a very good bad thing we've found

“Explain,” he says, once Dazai is seated on the living room couch. The wound looks pretty bad, though he can’t see it quite as well from this angle. There’s so much blood, he almost feels paralyzed by the sight of it. “No, nevermind. Don’t talk. Stay here.”

He runs off to the bedroom. He has first aid here somewhere - antiseptic, bandages from the last time Dazai came over. Gauze? No, he’ll have to use an old T-shirt to stop the bleeding–maybe the one he wears to bed? It’s been washed recently. 

What the fuck has that asshole been doing?!

When he returns to the living room, Dazai is trying to get his coat off with one hand, the other still pressed down on his stomach. Chuuya steps forward to help, ignoring the way Dazai startles as he slams the first aid box on the coffee table, or the way he winces as Chuuya pulls his clothes off. 

Maybe he’s being too harsh considering Dazai is injured, but he’s in a hurry - he needs to stop the bleeding, he needs to bring color back to Dazai’s pale face. The coat and bandages are also covered in blood, and the metallic tinge is making Chuuya feel dizzy. They fall to the ground and bare bloodied skin alongside all the scars Chuuya was already well-acquainted with.

“I had a run-in with some of my enemies,” Dazai says by way of explanation, and Chuuya hadn’t asked but he scoffs, despite himself. 

“Of course, you did. One in five people are your enemies.” He kneels down on the floor between Dazai’s legs, and this time, his hands are gentle. He moves Dazai’s out of the way so he can get a better look at the wound.

It's a knife–a slash across the stomach, not deep enough to damage any organs, but enough to make him lose blood faster than is safe. 

Chuuya isn’t an expert in first-aid. On the rare occasion he has a severe injury, the infirmary at the mafia headquarters is good enough to do the job. But Dazai is bleeding out onto his couch, and no matter how many times Chuuya wished for him to fuck off and die, it feels all too real when his hands are stained with blood and he’s got front row seats to Dazai clinging to life in a way he wouldn’t expect from someone who has always just wanted to die.

Focus. He has to focus.

“Doesn’t the Agency have a doctor?” Chuuya forces his voice to stay stable as he presses the T-shirt to Dazai’s skin. It’s a white shirt, and it colors in an instant. Dazai winces at the pressure and his fists clench on his sides. 

“Yosano-san’s ability wouldn’t work on me.”

“Not her ability. She went to med school, didn’t she?”

“Yes, well…” Dazai starts, trails off. He’s breathing hard now, leaning back on the couch and looking down at Chuuya through lidded eyes. His face is still pale, lips white. His hair is sweaty, matted to his forehead. “Your place was closest.”

“What if I wasn’t here?” 

The bleeding may be slowing down, he thinks. The T-shirt is drenched, so he swaps it out with another one, tossing the bloodied cloth onto the floor. He’s not good at this–Dazai’s close to passing out and that would be bad news. The panic from earlier that he’d swallowed is rising back up his throat like bile, burning in his chest. 

What can he do? Why hadn’t he taken first aid? What kind of executive is he? The mafia has always valued the lives of their own, yet here he is, letting his partner bleed to death in his own home.

No, Dazai’s not his partner anymore. Dazai’s not part of them anymore. And Dazai is at fault for that too. But…

“You’re here when I need you to be,” Dazai says, and even like this: barely conscious, toeing the line between life and death and suffering from all the pain he hates so much, he gives Chuuya one of his detestable grins. “I came here because I trusted you.”

Chuuya grits his teeth. He takes Dazai’s hand and presses it on the T-shirt. “Keep that there,” he instructs, and gets himself busy with cotton and disinfectant. Dazai obeys, but there’s only so much energy left in his body, so Chuuya has to hurry. 

He wipes the skin around the wound, ignoring the way Dazai jerks at the sting–feeling some kind of strange satisfaction in it. A response, a reaction to pain, an indicator that the asshole is still alive, still kicking, still around to make Chuuya’s life hell.

By the time he’s wrapping bandages around Dazai’s stomach, Dazai is lying limp on the sofa; not saying much, which is a welcome change though Chuuya wishes it were in less life-threatening circumstances. Still watching him. He almost feels self-conscious

Despite his reservations, Chuuya had called the Agency. There’s no more bleeding and Dazai’s life is no longer in danger, so Chuuya had snapped at him to get proper medical attention.

“You really know how to suck a person dry, don’t you,” he says. Dazai has the audacity to waggle his eyebrows suggestively at him, and huff out a laugh, wincing at the pain immediately after.

Chuuya can only laugh.

“Your guys are coming to get you,” he says, picking up the first aid supplies and Dazai’s bloodied clothes. “I should’ve just kicked you out and left you to die.”

“But you didn’t, did you?”

Chuuya pauses. He wants to kick the asshole, wipe that smile right off his face. Dazai is lying there— docile, helpless, passive. Chuuya has never needed his ability to overpower him, and he’s a sitting duck like this, served to Chuuya on a platter. 

If there’s anyone he can forgive, it’s her. He owes his life to her after all. She’s the one who caught a burning match with her bare hands while he stood there drenched in gasoline, she’s the one who helped him achieve a dream he’d long since considered impossible, she’s the reason he lives when there is not much else to live for.

Stepping into his space just a little more than he’s comfortable with is - well, it’s okay. Maybe. Just a little bit. 

Okay, maybe not, but it’s not as bad as it could be. He knows regardless of the mess she’s discovered, she’d never hold it against him, and if there’s anyone who would...respect that mess, for lack of a better word, it’d be her. She hasn’t brought it up, hasn’t even hinted at it because why would she, when it’s not her business?

He’s pretty sure it was an accident, anyway.

And she clearly feels sorry for it. 

He’d known what she was talking about when she’d tried to talk about it vaguely, leaning against the trunk of a ridiculously tall tree. That fucking hundred-foot tree. He never thought he’d think of it so fondly.

She was good at keeping secrets, usually. After all, she’d kept the escape plan under wraps for a whole month without him figuring anything out. Maybe she hadn’t wanted to keep it a secret. Maybe she had wanted him to figure it out, because she didn’t want to bring it up herself. Maybe that was her way of giving him the push he needed, because he sure as hell wasn’t going to do anything on his own.

Maybe he was just looking into it too deep, and she had just blabbed without thinking. After all, the letters weren’t something outworldly. They were just letters. He’d just been talking. She might have forgotten the things he’d said out loud, and the things she just thought he’d said out loud.

He didn’t know what to think. But it didn’t matter.

He could forgive her for it. If it were anyone else, he’d have held the grudge forever - it was rude and invasive, and he couldn’t stand the idea of anyone stepping into his space and pulling out secrets they had no right to--

Emma was--

Well, maybe she had some right over his secrets. And she was different, he could forgive her.

He would forgive her. She had felt sorry, and he cared too much not to.

Then--

Embarrassment.

He could forgive her, yes. He’d calm himself down, put aside the agitation and frustration, because an accident is an accident and he would let it go and forgive her but--

How could he face her again after saying all the things he’d said?

He rustles the papers around, trying to figure out if there’s any way to tell which ones have been read and which ones haven’t, hoping to fuck that she hadn’t seen the ones he’d scribbled out red-faced about all the things he’d been thinking of lately. At the very least, he hoped she wouldn’t understand. Though he didn’t think there was any other way for her to interpret I want to kiss you than simply what it sounded like.

And it’s not a lie. He did want to kiss her. 

Fuck, he had kissed her, in a stupid blanket fort in the middle of the night and it had been the most glorious day of his life, though he had spent the next few days distracted by the thought of her lips under his and the way she’d tasted like the fruit yogurt they’d had for dessert and the way she had brought her arms up over his shoulders and played with the hair at the back of his neck and--

Well, he’d been distracted. He’d only just managed to compose himself long enough to exist and function like a semi-regular human being, but it only took so much for his thoughts to stray again. He’s distracted now, looking through the pages that express only how much, though at the back of his mind he thinks if she hadn’t read them she may never have brought up the kissing and then he’d never know, which would kind of suck.

But either way, he couldn’t face her. He absolutely could not meet her eyes after having said what he said. The kissing had been mutual, but this...this admission of feelings - especially when they’re put in words as intense as his own, what was he thinking? - is too much and too one-sided for him to ever be able to consider breathing in her presence ever again.

He loves her, he really does. But her efforts to save him have been in vain, because he’s going to put an end to himself just so he doesn’t have to deal with the aftermath of his secret being exposed.

He can burn the letters, because like hell is he going to let her keep reading those. Even if she already knows at this point. He has no idea how many of them she’s read, but he certainly hopes she hasn’t gotten to the one about all his late-night fantasies that he’d torn in half and then taped back together because it gives him a little thrill to think about the way he’d kiss her secretly behind the shelves of the library, or lying in bed under the covers when everyone else thinks they’re sleeping--

Anyway. 

She doesn’t need to know that. He’d burn all of them, though it really pains him to do it. Even if she’s read everything, knows everything, unless he says it to her straight, they’re never going to bring it up, so it’s fine this way. He can pretend everything is okay and normal, as it always was.

Except it’s not. 

There is a difference between the way she looks at him now and how she’d done so before. Sometimes, though it may be wishful thinking, he thinks she looks at him the way he thinks he looks at her. At least, it’s different from the way it used to be. 

He notices, like he notices everything about her.

It’s different because she’s been pushing boundaries, like she’s testing the waters. Different because now he knows the way her lips feel when they’re pressed to his, knows the way she’s been trying just a little bit more to make herself look pretty even though he thinks she’s always pretty and it could be for anyone, for any reason, but he suspects it has something to do with him, from the way she throws looks in his direction when someone compliments her, as if gauging to see how much he agrees.

(Of course, he agrees. He wonders why she doesn’t know it already.)

In any case, it’s different, and somehow, writing letters on scraps of paper when everyone thinks he’s making escape plans doesn’t feel like enough anymore. 

He’s definitely burning the letters. He doesn’t want to bring it up to her directly, still. He doesn’t think he can even if he tried. He’d much rather burn himself with the letters, like he’d planned on doing initially.

But she’d saved him from that - he owes her his entire life.

At the very least, he could give her an explanation. Or at least, let her know it’s okay, though she has got to stop spying on him.

Despite himself, Ray smiles, and pulling out a fresh piece of paper, begins to write.

In her heart - it still stings. Itches, burns, blooming suffocation as she watches him move around with anything and everything on his mind except her. It’s ridiculous of her to even think about it with so much disdain. They’re fighting for their lives, aren’t they? They’re in the midst of trying to liberate their own species. 

In her heart, she’s still just a fourteen year old girl.

It starts with the shelter. 

Norman is alive, and at the front of a revolution, so there is reason to celebrate. Nothing else matters in the moment she steps into the room and sees his smile, the moment she throws herself at him in a hug, the moment Ray steps in and pulls them both to him in a precious, precious reunion. 

That’s where it starts. 

As a kid, she’d always been selfless. She doesn’t have an issue with sharing. Her toys, her time, her people - sharing is good, sharing is fun, sharing makes people around her happy, and she likes to see them smile. 

As a teenager, she’s not much different. She likes sharing, still. Her things, her time.

Maybe not her people.

It’s just Norman, she thinks, when she catches him and Ray sitting together at a table, engrossed in a game of chess. Neither of them notice her when she walks in, and while that isn’t anything new, it feels an awful lot like having something that belongs to her being snatched out of her hands. Not that she knows what it really feels like, because that has never happened before. 

But if it were to happen, she suspects it’d feel something like this.

It’s just Norman, she reminds herself. Then why does she feel so bothered?

“Oh, Emma,” Norman says, looking up and noticing her, and she plasters a smile on her face and walks over to their table, looking at the pieces and discerns that Ray would win in a few moves. She looks at him expectantly, waiting for the knowing look he throws at her when he’s got the upper hand, but his eyes stay on the board, and it’s only when he’s got Norman held at checkmate that he looks at her.

“Hey,” he says, patting the seat next to him. “Sit down?”

Emma takes the empty space next to Norman instead. It’s spite, more than anything, though she can’t figure out why it’s there.

They’re still best friends. There are things about her nobody knows except Ray, and things about him nobody knows except her. They have something special, they have a bond, and they understand each other best. That’s a fact.

Maybe the only secret they might have between them is this growing feeling in her chest over the past few days, the absence she feels of him by her side and the irritation that clouds her mind when she catches him busy with something or someone else, as if everyone in the shelter is suddenly more important than she is. 

People he doesn’t know, people whose names are new on his tongue, people who don’t know how smart and special he is, how much he’s been through to get to this point. How everyone in the shelter with Gracefield’s numbers branded at the side of their neck owes their life to him. 

They don’t know that. They don’t know that he’s self-sacrificial, that he’s poured gasoline over himself to save his family, that he’s faced demons head-on to save her, that he’s spent his entire life tormented by the reality that everyone had at some point been so blinded to.

She knows it. 

She might be the only one who truly understands how much.

Then why is he there and not here, with her?

Swallowing bitterness, Emma busies herself with Norman, pretends she’s unaffected by the big Ray-shaped hole in the days that come, and reminds herself they’re fighting for liberation.

The peak comes after a few days. The ‘peak’ - whatever that is. 

They are sitting in the woods. It’s late, and Emma’s eyes sting from how sleepy she is, but Ray is still awake, sitting on the ground with a piece of bread in his hands. He hasn’t said much of anything for a while.

The other kids are fast asleep, already, and despite herself, Emma closes her eyes, resting back against a tree trunk, giving in to the exhaustion. 

The words she hears are hushed. If she were just a little bit further into sleep, she might not even have heard them at all. Cracking one eye open, she takes in the sight of the wolf-girl Ayshe sitting across Ray, chewing on her own piece of bread.

“He was a good parent,” Ray says suddenly. “Your father, I mean.”

Ayshe looks surprised for a moment, as if she’s never heard something like that before. Probably hasn’t, from a human. “He was a monster, though?”

“That doesn’t matter.”

“You had a great parent too, didn’t you?” she says, not really looking at Ray. He isn’t looking at her either. “I can say that much by looking at you all.”

Ray huffs softly, and his smile is bitter. By now Emma is awake, blinking wearily at the two of them from her spot a few feet away. 

“Our parent was a human,” Ray says, and Emma thinks of Isabella - with her kind smile and her warm hugs, and the terror Emma had felt down to her toes when she’d first seen her mother stand opposite the very same demon that had brutally murdered Conny. 

Human?

“But to me,” Ray continues, and this time the expression on his face is unreadable. “She was always a monster.”

Ayshe doesn’t say anything to that. She quietly finishes her food and murmurs something under her breath which Emma thinks might have been a ‘good night’, and then she’s getting up and walking away. Ray sits there, staring at the lantern at his feet.

Silence on Ray, isn’t a new look. He rarely speaks, and when he does, it’s almost never about himself.

Emma thinks of Ray - six years old, faced by the brutal reality of death and sacrifice, unable to feed into the simple illusion of happiness everyone had set up for themselves. A six year old, with a monster to call mom. 

Her heart hurts, but she can’t bring herself to say anything. She doesn’t have that right. At six, she’d been thinking about riding giraffes while Ray thought about how his mother was seasoning him for lunch. 

Nothing she’s ever been through can equate to that. She can’t even begin to understand, and it bites - bites so hard - that she’d heard of this for the first time through eavesdropping. That he hadn’t trusted her enough with it to tell her himself. 

But why should he?

She wouldn’t understand.

Ayshe would, she thinks bitterly. Ayshe, who had grown up with parental issues just like him, who barely knew anything about him, yet could touch on such a sensitive, deep part of him just by being herself. 

The suffocating jealousy made no sense, but it eats her up inside anyway.

She stays where she is, watches him as he sits unmoving in his spot for a while before he blows the lantern out. She closes her eyes when he approaches her, and hopes he can’t tell she isn’t sleeping when he sits next to her, murmuring, “You’ll get cold like this, idiot,” as he covers her with his jacket.

Emma’s heart clenches.

She corners him at the shelter two days later. 

He’s sitting on a rock tying the laces of his boots. His hair is messier than she’s ever seen it, and his eyes look bloodshot, as if he hasn’t slept through the entire two days she hasn’t seen him. She doesn’t know if this is avoidance or preoccupation, but she thinks it’s the former. It doesn’t sit well with her at all.

“You’ve been avoiding me,” she says, crossing her arms and jutting her hip out, the way Isabella used to stand whenever they’d get caught trying to sneak food from the kitchen late at night.

Thinking about Isabella puts a bitter taste in her mouth.

Ray looks up at her, tiredly. “I’m not,” he says. “I’ve just had things to do.”

“Right,” she says, trying not to let the jealousy show itself on her tongue. “Things you could have done with me, but you chose not to.”

The look he gives her is baffled. “What are you talking about?”

Emma shakes her head and looks away. Ray lets go of his shoes, laces not fully tied yet and stands up. He holds her by the shoulders and turns her to face him, looking her in the eye. She resists the urge to press her hands against his face and smooth away all those worry lines, resists the urge to push him into a bed and demand that he sleep, it’s been two whole days. 

“What’s wrong,” he says, more than asks. It’s demanding, but his voice is soft. “Talk to me.”

Emma bites her lip, frowning. “It’s been a whole month since we had a proper conversation, you know? It’s like you were only there for me throughout the past year because you had no choice, and now that you have Norman and Ayshe you want to just run off and leave me behind.”

Ray blinks at her. Once. Twice. He opens and closes his mouth.

Emma counts the seconds.

“Are you jealous?” he asks, incredulously, when she reaches five. “Seriously?”

Emma huffs in response.

“You think I was deliberately spending time away from you?”

“Weren’t you?”

“No? I - fuck, Emma.” He sighs in exasperation, but despite the tiredness in his eyes, the look he gives her is fond, and he reaches up to brush her hair out of her eyes. “I was giving you space. I thought you might want it, after being stuck with me for so long.”

Space, Emma thinks bitterly. Space doesn’t mean opening up to strangers in a way you’ve never done with me.

But that’s not her place to say. His secrets aren’t hers to dictate.

Besides. 

His hand is warm on her shoulder, warmer as he cups her cheek and tilts her face up to look at him. She steps closer, wrapping her arms around his waist and burying her face in his chest, breathing in his smell as his own arms come around her. 

“You’re mine,” she mumbles into the fabric. “I don’t share.”

He wanted so badly to reach out and hug her. He didn’t think she’d appreciate it very much right now.

“Emma," he started, but she turned around abruptly, gave him a grin and announced that she was going to see what Gilda and Anna are doing. 

Under other circumstances, maybe he might have let her go. It wasn’t the first time she’d plastered strength on her face to convince herself she was okay, and even though Ray always did his best to be there for her, sometimes it was just easier to carry the burden yourself than to share it with other people.

Except he wasn’t other people.

Not after what she’d said.

He grabbed her wrist as she walked past him, pulling her back.

“You can’t just leave like this,” he said.

“I can if you let me go.” Her voice was even, her face expressionless, and that made him even more aware of the fact that she was probably panicking. She twisted her arm in his grip, trying to free herself. “Let me go, Ray.”

“No,” he told her firmly. “You’re not going to carry this one on your own. Talk to me.”

“Ray.” Emma closed her eyes, took a deep breath and looked up at him. “Please just be my best friend right now. Not the guy I just confessed my love to.”

The words seemed designed to deliver one well angled punch in the gut, because that’s what they did. He froze, his fingers loosening around her wrist and she was taking her hand back and running out the room, face bright red. 

His pulse was drumming in his head, the blood rushing so loud he could barely hear himself think - not like he was thinking much of anything, anyway. All he could do was replay the scene in his head. 

Him, standing at a bookshelf, commenting on how none of the books were new titles, and that the bunker library had been much better stocked than this one. Behind him, Emma stood at the window.

“I think I might be in love with you,” she’d said, as if it was as simple as talking about the weather, or lunch.

It’s kinda cold today.

I wonder what’s for lunch.

I think I might be in love with you. 

Ray turned around slowly. He’d been holding a book, but he couldn’t be assed to remember the title anymore. It wasn’t relevant, anyway. 

Their eyes met.

Emma’s lips pulled up in a smile, and she turned around to look outside. Moment over.

He’d ruined it by being the guy she’d just confessed to. Not like he didn’t want to be, of course. But what he felt didn’t matter. She needed a best friend right now, so that’s what he would be. He was already disappointed in himself for not having been exactly that half a minute ago.

He cursed under his breath now as he followed her outside, practically throwing himself down the stairwell to the open area where he spotted her sitting at a bench looking just as miserable as she’d tried to make herself not seem back in the room. 

Shoving his hands in his pockets, he sauntered over to her, ignoring the look of surprise she gave him and sat down next to her. 

“If you’re here to pull things out of me again--” she began, and he cut her off, adding an obnoxiously exaggerated level of concern to his voice as he said:

“It looks like my best friend Emma is upset about something!” 

Emma blinked.

“Maybe she wants to talk about it with me, her best friend?” He turned to give her a meaningful look. “That’s what friends do, right?”

She stared at him for a moment, before her features relaxed and she gave a quiet laugh, leaning back against the bench. 

“So I confessed to this guy,” she said. “I think I shouldn’t have done that.”

“Why not?”

“Because it’s obvious it wouldn’t go anywhere. He doesn’t think that way about me.”

“How can you be sure of that?”

She threw him a look. “Because we’re best friends, why would he? He didn’t look too happy about it, either.”

Ray hummed loudly, pretending to mull it over in his head. “Maybe he was just surprised because he likes you too, but he didn’t ever think you could like him back.”

Emma took a moment to consider that. Toss it around in her head like she did, trying to make sense of it. Ray held his breath. That was as good as a confession, wasn’t it?

She’d already confessed first - he knew his feelings were reciprocated, so why did he feel so anxious?

After all those months of pining, shoving his stupid, stupid feelings as deep as possible and reminding himself he wasn’t allowed to think of her like that, he wasn’t, she’d just come and dropped a bomb on him like none of that had been of any use at all.

Typical Emma.

But liking - loving. He loved her - someone wasn’t the same as getting a response to a confession. She’d known that too, when she confessed. Not that he wouldn’t have given her a response. He’d lay himself down at her feet if she asked him to, was always ten steps ahead in making sure she got what she wanted.

Reciprocation, probably.

Loving her first. He’d done that too.

But that wasn’t important right now. Right now, he wasn’t the guy she’d confessed to. He was her best friend.

Though that line had been blurred quite a while ago.

“Why would he think that?” Emma asked, quietly. Then, as if regaining some of the courage with which she’d blown away his entire world, shifted just a bit closer and leaned in to rest her head on his shoulder.

Ray gave a small shrug, so as not to disturb her. “He doesn’t think much of himself, you see. You’re too good for him.”

“That’s ridiculous,” she said. She was warm against his side. He resisted the urge to put his arm around her. “He’s the most important person in the world to me.”

He thought his heart might have stopped. Maybe it did. For a second, his brain blanked out, and his pulse took over, dictating the way he reached across to take her hand in her lap, pulled it so their fingers intertwined and rested on the bench between them.

“More important than me?” he gave a small laugh. “I’m insulted.”

“Sorry to disappoint,” she said, and squeezed his hand just a little. 

There was silence for a moment. He was doing his best to avoid looking at her - though he couldn’t see her face, and he was glad she couldn’t see his. He was hyperaware of her head on his shoulder though, every inch of skin that met hers tingling as he went back to the moment upstairs, replaying it in his head again and again. 

“Can I switch now?” he asked quietly.

“To what?”

“To being the guy you confessed to.”

“Oh.” A pause. “I guess.”

Another pause. He squeezed her hand. Swallowed.

“I think I’m in love with you too.”