#katie.fic

Dazai pitches forward violently, his head slamming against the back passenger window. The world blinks out—then in, and back out, and then in again in a blur of throbbing light, red and angry and harsh against the heaviness of his eyelids. Iron drips onto his tongue, and it takes Dazai a long, dizzying moment before he realizes it must be blood, that he’s bleeding, that the car isn’t moving anymore, that there is rubber burning in his nostrils, a squealing sound lancing sharply through his ears and into his brain as if trying to cleave it in two. 

He’s sitting up before he realizes he’s willed his body to rise, and his vision lurches with it, grasps for focus, shifts and slides and sharpens onto Chuuya, slumped over the steering wheel—onto the dashboard, crunched in on itself in cracking layers of plastic and metal—onto Kunikida, unmoving against the passenger door. 

“Dazai.”

Fingers slide over his cheek. A thumb traces his jaw. 

Kunikida’s face is pale, his glasses missing, his body pinned in his seat by the crumpled inward press of the car. It holds him upright in a cruel mockery of the way he holds himself, straight-backed except for the grotesque lolling of his head, and there are cracks radiating from where his forehead rests against the window—and blood, so much of it, spattered around the crown of his head, a perverted halo over the disheveled tumble of his hair. His legs turn inward towards the middle of the car, the angle odd, unnatural beneath the ramrod posture of his upper body, his wrists pinioned beneath a mangled mess of steel, and his hands, his hands—

“Dazai.”

Dazai resurfaces from sleep like a man nearly drowned.

He gasps with it, shuddering against the fingers that thread into his hair, curling against the nape of his neck as focus returns slowly to his eyes. The ghost of his dream lingers in his vision, superimposed over the white ceiling of the hospital room, and Dazai blinks it away forcefully, shifts his gaze until he finds Chuuya’s face swimming over him, cast in bright, sterile fluorescence, the furrow of his brow painting shadows over the pockets of his eyes.

“It’s okay,” Chuuya murmurs above him. He sounds tired. “It was just a dream.” 

“Just a dream,” Dazai echoes. He reaches for a joke, something to get rid of the tension that pinches Chuuya’s face inward, but it dies on his tongue, burning away like the end of one of Chuuya’s cigarettes.

“Yeah.” Chuuya leans over his chair and presses his lips to Dazai’s temple. “Everything is okay. We’re okay.” Dazai feels his lips move against his forehead, feels the warm rumble of his voice.

On the other side of the bed, the heart monitor beeps. Its tone grates against something inside Dazai, rubs away at the composure that in the past had always come so easy to him.

“He’s okay,” Chuuya adds, more to himself than to anyone else, as he rests his head against Dazai’s shoulder. “He’s alive.”

Kunikida lies buried beneath the crisp white sheets of the hospital bed, silent except for the slow intake of his breath, in and out, in and out, moving to the chipped beat of the heart monitor. His head is wrapped in gauze, and his left leg is raised, armored in plaster and mounted on a pulley attached to the ceiling. His arms rest against his sides, motionless, swathed with bandages, thick with gauze at the ends where his hands should be. 

Dazai feels the phantom limb of Kunikida’s touch running along his own hand, tracing along the lifelines of his palm, and he clenches his fists, focuses on the rise and fall of Kunikida’s chest, slow, steady, alive. Like the crawl of waves along the shore. The oldest song on earth, safe in its steadfastness. Dazai breathes with Kunikida, lets the rhythm roll through him, and with each breath it settles the tremor of his muscles, quiets the fight-or-flight hammering of his pulse. 

He relaxes against the solid weight of Chuuya beside him and lets gravity tip his head sideways to rest on top of Chuuya’s head.