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“You owe me your life,” Chuuya says.
So he gives you the death you have never been convinced you’d be able to outrun, the one you think may actually be the most fitting. He breaks your jaw on the curb and shoots you three times in the chest.
You always thought it would hurt more than this, but maybe you’re just tired enough to not care anymore.
“You owe me your life,” Chuuya says.
So the two of you find a new home together. There’s a highrise apartment building full of antique furniture that was owned by happy couples that lived their lives together, and you don't flinch away from every surface, or pass through it like a ghost. There’s a hatrack near the door, and a gun hidden in the drawer behind the forks and spoons because neither of you live a life free of danger, and there’s always a risk.
There are no pictures on the walls, but there are stains that tell stories nonetheless. Drawers in the bathroom are filled with gauze, bandages, painkillers, disinfectant because Chuuya is good but even he’s not impervious, and you can’t remember a week you haven’t come home at least once with a throbbing in your head from one of a long list of potential causes.
You are both the same people you were before which means some nights you sleep slumped over your desk, or Chuuya puts dents in the walls before leaving in a flurry of rage. You are both on sides that mean to protect the city without being on the same side, and most days that means leaving your work in your office because you love him, you do, but he’s still a Port Mafia Executive and you are a member of the Special Division, and not all things can coexist easily.
You love him, and you think he loves you too, but that doesn’t mean you know what this is. You sleep in the same bed, and live in the same apartment, and spend nights talking until the exhaustion seeps into the cracks and pauses of the conversation, but you don’t have the words for what this is, because ‘lover’ feels too soft and you’re nothing as official to deserve more than that. Somedays, it still makes your breath catch in your throat to think you have this life together at all.
In your dreams, the world is bathed in soft memories of a time that you have never lived, with the sort of overlay of the things you've never been able to escape. You look into the mirror and sometimes you swear you can see a family laughing in the places behind you, but even it can’t escape the sheen of anger and something darker that is always a pressing constant in your lives. But sometimes, you brush by it with a slight smile of night spent curled together, in the soft light from the world outside, and the parts that make this all worth the pain and the struggle it can come with.
You give him the best parts of your life, even on the days when it isn’t easy, and you forget why you want this, there is always the reminder that this is better than anything you’ve ever had before.
“You owe me your life,” Chuuya says.
So you come back to the life you thought you’d left once. Back to a world that you betrayed because you were never that person in more than words. You come back to a Port Mafia that’s been shaken in the wake of a death of a man that barely mattered to the whole but was vital to Dazai who did .
You don’t ask why, or how Chuuya did it. You don’t want to know, if you’re honest. You sit at the first stool on the left at a bar you haven’t drunk at in years, and you keep looking over expecting- expecting. But it’s too quiet, and there is something wrong about being here alone, after what you've done. It doesn’t matter that you always knew it would happen, or that it wasn’t even all your fault. It matters that the man that should be beside you hates you, and the man beside him is dead and buried.
It’s almost funny that Dazai got out, even if no one would have ever expected for that; and that you, who was never really loyal at all, have come back to the Port Mafia. This was the cost for saving the world, and truth be told, it’s not even all that different than the ‘good’ side was. You still don't sleep, but then again, you didn’t before either. That’s hardly anything notable, and the work… it’s different now than why you worked in an office surrounded by stacks of books, there are computers now that there weren't before, but the actual filing systems are familiar. You remember using them, you remember creating them.
You have never thought you’d write another obituary, and yet here you are, at a bar you used to frequent, because the day has been exhausting, and you crave that little bit of comforting familiarity, that is now no longer comforting or familiar.
Behind you a door opens, and then there is a figure beside you. A Port Mafia executive , the exhausted part of you thinks, well this is familiar. But it’s the wrong Executive, and the wrong time.
You turn to look at him, the low ambient light not reflecting off your glasses in the way you want. It feels personal, and intimate, and almost like a new beginning-- you have never been wholly at peace without the layers of protection, and the eye contact feels like it cuts through all of those walls you’ve spent a lifetimes protecting yourself behind. Odasaku would hate this, hate you, hate the situation, but he is dead, and you know Dazai already does.
You raise a toast to Chuuya. “To a returning.”
Chuuya just rolls his eyes, and points towards the door. “Come on, I’m not here to entertain your ghosts.”
And it’s true, you suppose, your ghosts haunt this place. You circle one finger over the top of the glass, and see a scene like this sepia tinted and familiar but from half way down the bar, and it feels like the best reminder that the past cannot be courted. You are not the same person you were, your loyalty is to something else, and maybe it’s only fair that you leave the past to die here, where you should have let it die years earlier.
You leave ghosts behind you, and pledge your life to a man and to an organization that you would have sworn were your enemies.
“You owe me your life,” Chuuya says.
So he lets you take him home, to a hotel room that overlooks Yokohama from a row of windows that let in the early pre-dawn light. The floor is carpeted, and the closet is full of suits and a box in a corner full of the few momentos you allow yourself of the life you’ve lived. They live on a shelf, because you’re afraid if you touch them you'll taint them with the heavy exhaustion and sadness you’ve come to carry, but you can’t bring yourself to get rid of these precious things.
Chuuya sits on a bed you haven’t slept in in a week and a half, sheets with crisp edges. In another world, it might be a house, or an apartment with antique furniture, instead of a mostly empty hotel room that’s more function than form.
You sit on the only chair in the room, hard backed and arguably uncomfortable, drinking coffee from the only cups you keep on hand. The stemless wine glasses are all purpose enough that you keep three of them in a row at the side of a sink, three plates and three bowls beside them, all immaculate.
Chuuya drinks the nicest wine you have from the bottle, and you talk through the fall of the adrenaline rush, and the survival you both thought was going to be impossible. Through the widows, the sun sets, and somewhere in the city below, there are street lamps and rebuilding from recent devastation. You talk until the room is bright with the strangely soft colours of dawn that feel too delicate for both of you. He is a creature of the night, and you have made yourself comfortable in dark rooms illuminated by screens and the blinding daylight.
In the slow way that isn’t actually slow at all, you find your hotel room shifting to accommodate two lives. There’s a spot on the counter where he puts his hat, and a corner of the closet that gets partitioned off for the clothes that aren’t yours. A pile of take-out menus appear on the table, beside scribbled notes about work, some of them yours, some of them his.
The hotel room that has only ever echoed with muffled memories of past people start to feel more like the things that belong in a home. You pick up a glass, and are struck with the sensation of domestic closeness.
You come back to the- home after days-nights-days of sleepless staring at a computer and papers, and being on calls with people you have to be nice to, with a headache that gnaws in in your temples and behind your eyes and curl into a bed that’s warm, beside a person you do not want to consider the idea of loving, but probably do. You don’t want to love Chuuya, because it is going to hurt, it always does. Love is meant for people with normal lives, and not for the people that guard over a city beloved, but wrong to each other. Love is the sort of thing that ruins but somehow it’s crept into your life, so you don't admit what it is because that would admit to the openness of being ruined.
So it might not be love, but you’re certain he’s never looked more resplendent than in the twilight, and it might not be love, but that doesn’t stop you from giving him your life.
“You owe me your life,” Chuuya says.
So he comes to a life he never thought he’d leave. He leaves the Port Mafia behind, and you have dreamt of many ends to this, but none of them contain Chuuya leaving the Port Mafia behind. None of them include a world in which the only one of you to not escape the world of the Port Mafia is Oda, the most moral of you all, the most driven to be a better person.
You clear Chuuya’s record, a process you’ve done before, and never thought you’d do again. You think you should be less amused by the chaos that his working with you is going to cause, but you’re tired, and running in the adrenaline rush that is surviving this long-- through Shibusawa, and Chuuya himself, and the called off death sentence from above.
You owe him your life, and you know that you will have to pay your debts, but for now, you are going to take the amusement that comes from this. The government is going to benefit more from having his powers under their command than not, and you know that. You’ve seen what he can do, and so have they. You would all be dead if it weren't for him.
You give him your life in the sort of ironic way that you could never have built contingency plans for.
“You owe me your life,” Chuuya says.
So he kills you. Hand on your neck, gravity too heavy to keep yourself standing on your own. You have ever known gravity like this, have never known a lot of things. Stranger the gratefulness for your murder, but you’ve excelled in lies and half-truths, but you promised one thing in exchange and you want this one thing to be true. Part of you realizes it should have been harder to accept the terms, but struggling for breath around the weight in your chest and it feels more like a relief.
You smile as you feel the consciousness flicker and fade. It feels like a debt repaid finally. It feels like coming home.
“You owe me your life,” Chuuya says.
So he takes you home, to an apartment that’s too empty and too big for one person. Full of fine fabrics and finer china, but with air that has the telltale scent of disinfectant covering metal, covering blood. There’s a hatrack near the door, and a kitchen that you don’t think has ever been used to cook anything.
The windows look out over Yokohama-- you never thought you’d see the city like this again, not after leaving the Port Mafia, and Odasaku’s death and the person you were never really meant to be. (Were you ever that person? Sometimes you wonder).
The first night you drink tea out of a wine glass, and he drinks champagne out of a coffee mug and neither of you sleep-- not that either of you would have anyways. You talk with guarded words and raise a toast to the people neither of you are, raise another to the city that’s been saved. You don’t know at what point your tea becomes something harder, and the champagne leaves nothing but the echo of bubbles.
You learn to sleep in bed nicer than any you’ve ever had, and how to wake up from nightmares of memories that aren’t yours. Some of them are Chuuya’s, most of them echo with a distinctive emptiness of a life lived in motion, like the hotels you’ve spent your adult life moving between. Some days you come back to the apartment that you’re beginning to learn to call home and it smells like lemons, you think this should bother you more than it does.
Your hands are stable when they pull out bullet shards from Chuuya’s arm, they only begin to shake when you’re sitting on the couch with his head in your lap watching some terrible reality show that neither of you are paying attention to. It’s an excuse to not talk about this, and the emotions that you’re beginning to realize are important.
The nights you both sleep in bed together are few and far between, but you can’t remember a time you’ve ever slept better.
In between late nights and later mornings you give him your life.