you can take my Soul, but never my Heart (omegaverse)

Chapter 25: peaches and proposals

Dazai leaves the bathroom once he has fresh bandages wrapped around his arms, the scarred skin almost buzzing in the aftermath of all the touching he endured. He's about to track Chuuya down for those cuddles, breakfast be damned, because he kind of feels a little cold and like he's about to shake to pieces. He doesn't really know enough about sex to know what dropping is, but that is probably what the bone-deep need to be held right now is.

Chuuya doesn't look like he's faring any better, actually.

He isn't in the kitchenette, but by the coffee table, sitting on the floor next to it as he slowly gathers up discarded playing cards. He peeks at them, at the hands that were folded and never played, and Dazai wonders if he remembers whose they were. If he can see who would have won. But Chuuya probably doesn't care about that, merely stacking them into his hands and idly shuffling them.

"Chuuya."

He doesn't respond beyond a low grunt in his throat to acknowledge that he heard him, inspecting the cards. Tiny scratches exist on them, some edges bent, and Dazai doubts there was ever an even game when the Flags would all be the type of men to cheat with those marks.

"You miss them, don't you?"

Again, he says nothing.

Dazai leaves him, ducking into the bedroom, because he feels like he's intruding on something. He opens one of his bags to find some clothes; his sleep shirt and some flannel pants, soft and familiar, in hopes that they'll bring him some sort of calm. They smell like him, like Koko and his nest, and he takes a moment to regard the stock of nesting materials in the corner of the room. He misses his own nest already, but he knows it's not much to mourn right now, compared to what Chuuya must be feeling here. His own losses have never stacked up to measure against everything Chuuya has had torn from his hands.

He knows Chuuya has lost a lot.

Really, that's an understatement.

Chuuya lost his childhood to government laboratories, the simplicity of a regular life lost to a singularity that lurks under his skin like a ghost possessing him. Dazai believes that Chuuya is a human, but to believe that also forces him to acknowledge how much trauma such a simple human has been put through. Dazai has only ever known Chuuya since they were fifteen; everything before that is just hearsay. But he knows that Chuuya lost the Sheep, that they turned on him despite his sacrifice to save them, and that he nearly lost them again a year later. Verlaine left a trail of blood behind him six years ago, all spilled because of Chuuya; because of who Chuuya is, and who he was. Because two agents from Europe broke an unstable seven year old out of containment, and one of them lost his memory while the other came back to try to finish the job eight years later. Dazai never asked, but he knows that Chuuya blames himself for the death of the Flags and Detective Murase, as well as everything else that happened back then. He knows, even after that, more people died. Swathes of Chuuya's subordinates were slaughtered by Shibusawa, some of whom he considered friends. Anyone that seemed to get close to Chuuya was destined to be killed some day, no matter how hard he fought to protect them.

So he knows why Chuuya is hesitant.

He's cut all ties with the Port Mafia, whether he wanted to or not, because he tried to kill Verlaine. Judging by the blood Dazai saw on him, he knows that Chuuya injured him severely, at the very least. Verlaine reminds him a lot of a cockroach hiding under a rock. Scuttling out, nearly getting killed, and merely hiding away again to nurse his wounds while everyone else fears risking the sight of him again. Chuuya might not be scared of him anymore; perhaps he made his peace with that when he tried to tear him to pieces. But Chuuya's fear lies in something else.