⅋ @chuyua . . . “ you look good with my hands around your throat. ”
it was definitely proficient, dazai would have to give them that. he'd filed away this particular torture tactic for his own uses, barbed wire wound around his neck and pulled ever tighter by the hand of an over - excited grunt off to the side. he could see it working on the sorts of people that had something to lose, something worth coming back and living for in the wake of betrayal and the trade of secrets, as most tactics did, but dazai himself seemed to baffle his new friends. he'd kept his lips firmly pressed together with no sign of giving in, tauntingly bored expression plastered onto his features as he knowingly struggled against tightly wound wires, looking for the expression of distress and disgust in their faces and laughing when he caught it. in the end it was irritatingly painful and something he would complain about later, but too satisfying to pass up in the moment.
chuuya's arrival signalled the end of the charade, ridding dazai of the contraption and despite being waved away, instead he'd pressed his palms onto seeping wounds, shrouded in their coverings but no less burning dazai's skin in the forced removal of the layer of coverage around his neck. still he was warm, at least, and that seemed to soothe the bite and sting of cool air against lacerations mostly self - inflicted. you look good with my hands around your throat. likely said to rouse some sort of a favourable reaction from him. they'd helped each other through worse, pressed on bullet holes through shirts, tied torn fabrics around stab wounds, dazai had held corruption under his palms and thought it beautiful, but this ⸺ skin to obscured skin, grasp slippery with blood, raw and warm and free - flowing. those words spoken between them, well. the feeling that accompanied that just wasn't fair at all.
it almost felt like too much. it maybe should have felt like nothing at all. from dazai, a roll of his eyes and sour wrinkle of his nose, performance of distaste and nonchalance cracked in amber gaze that seemed to soften on something amused, then the tiniest lean into chuuya's space, forehead meeting his clothed shoulder. an outsider would take it for fading consciousness, the best guess, and not the desire for a closeness he still wasn't sure he fully understood. perhaps a little more of the former, but he'd be forgiven for his sorry state. not the first time he'd heard those words, before said with a lick of heat and breaths shared between them, wandering hands and a door to the outside that stayed locked more often than it did open. though it sounded the same, it felt different. “ don't get used to it. ” dazai could only think to say the same thing he'd said then, pressing something of a humoured smile into chuuya's arm, once again hidden from the rest of the world. “ or do. ”
