildly interested, but Chuuya feels like he knows he’s being watched. Just a touch embarrassed, he turns to face the screen too, determined to pay just enough attention to the movie, but mostly to sit in a theater full of people the way he originally intended, mostly alone.
The documentary is interesting. He had assumed everyone in it would be filmed behind a screen and with a voice modulator, scared of the repercussions of contributing to any sort of reporting, but nearly everyone appears on-screen with their name in a bar across the bottom. A lot of them are younger than he expected, close to his age, maybe even younger.
Occasionally, he steals looks up at Dazai, who catches him almost every time. Slowly, Chuuya stops feeling embarrassed when he does. It becomes part of the movie, looking over at Dazai when something interesting happens, gauging his reaction not just to the screen but to being engaged. It seems to be exactly what he wants.
Around three quarters of the way through, the narrator describes a sting that took down an entire division of the organization, how four of the members killed themselves before they could be tried. Dazai lays his hand on the back of Chuuya’s forearm resting across the full length of the armrest between them. Chuuya looks up at him, but Dazai doesn’t turn. He keeps his gaze fixed to the screen and his hand on Chuuya’s arm as if it’s the most natural thing in the world, as if they do this every week, as if they know each other. Chuuya doesn’t move, just follows along and keeps watching, though his skin crawls under his shirtsleeve.
Dazai moves his hand a few minutes later and doesn’t move again until the movie ends and the lights come up. The director wastes no time starting their presentation, and Chuuya divides his attention evenly between their spiel and the rest of the crowd. Some of them talk quietly with the people next to them, some squirm in their seats with unasked questions. Dazai sits dead still, his head tilted slightly toward Chuuya.
When the director finishes describing what led them to take on such a project and skating around their methods of locating members to speak with, they open up the floor for questions.
The first two are softballs, nothing Chuuya imagines the askers had genuinely been wondering about through the film. Just icebreakers. The third is different, though. Dazai raises his hand, stands up, and asks, “Which of the ex-members are you related to?”
The room goes silent, and Chuuya freezes.
For a moment, the director stands rooted in place, holding the microphone at their side, looking more surprised than anyone. Chuuya thinks back to the names displayed at the bottom of the screen, tries to match any of them to the director’s, but he can’t.
After a tense few moments of silence, Dazai expectantly towering over the crowd, the director raises the mic and says, “My family isn’t mentioned in the doc.”
Smiling, voice the exact same as it had been when they chatted together in line, Dazai presses, “Yes, but one of them was related to you, correct?”
“How—”
“Isn’t it obvious? Documentarians don’t just get to make films like this without coming from inside. I’m wondering who.”
Chuuya can feel the shock radiating off the crowd, and some part of him feels like he should minimize his own liability and curl into himself, act ashamed to be seated next to Dazai.
The director’s eyes bore into Dazai across the room, their forehead creasing with confusion. Quietly, inexplicably, they answer, “My brother was captured in the sting.”
No one wants to make a scene in public, but Chuuya thinks if anyone from the audience had decided to gasp, everyone else would have followed.
“I’m sorry for your loss, then,” Dazai says, flicking his wrist in a short wave and sitting back down, ending the scene. He runs his palms across his thighs, and Chuuya can’t make eye contact with him. His heart is pounding in his ears.
The director, to their credit, tries to continue the Q&A session like normal. A few kind people stand and ask interesting, non-invasive questions and steer the night back to its original course, but it doesn’t last quite as long as it might have. Within thirty minutes of the lights coming up, the crowd is filtering out through the theater doors, buzzing with the hum of twenty different pockets of gossip.
Chuuya knows he should be horrified, if only because Dazai clearly doesn’t care about approaching delicate issues with tact the way he should. But stronger than that ingrained social shame is the persistent thought that Dazai knows things Chuuya doesn’t, and maybe he’d like to share.
The two of them make their way out of the main theater and naturally slow to idling just outside. Other members of the audience brush past them, and some don’t even try hiding the way they stare at Dazai as they pass.
“Interesting documentary, I thought. The editing almost made it feel like an action movie—”
“Why would you ask that question?” He tries to put some bite behind it, but for once he can’t find any.
Dazai doesn’t pause to consider his answer, clearly having anticipated Chuuya mentioning it. Shrugs and says, “I was wondering about it.”
“But… what do you mean? How could you… it’s not even obvious, actually. There are other ways the director could have met those people. Why would you assume they had a family member in the Mob?”
“It definitely is obvious, it’s just that most people aren’t observant enough to come to that conclusion and brave enough to ask about it.”
Chuuya isn’t sure whether to start with the implication that he isn’t as smart as Dazai or the cockiness of the way he said it. “You can’t just ask people things like that in the middle of a crowd of strangers.”
“I got my answer,” he says, not budging an inch.
He can feel his frustration rising, beginning to bubble over. “But that person had to reveal sensitive information—”
“They didn’t have to,” he counters, still frustratingly calm. “You were probably wondering about the informants too, right, Chuuya? Now we know.”
There’s something about Dazai that drains something from him. An endurance in conflict he typically has, the will to hold out. And despite everything, despite all his misgivings, Chuuya is curious about him. “Now we know,” he sighs.
Dazai tilts his head again, a signature part of his act, and pulls out his phone. “Can I have your number?”
“Huh?”
Pushing it forward into Chuuya’s chest, he repeats, “Can I have your phone number?”
“Why?”
“Because I wanna talk to you more.”
“What if I don’t wanna talk to you?” he asks, glancing down for a second at the phone.
“Maybe I should actually give you mine. But then I’ll just have to trust that you’ll use it,” he says, raising a finger to his lip in a heavy-handed coquettish performance. He holds out his hand, palm open and up, waiting for Chuuya to hand over his own phone.
There are a million reasons to refuse. Ever since the first moment Dazai spoke to him this evening, he’s done nothing but annoy, embarrass, and insult Chuuya. He doesn’t act like other people, and that makes him difficult to pin down and anticipate. He’s mysterious in a suspicious way, and he’s too tall.
“Fine,” he grumbles, fishing his phone out of his pocket. “No promises I’ll text you. Ever.”
“That’s just fine,” Dazai smiles, already tapping his number in. Within no time, Chuuya’s phone is back in his pocket, feeling almost physically heavier with the weight of the new contact.
“Maybe if you want, we can get together sometime and discuss the movie in more depth. I feel like there was barely any time,” Dazai whines, slowly walking backward from the theater doors. “Hopefully I’ll be hearing from you soon, Chuuya.”
“Yeah, maybe,” he brushes it off, glad Dazai’s headed in the opposite direction, if only because it gives him some time alone to think.
And he does. Walking to the train, looking over his shoulder every so often and wishing he had just taken the motorcycle to cut down on time spent on foot in the dark, he thinks about questions, who’s allowed to ask them and what they’re allowed to be. He thinks about the ways people talk to each other, sometimes more violent than fists and knees. He thinks about the deaths of hundreds of people and who’s to blame for them.
He also thinks about Dazai. He mostly thinks about Dazai.
~
All the thinking gets him nowhere for a while. He has even more trouble than normal making it through the day at his shitty retail job because his mind keeps circling back to the possibility of Dazai suddenly showing up. He lives in the city too, and unless he’s been banned from the establishment (not an impossibility), he could walk in at any moment. He could see Chuuya in his uniform and talk to him like a customer, or worse, he could talk to him like a friend.
Even when his brain is tired to the melting point of thinking about Dazai, it doesn’t slow down, just shifts its focus to the movie. It was interesting, enlightening even. But the parts of it that occupy the most space in his mind are the questions he asked about it, and then he’s right back where he started.
It’s exhausting. Chuuya can’t remember a time when he was so utterly unable to control the direction of his own thoughts, the insistence of them.
And then, a few days after that point of exhaustion, he starts to feel a certain distance from it. Eight days have passed since the event, and his job is still shitty and he still doesn’t ride his motorcycle enough, and he still doesn’t know whose fault it is that all those people died.
He calls Dazai, who sounds pleasant but not quite excited, and they decide on drinks at Chuuya’s second favorite bar.
He puts thought into his outfit, and then catches himself and forces the thought back out. Changes from a soft black button-down into a light sweatshirt, doesn’t bother to give himself a last once-over before heading out.
Dazai looks the same as he had at the theater, dressed well enough without standing out. The things he says do that for him.
“Little Chuuya,” he beams, meeting him at the door.
“I’m not fucking little.”
He follows Dazai in and they get situated at the bar, wasting no time in ordering. Chuuya wrinkles his nose at Dazai’s preference in beers and the way he winks at the bartender, and he thinks about how it’s the first time he’s been out with anyone since meeting him at the theater.
He doesn’t want to beat around the bush, asks, “Do you always act like you did when we met?” It doesn’t feel as weird as he had expected to refer to the two of them as ‘we.’
“What do you mean?” Dazai smiles over the rim of his glass, eyes just as flat as they were a week ago.
“Weird.”
“Why do you wonder? Were you hoping to find something else if you kept digging?”
“I don’t intend to keep digging,” he counters, taking a sip of his drink.
“Yet you called me for drinks.”
“You suggested—”
Dazai rolls his head, turns away from Chuuya and toward the bar, smiling wider. “You’re so interesting, Chuuya. You’ve learned everything about how people are supposed to act.”
And Dazai clearly hasn’t. Or he has, and he deliberately breaks the rules at nearly every opportunity. “What does that mean?”
“You remind me of a man I met recently,” he says. His expression is neutral, but his eyes are more alive than Chuuya’s ever seen them. “You’re not very similar to him, but you two think about the same things.”
He doesn’t know what he expected from this meeting. Maybe he should have known it would be odd and off-putting; that’s who Dazai has shown himself to be. He definitely should have taken into account the other feeling, the magnetism. It’s been pulling at him all week, of course it’s stronger in person.
He can’t help but ask, “What things?”
“The rules for being a person.”
“I—” Chuuya struggles for a response. He watched Dazai read a person like a book at the movie theater, should have anticipated the same happening to himself. “I don’t know what—”
“He doesn’t talk about having to learn them consciously, just what they are. That’s a lot like you. You talk about what you’re allowed to say to people, but you don’t talk about how none of it comes naturally to you.”
Normally he would be angry. He knows enough about himself to understand that this is the sort of thing that would push him to belligerence in any other situation. But now, voice quiet, he asks, “What?”
Slightly cheerier, Dazai says, “He actually lives in the same area I do. I recently moved to a sort of cooperative living community, and he’s pretty prominent. A bit of a self-improvement nut, but other than that a fine guy.”
“Why do you think person stuff doesn’t come naturally to me?”
Looking down at Chuuya, glass in hand and eyes alight, he says, “Because you’re like me.”
Instantly, he feels the fissure in his brain. The protest jumps to the tip of his tongue, we are not alike. And so far, in the few cumulative hours they’ve spent together, it’s true that there hasn’t been much overlap. Even so, he can’t deny the tug in his chest, the way Dazai seems to understand him better than people he’s known for years do. The draw he has, the almost-familiarity.
It’s all there, waiting to be said, but it isn’t what comes out of his mouth. “I thought you were way smarter and braver than other people,” he mocks, bringing his glass to his lips.
Dazai laughs, and it matches his smile, just slightly empty. “Let’s split the difference.”
“Huh?”
“I’ll be smarter than you and you can be braver than me.”
Chuuya finishes his drink and Dazai’s eyes widen. He comments on Chuuya’s impressive pace as he watches him flag down the bartender to order another.
Wiping the glass’ condensation off on his thighs, he says, “The self-improvement fanatic—”
Dazai laughs a little at his word choice but doesn’t correct him.
“Is he into the books and everything? Those things are bullshit.”
Holding Chuuya’s gaze over the rim of his glass, Dazai drinks, deliberately slow. Lowers the glass and licks the corner of his mouth with just the tip of his tongue. Chuuya’s stomach feels warm and he looks away.
“No books. He has his own ideas, I guess.” He pauses a moment, studies the red of Chuuya’s cheeks trailing up to his ears, and offers, “You should visit, maybe meet him. It’s nothing special, but you might like it.”
“Visit you at your ‘cooperative living community?’” he asks, skepticism laid thick.
“Of course.”
“No way.”
“Why not?”
“Cause it sounds like a cult.”
Dazai raises an eyebrow, doesn’t look away for a second. “You’re just saying that because you think I’m weird.”
“Yeah,” Chuuya nods, thanking the bartender and grabbing his new drink. “You are weird.”
Dazai rolls his eyes, a high-quality performance, and shifts in his seat. His arm comes to rest on the bar less than a centimeter from Chuuya’s hand where it’s loosely wrapped around his glass. “You’ve got my number anyway,” he says, looking down at his own arm before he pulls it back to his side.
“Is this like a drawn-out way of asking for a hookup?”
A surprised smile (a real one, maybe) cuts across Dazai’s face, creases the skin at the corners of his eyes for just a second. “Chuuya, how direct!”
“Is it?” he asks, laughing despite himself. It’s probably the alcohol helping him loosen up.
“Would you say yes?”
He doesn’t think he’s blushing anymore, but he spends a moment wondering whether his body language is giving him away before he remembers this is Dazai and he probably already knows regardless. “No,” he lies through a grin.
Matching him exactly, down to the slight leftward slant of his smile, Dazai leans forward and says, “Well again, you’ve got my number. So if you get bored…”
I’m always bored.
His mind wanders while he works, he goes home and pours himself the first of a few glasses of wine, he listens to music and ignores calls from strangers and acquaintances alike. Every day is the same. Of course he’s bored.
“Do you ever get bored?”
“With this brilliant mind? Every day.”
“What?” he laughs, furrowing his brows and raising his glass to his lips.
“I see through everything, Chuuya,” he whines, draping himself across his arms on the bar. “It gets to be so repetitive.”
“Oh, I’m so sorry, that must be awful for you.”
“Yes, you get it,” he nods, pushing himself up slowly, grabbing his beer and finishing it off.
They while away another hour or so talking. Chuuya knows they’re supposed to get another drink to stay at the bar; it’s a burden on the bartender if they don’t. For once, though, he doesn’t particularly want one. He mentions the rule to Dazai and is met with a knowing smile, eyes somewhere in between the dullness of when he first saw them and the way they lit up earlier. He calls the bartender over and asks for glasses of water for the two of them, drumming his fingers on the edge of the bar until they come.
Chuuya usually only counteracts alcohol with water when what he really needs is to throw up, but it feels right to have something to sip on. Maybe Dazai was right. Maybe it doesn’t come naturally to him.
“When did you say you moved?”
“Around a month ago.”
Chuuya nods, racking his brain for any mention of the type of place Dazai described in the area. “It’s in the city?”
“A little ways outside,” he corrects, watching Chuuya’s face. Waits a beat and asks, “Interested?”
“Confused. I haven’t heard about anything like that anywhere near Yokohama.”
“Just another reason you should stop by,” he shrugs, dragging his finger through the condensation collecting on the side of his glass.
Chuuya doesn’t know why he keeps asking about it. He has a million other things he’d prefer to talk about, and every time he brings it back up, it monopolizes another chunk of their evening. Something about it just intrigues him.
When he and Dazai finally part for the night, he’s still thinking about it passively. A little afterthought as he turns on his heel and heads for the train, a whisper in the back of his mind as he changes out of his clothes and washes his face. Another spiral to get caught in; Dazai seems full of them.
His final thought before he nods off to sleep is about how Dazai seems like the exact opposite of the archetypical commune resident, yet he lives on one in perfect content. And he said Chuuya was like him.
Hair bunched uncomfortably under his neck against his pillow, he begins to think visiting might not be such a terrible idea.
~
Osamu needs to find out how to get his license reinstated. Before, not being able to drive was just fine. With the compound outside city limits, though, it’s a nuisance in this new situation. The walking isn’t the worst thing he’s had to endure, but he can’t justify it when he used to rely on the subtle rumbling of a car engine under his feet. He just needs to time everything correctly so he doesn’t miss his chance.
It was nice getting out for the night to see the shrimp, even a touch surprising. He had expected Chuuya to hold out at least another day before calling.
Dragging his feet along the long entry driveway to the compound, he cranes his neck, catches a glimpse of the windows of the hearing house. They’re black and empty, and he breathes a sigh of relief. One less thing to do tonight. And Mori wouldn’t have been pleased with him coming in late and disrupting the mood.
He reaches his apartment building and climbs the stairs to his door with shaking legs, twists the doorknob, confirms it’s still locked. He supposes it’s still too early to be worried about such breaches of privacy; forcibly unlocked doors shouldn’t be a concern for at least another month. Everything is still in its place when he surveys the main room, and he decides to give it a rest and brush his teeth, maybe do some reading before he passes out.
Looking at himself in the mirror, he tries to see himself the way Chuuya did earlier tonight: subjectively, searching for something to think, an opinion to form and hold and protect against all evidence to the contrary.
He thinks he looks normal. Maybe he’s attractive. Maybe he needs to sleep more, take care of the faint dark circles under his eyes. Or do they make him look pensive and interesting, the sort of person someone might want to spend time with? Do they make him look worthwhile?
Inviting Chuuya to visit had not been his intention. It had slipped out without premeditation, though he thinks he did well transforming it into something understandable, acceptable. He isn’t sure yet whether he hopes Chuuya will ever take him up on the offer. This place would be worse for him than it is for Osamu. If Chuuya sticks to his gut instincts, he’ll come to that conclusion himself. He already knows what it is, said it himself.
Of course Osamu knows it’s a cult. He knew before he moved in.
It’s just getting off the ground, still in its infancy and only as dangerous as an idea so far, but it will grow. He’ll watch, and he’ll listen, and he’ll leave when he needs to. But in the meantime, he has to be somewhere, and at least here he can spend a couple hours a day selling snake oil over the phone instead of clocking into an office job. He gets a little apartment to himself and only has to interact with people he doesn’t like during the hearings.
By the time he’s ready to sleep, the compound has gone quiet. It’s a nothing night, no hearing to draw people together. He missed dinner, but he’s new enough that it isn’t yet a cardinal sin to enjoy a little life outside.
If he stepped outside to look out over the black metal rail across from his door, he might see a few people milling around the compound. Probably Miyazawa, always outside, almost always barefoot. He would stop to smile and wave up at Osamu, and then he’d continue with whatever he had been doing, always busy with something.
He doesn’t step outside, though. Doesn’t check to see who’s up, doesn’t chance being invited to something by the few people who are. He goes to sleep without thinking about the other members of the community, almost without thinking about another soul on earth.
But then, as his eyes slip closed, he remembers the way Chuuya laughed with him at the bar, and for a second he hopes he never sees him again.